Remembering Mya
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
Mya Hall. Have you heard the name before? If you haven't, you are not alone.
While Freddie Gray is now a household name, two weeks before his cruel death, Mya Hall was also killed by Baltimore's law enforcement officers.
Mya Hall was a member of a despised community within a hated minority.
She was black, she was a woman, she was poor, she may have had mental issues, she was a sex worker, and egads! she was a trans woman. As such, her life mattered less than that of a wild coyote.
What really happened to Mya and her friend on the evening of March 30?
According to police (eyeroll):
Police opened fire on the pair after Hall failed to heed instructions to turn back from the NSA gates and rammed into a police vehicle, according to the NSA. The other person in the SUV was injured, as was an officer working the security checkpoint.
After the killing, the local media was a abuzz with news of a terrorist attack by men dressed as women. There followed days of breathless Wolf Blitzer-type reporting about terrorism and the two "men" who were responsible. Pretty soon, however, the truth began to trickle out. These were no terrorists intent on attacking the well guarded premises; rather, these were two people who got lost and took a wrong turn. They didn't crash the gates of the NSA compound in preparation to attack; rather, after they were shot, they lost control of the vehicle that then crashed into the gate of the compound.
Authorities believe the pair might have ended up on the base by mistake.
"There is no information being released at this time regarding motive," an FBI spokeswoman, Amy Thoreson, said in a statement. "However, FBI Baltimore does not believe this is related to terrorism."
Why did the guards have to shoot up the vehicle? Why did they have to shoot to kill? Keep in mind that the only thing they knew about Mya and her friend at that point was that they were two black women. They didn't know that the vehicle was stolen; they didn't know of Mya's troubled history, and they certainly didn't know of any drug use by the occupants of the truck.
Yes, yes, we know, Mya and her friend were no angels. We all know that only angels deserve to live, right? In fact, Mya had a history of run-ins with the law, and at the time of her death, a warrant may have been out for her arrest. Her long list of criminal activity (petty theft, punching a woman, not turning up for court days) was made available to the news media by the very helpful police department.
Mya's death didn't happen in a vacuum. Once again, police resorting to the only tool they seem to have available when interacting with black folks: overwhelming deadly force. In fact, Mya is just one in a long list of black women killed by police for one cockamamie reason or the other.
Mya's other community have had to deal with one devastating blow after another. Death comes a-calling quite frequently in the trans people of color community. They are used to seeing their sisters killed for no other reason than that they dared to live their lives as their true selves without regard for what gender they were assigned at birth. They are not only killed at will; they also face discrimination in every imaginable area you can think of.
In an article titled "Injustice at Every Turn," the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force revealed that trans women in general, and black trans women in particular are among the most persecuted and discriminated groups in these United States.
Black and African-American transgender women have a 50 percent greater homicide rate than their white, Latina, and Native American counterparts and were more than three times as likely to experience police violence more than any other group, according to a 2012 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs on LGBTQ and HIV Affected Hate Violence. Results from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey show that black transgender women are disproportionately discriminated against and overrepresented across multiple disparities, including poverty (34 percent earn less than $10,000 annually — twice the rate of transgender people of other races), housing (41 percent experience homelessness in their lives, and 38 percent have been refused housing because of bias), employment (26 percent unemployment rate, and 32 percent job loss due to bias), medical care (21 percent have been refused medical care due to bias), and HIV-positive status (20 percent). And half of respondents said they have had to resort to sex work and the distribution of illegal substances in order to survive.
“Mya had a hard life,” Jenkins said. “She just wanted to have a job, a life, a home. Just the simple things.”
Mya Hall, we tell your story. We speak your name.
Your life mattered, sweet one.
Rest in Peace.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Here's why the conservative interest in reform kicked-off by the riots will almost certainly be short-lived. Salon: Abandon your bipartisan fantasies: The Baltimore uprising won’t make GOP get serious about urban reform.
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Are we destined to live through another round of backlash politics, largely driven by white and affluent voters’ fears? Or might the dysfunction and injustice that was so explosively revealed in Baltimore — and Ferguson before it — kick-off a rare bout of genuinely useful bipartisan cooperation?
Cynics will likely find these questions gratingly naive, but you don’t have to be a pollyanna to see reasons for optimism. After all, ending mass incarceration and reforming the criminal justice system were making their way into the political mainstream before anyone had heard the name Freddie Gray. And even conservative politicians like Sen. Rand Paul, a man some people (wrongly) consider a serious threat to be the next president, have been talking about these issues frequently and at length.
Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but although I think a return of “tough on crime” politics is unlikely, it still appears to me that a serious response to urban poverty and mass incarceration won’t be coming out of Washington any time soon. This useful Tuesday article from the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent helps explain why, but the answer can be boiled down to two words: demographics and location.
If you want to understand why Republicans in D.C. will ensure this problem goes unaddressed, you must start, as always, with the House of Representatives, where the GOP’s grip on power is white-knuckle tight. According to Sargent (via David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report) one way to think of the Republicans’ dominant position in Congress is to look at one of the usual explanations — the fact that Democratic voters are inefficiently packed into a smaller number of overwhelmingly Dem-friendly districts — from a new angle.
Viewed through the lens of land mass rather than population, Sargent reports, Republicans control nearly 86 percent of the United States, despite holding “only” 57 percent of the seats in the House. Democrats, on the other hand, lay claim to 43 percent of House seats yet only control around 14 percent of actual American land. As Wasserman explains to Sargent, what that means, in practice, is something you probably intuitively got already — in the House, the coalition that makes up the Democratic Party is very urban; and the Republican one, conversely, is not.
Put simply, the GOPers in the House whose constituents look like (or care about) the folks in Baltimore, Ferguson and so forth are few and far between.
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When an innocent person is finally set free, it’s no fairy tale. Slate: Life After Exoneration.
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airy tales are seductive. A sweet-faced, innocent hero is victimized by evildoers: poisoned, enslaved, enticed into an oven, locked in a cage to be eaten. Our protagonist withstands these outrages with bravery and fortitude. And then intervention—magical or otherwise—arrives, and with it freedom, love, and redemption. Trauma and misery vanish, and the reader is rewarded with Happily Ever After.
The narrative arc is always the same in fairy tales. The suffering, no matter how hideous and unwarranted, has a fixed end point. Good triumphs over evil. Youth, beauty, and hope are restored. Soul and spirit intact, the protagonist thrives in some perpetually blissful state. Fairy tale plotlines resonate in our Hollywood culture, which believes firmly in the restorative power of second chances and the cauterizing effect of retribution. Justice is done and villains receive their due.
I did not realize the power that fairy tales continue to exert over me until I read Ariel Levy's “The Price of a Life,” published in the April 13 edition of the New Yorker. The piece chronicles, unsparingly, what life is like now for the men and women who were freed after decades in prison for crimes they did not commit. It is shattering. While some exonerees Levy profiles are doing relatively well, many are hobbled, psychically and physically, by all that they had to endure: assault, abuse, abrupt separation and ultimately estrangement from spouses and children, the deaths of loved ones whose funerals they could not attend.
Kash Delano Register and his mother, Wilma, reunited for the first time in 34 years, speaking to reporters immediately after his release from jail in downtown Los Angeles on Nov. 7, 2013.
Photo courtesy Loyola Law School
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Attacking the very foundation of our democracy, the right to vote. The New Republic: Register Minority Voters in Georgia, Go to Jail.
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In a letter, Brian Kemp, Georgia's Republican secretary of state, offered few specific assurances about the new voters in question and informed Ho that his office was launching an investigation into how AALAC registered these would-be voters. Kemp’s office asked that AALAC turn over certain records of its registration efforts, citing "potential legal concerns surrounding AALAC's photocopying and public disclosure of voter registration applications."
Ho was aghast. “Our genuine desire was to help the secretary of state clear these people through to vote, so it was interesting that their response was to investigate us,” she told me. “I’m not going to lie: I was shocked, I was scared.”
The investigation targeted her group not for any voter fraud, per se, but for more technical issues, such as whether canvassers had people's explicit, written consent to photocopy their registration forms before mailing the originals to the elections office. Kemp’s investigation into AALAC lasted nearly two-and-a-half years. This past March 12th, it ended with no finding of violations.
Now that the state has concluded its investigation, Ho is speaking out about her story for the first time. “We were retaliated against,” said Ho, now the executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which encompasses what used to be known as AALAC.
Ho’s experience with the elections authorities in Georgia is not unique. Republicans have long amplified the threat of voter fraud to justify restrictive voter ID laws. In Georgia, any whiff of impropriety surrounding voting registration has come to carry tremendous personal stakes. Kemp’s office has aggressively policed minority-focused voting groups for potential breaches of the state’s lesser-known voting regulations, raising questions about whether the state has taken a selective approach to its zealous pursuit of such infractions.
