Accompanying the rapid demographic shift in South Central are farm animals! Always a mainstay in the lifestyles of rural and low-income families, chickens, goats, ducks, and other animals provide a form of subsistence for many. However, some residents of this ethnic enclave object to the sounds of ducks and roosters.
Hereby creating a paradox in the urban jungle. To eat and be merry or live with the sounds of a car city.
When will the ethnic, racist politics come to end? I would hope the day would come when a Jew would be elected CD14 Council Member beacuse they love their community and they are the most qualified person or perhaps a Latino would be elected in CD5 for the same reasons or an African American in District 12, etc., etc., etc.
Posted by Mayor Sam @ 5/20/2008 08:18:00 AM 4 Comments Links to this post
Sidenote: Why is it that the most pervasive blog documenting LA city politics has a narrow-minded view of the demographic contours of the city and its history of exclusion and racism in public policy? Everytime I visit the blog, I find something new that is so disconcerting, considering we both wake up to the same city: a city of immigrants, globalization, diversity, and police brutality. Sure LA politics are corrupt, and maybe the race card isn’t playing in the white man’s favor-but I will argue he has all the cards in his hand. This comment ignores the history of oppressive politics that have forced disenfranchised communities to the off-set of policy decisions and to be represented by officials that have no stake in the quality of their daily lives. To argue that council districts should be color bling forgoes the fact that up until 25 years ago, this city was dominated by white politicians with the occasional Black elected, who put up a hard fight to overcome the city’s legacy of night curfews, redlining, and outright racism. Never have we seen the rise of the Latino politician in a major metropolis and the growth of the Asian political base. Why can’t we embrace it, and stop advocating for this nonsense color blindness that ignores the recent history of this region, and the larger political atmosphere that defines the U.S.
Mayor Sam-stop gerrymandering.
Four Philadelphia police officers will be dismissed, three will be disciplined and a supervising police sergeant will be demoted after the violent police beating of three suspects fleeing a shooting, the city’s mayor and police commissioner said today. A TV news helicopter captured footage of the incident.
If only Inglewood’s, Los Angeles’ and New York’s respective police departments can take notes from the swift disciplinary action from Philadelphia. Police brutality is commonplace, but it should never be condoned. Shooting an unarmed man with 50+ bullets is not deserving of a clean police slate and regional celebrity. Instead, these officers in uniform should have justice served to them, quickly an swiftly. Too many individuals from disenfranchised communities are at the bad end of these officer’s game plan, and all too quickly do these incidents remind us of the racial injustice that is ramped throughout the U.S.
Police Departments across the country-Please take notes. All others, be on watch and guard. Inglewood’s incident was just a mear dot in the legacy of ill-will and police misconduct in Southern California.
The Jena Six and US History
By Paul Ortiz t r u t h o u t | Perspective Thursday 27 September 2007
I was in the middle of an extended research trip in the South when news of the march and rally to free the Jena Six began flowing through the blogosphere. What has transpired in Jena in support of six young black men is an important new chapter in the black freedom struggle.
The Jena Six are six black teens from Jena, Louisiana, who were accused of fighting and beating up a fellow high school student last December. The student who was beaten up was white. While the victim in question suffered no severe injuries, the six black youths were initially charged by the local district attorney with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The murder weapons, according to the DA, were the perpetrators’ tennis shoes. This is how much progress we’ve made in the United States: what used to be seen as a schoolyard brawl punishable by suspension or community service has become a crime punishable by life in prison. After a wave of publicity, the charges were reduced in most of the cases to battery and conspiracy which may still result in over two decades of prison time for these kids. One of the defendants remains in jail after being unable to post $90,000 bail.
According to the local authorities in Jena, we are supposed to believe that race has nothing to do with the charges levied against the high school students.
Earlier incidents of violence and intimidation directed against black students at Jena were ignored by local law enforcement officials. In one incident, a white man pulled a shotgun on a black teen, and on another occasion white youths smashed a black youth over the head with a beer bottle. Black residents also reported that whites were spewing racist epithets at them in public. All of these incidents were reported to authorities, and the police did absolutely nothing in the months leading up to the beating.
Local authorities also claim that three nooses hung on a tree at the high school three months before the fight had nothing to do with race. African-Americans in Jena report that the nooses were hung up after black students sat under a tree that some white students felt was reserved for them. While this version of the story has been disputed by school officials, according to the district attorney, it doesn’t matter anyway. The DA claims that young people are so ignorant about their histories that they wouldn’t know what the nooses were supposed to represent! The US attorney for western Louisiana concluded that there couldn’t be any possible linkage between the nooses and the subsequent school fight. It was reported that one of the witnesses for the youth who was beaten was also one of the students connected to the noose hanging.
In Jena, as throughout the rest of the US, we are supposed to believe that “race is no longer an issue” and that justice is colorblind. California fits the pattern perfectly. Out here, Martin Luther King Jr. commemorations have become exercises in remembering how bad racism used to be [in the South] but thank God almighty we are free at last! I am really, really glad that tens of thousands of demonstrators who descended on Jena on behalf of the six young black men ignored what has embarrassingly become the “common sense” position on race relations in this nation.
Many progressives today would like to de-emphasize or even separate the struggle against racism from efforts to end war and bring economic justice to the Americas. Their rationale is that white folks get upset when you talk too much about racial inequality and that the only way to draw the white working class to the movement is to keep quiet about race. This viewpoint is insulting to white people and it ignores the history of social change in this country. The nonracial proletarian revolution has never occurred in this country, and it never will. White people could not make the revolution by themselves in 1776, and they certainly cannot do it now. Furthermore, you cannot erase five hundred years of slavery, segregation, the Mexican-American War, the Sand Creek Massacre, Bracero programs, etc., etc. Tell the parents of the Jena Six or the survivors of Hurricane Katrina that we are all equally oppressed by capitalism. Race and class are forever linked in this nation.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered the single-family, two-story home in the 10000 block of South Normandie Avenue about 6:30 a.m.. and arrested 61 Central and South American immigrants in the house due to citizenship status.
Be on the look out and be careful. These raids continue to devastate communities and tear up families. South LA has long been a site of INS agents, dating back to the horrid summer raids of 2004.
Via racewire.org: Ruben Kihuen, the son of Mexican immigrants, is up for re-election in Nevada’s state assembly. The Dem has represented the 11th District since 2006, when he ran his first campaign a year after becoming a citizen. Kihuen made news most recently though because he endorsed and canvassed aggressively for Hillary Clinton, though the local Latino-heavy Culinary Union supported Obama. Clinton won the Nevada primary, but how Kihuen will deal with the difference in opinion between himself and his constituency is something to keep an eye on, says Bill Fulkerson of Plan Nevada, a nonprofit alliance of over 24 groups that works for progressive social change in Nevada.
Ruben Kihuen’s website: http://www.rubenforassembly.com/
After reading about the issues plaguing the Soboba Indian Reservation, I had to take a minute and ask myself what year it is: 2008. The conflict between the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and the Soboba Indian Reservation looks strikingly similar to the Indian Wars of the 18th century. So much so, I am alarmed and saddened that amidst all of the social and economic problems plaguing Indian Reservations today, they still must face police brutality and outright racism.
Essentially, a wild gun battle between Riverside County sheriff’s deputies and a pair of suspects on the Soboba Indian Reservation left two people dead and tribal members frustrated and demanding answers Tuesday.
“There are better ways to solve these problems than by bringing in the 7th Cavalry and wiping them out. I would say we are in a war right now,” said Robert Salgado, Soboba tribal chairman and a cousin of those killed. Chairman Soboba was refused entry into the crime seen by Riverside County Sheriff’s intensifying the disrespect felt by this community, on top of the mourning of two of their peers. In response to the Sheriff’s, Soboba states ”See why I’m angry? You see what I’m talking about?” he asked as he drove off. “If I was the mayor of L.A. and I was visiting a crime scene, they would have said, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ but they treat me with no respect. Do we look like gangsters?”
Moreover, after the land, natural resources, and livelihood was taken away by European settlers and their descendants, Native Americans have had few resources to deal with the isolation that their newfound ‘reservations’ provided them. They face issues of alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, and depression. Common issues plaguing today’s inner cities, but in this case they are socially isolated and all but forgotten, if it wasn’t for the creation of Indain casinos.
Salgado said he believes some of the tension stems from 2006, when he canceled a contract with the Sheriff’s Department that paid for deputies to patrol the reservation.
“We paid $400,000 and we didn’t see the benefits, so we did away with the contract,” he said. This explanation makes total sense: the sheriff’s department is pissed off they lost easy money for no work and have decided to harass the community in response to the loss of their contract. Are there no rules to regulate unprompted retalialtion and civil rights abuses?
The notion that these blatantly racist and discriminatory public officials can harrass, threaten, and even harm members of this community is beyond my own comprehension. Yet, I must remember this is the same country and same people that have colonized native people into laborers under harsh public policies that favor the rich and beat down on the poor. Now, two members of the Soboba Tribe have died, and tension is only escalating. Seems like the traditions of the wild west are still alive and well in the racist Inland Empire.
The once-steadfast promise to reopen Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Medical Center by February 2009 has given way in recent weeks to the bleak prediction among some officials that it could be years before the linchpin in south Los Angeles County healthcare is resurrected.
Supervisor Gloria Molina is the most vocal about her doubts. According to the way the Department of Health Services is moving, “it will not happen in my lifetime,” she recently told The Times.
Others make similar assessments in private, a startling contrast with the optimistic position that county supervisors had previously maintained — that the hospital, in Willowbrook south of Watts, would reopen soon.
Health services director Dr. Bruce A. Chernof, retiring Supervisor Yvonne B. Burke and others still say the hospital could reopen before long. And the future of King is a prominent issue in the current race to replace Burke. But among county officials and hospital-industry insiders, the path forward is more often seen to be littered with obstacles that are increasing:
* The county is facing broad challenges in its health services department that are some of the most difficult this decade: an oncoming budget deficit expected to exceed $1 billion within three years and a vacancy in the department’s top post.
* The hospital industry across Southern California is facing economic difficulties.
* King, in particular, has been troubled for years by problems with patient care, finally prompting the federal government to pull its funding, forcing its closure last summer.
The facility served neighborhoods with some of the sickest and poorest people in the county.
* The county’s own complex bureaucracy has been blamed for hindering the search for a new operator.