Last September, before the midterms, for example, Kemp announced a criminal investigation into the New Georgia Project, a voter registration effort that was attempting to bring 120,000 mostly-minority voters onto the rolls. “We're just not going to put up with fraud,” Kemp said of the New Georgia Project in an interview with a local news station. In a subpoena, Kemp demanded that the voter group turn over massive portions of its internal records relating to the campaign.
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More Africans are resisting presidential efforts to flout constitutional term limits. The Economist: Après moi, moi.
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Pierre Nkurunziza is the latest in a string of African presidents to risk a conflagration by refusing to step down when the constitution says their time in office is up. His announcement on April 25th that he would seek a third term in an election due at the end of June sparked riots in Bujumbura, the capital. So far at least six people have been killed and 25,000 are said to have fled across the border.
The UN, the African Union and Western governments have urged Mr Nkurunziza to think again before things spin out of control. As the constitutional court prepares to hear the case, the president’s loyalists are arguing that his first term in office, starting in 2005, does not count, as he was elected to his first stint by parliament rather than directly by the people, as the constitution requires. So he is entitled to suppress what they call an insurrection.
Burundi is at the best of times highly flammable. Since independence in 1962 it has been plagued by coups, massacres and the killing of several presidents, against a backdrop of ethnic strife between the country’s Tutsis, who make up a tenth of the 10m-plus population, and the Hutus, who comprise most of the rest. Mr Nkurunziza, a Hutu, came to the fore as a rebel leader in the 1990s after many thousands of Burundians, including his father and most of his siblings, had been murdered. A fragile peace has more or less held since 2000, initially thanks to the mediation of South Africa.
Mr Nkurunziza’s fate will be watched warily across Africa, for the issue of presidential term limits is increasingly fraught. Since the early 1990s, when a breeze of democracy swept across the continent, at least 34 of Africa’s 54 countries (55 since South Sudan was recognised in 2011) have put term limits on their presidents, usually giving them a maximum of two five-year spells, as in Burundi.
President-Pierre-Nkurunziza-of-Burundi
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South Florida resident Mark D’Sa gave up a lucrative job with GAP to promote a $300 million Haiti industrial park. Miami Herald: From Miami GAP executive to Haiti industrial park promoter.
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Mark D’Sa was a top apparel executive pulling in six figures and flying business class to meet clients when the request got to his inbox.
The U.S. government wanted to talk. Ten months had passed since Haiti’s devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake. One million Haitians were still homeless, and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wanted to embark on a different path.
Through the construction of a new $300 million industrial park in northeastern Haiti, Clinton was pushing a new concept she called “Aid for trade.” But for the venture to be successful, the State Department needed someone who knew the apparel industry and how to help countries take advantage of U.S. trade preferences.
“The inquiry from the State Department was very interesting,” recalls D’Sa, then a senior director at GAP in charge of Latin America.
With a four-decade career in the apparel industry, D’Sa was known as a go-to guy for growing foreign investments. He had lobbied for the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), and two years after its signing in 2004, D’Sa led GAP’s entry into drug-scarred Colombia. Years later, he increased GAP’s Haiti imports nearly fivefold to $33 million, making him a revered figured in the country’s apparel sector.
Now, here was the State Department, led by Clinton’s counselor, Cheryl Mills, asking him to apply his private sector skills to help create jobs in Haiti.
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Sometimes cops are caught in the middle. Washington Post: These cops are tired of white people getting freaked out by their black neighbors.
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"People, please stop making my job so difficult."
That's the opening of a discussion in "ProtectAndServe," reddit's community of law enforcement officers. The poster, who goes by the handle "sf7" and has been verified as a law enforcement officer by the forum's moderators, goes on:
So I'm working last week and get dispatched to a call of 'Suspicious Activity.' Ya'll wanna know what the suspicious activity was? Someone walking around in the dark with a flashlight and crow bar? Nope. Someone walking into a bank with a full face mask on? Nope.
It was two black males who were jump starting a car at 930 in the morning. That was it. Nothing else. Someone called it in.
People. People. People. If you're going to be a racist, stereotypical jerk...keep it to yourself.
Other forum users sympathize. One tells a story about someone asking the cops to investigate a middle-aged black man fishing in his own community. Another was asked to respond to a report of two Middle Eastern guys sitting in the same car. Another laments that "we frequently get calls about black men and woman and kids, yes [expletive] kids, walking. Like WWB [walking while black] was actually a crime and not a Twitter joke."
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