News21: Hate in America - This documentary covers the legacy of hate, and how it shaped America

I strongly recommended folks to see this documentary that, among other things, illuminates the connection between fundamentalist Christianity and violence. This is not unlike the kind of violence and terror that people in our country more commonly associates with Islamic extremism. In this case, what we are seeing is homegrown extremism, unfortunately, connected to a long legacy of settler colonialism and white supremacy.

-Angela Valenzuela

Kamala Harris' message to immigrants: "We as a nation are better than this"

I, for one, am thrilled about the Biden-Harris ticket. Among other things, she has been strongly opposed to the atrocities against children and families on the U.S.-Mexico border. Our government has brought such pain and suffering to untold numbers people, perhaps especially children who have been traumatized by our reactionary response to their presence along the U.S.-Mexico border.  

This is a community that has had to endure great distress, misery, and affliction, that is fleeing violence in their countries back home in hopes of a sanctuary, a safe haven, in the U.S. for which U.S. policy—nothwithstanding our toxic, political landscape under Trump—has been amenable. Accordintly, please see my earlier blog post titled, "Why is El Salvador so dangerous? 4 essential reads," by Beth Daley," on why this violence exists in the first place, including how the U.S. government and its punitive policies created the very situation we have been witnessing.

I very much hope that a Biden-Harris presidency not only addresses asylum policies that consist of laws that Trump has thwarted through administrative changes, but works with its countries to the south with whom our fates are inextricably linked.

-Angela Valenzuela

The (True) Origin of Wealth: Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

Umair Haque is a critical writer and thinker.  He looks for answers to his questions about wealth and poverty in economics and economic theory and they fall short.  I encourage him to read postcolonial scholars like Walter Mignolo, Maria Lugones, Anibal Quijano and others to get a perspective, coupled with deep histories, on colonization and decolonization.  Read in tandem with this piece by Tim Wise titled, "Western 'Superiority' is Killing us" where I specifically reference several of these postcolonial scholars’ writings.

-Angela Valenzuela

#GetWoke

The (True) Origin of Wealth

Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

by Umair Haque

There’s a question as old as economics itself: where does “wealth” really come from? Now, this question isn’t asked in the late-night infomercial sense. But in the genuine one: why are some countries rich, and others poor?

Nobody, really, has an answer to this question. There have been many answers proposed. Some — like Daron Acemoglu — say that wealth comes from institutions. Others, like the Chicago School, from freedom, or from its various branches, from property rights. Still others, like Schumpeter’s disciples, from “innovation” (whatever that even means anymore.

I was trained — maybe indoctrinated — in the arts of American economics. And for a long time, this question gnawed away at me. I couldn’t really accept any of the answers above. And worse, I couldn’t quite say why. They seemed lacking to me, in some basic human way, along some obvious and fatal dimension. Like the most straightforward thing in the world seemed to be missing from them.

Now, nobody in economics wants to engage with this question anymore much. Everybody’s picked a side — and if you ask it, you’ll basically get all the same old answers, just only more furiously, because that’s what happens when people bunker down in ideological foxholes. No thinking allowed — that’s modern economics’s credo. So the question — where does wealth really come from? — is still unanswered.

I began thinking about it, like I said, long ago. And after many years — go ahead and call me dumb, you’ll do it many times this essay, I almost guarantee you — it occurred to me that maybe the question itself was backwards.

Maybe the correct question isn’t: “where does wealth come from?”, but “where does poverty come from?”

Why did I think that? Well, because it was suspicious to me that economics started asking this question at the dawn of the colonial age. You see, for most of human history, nobody had ever asked the question “where does wealth come from?”, even though there were vast and glaring inequities in society, the Roman master reclining in his villa, fed by slaves.

I thought it was altogether too convenient that economics had suddenly started asking the question: “where does wealth come from?” at a precise and certain point in history. Not just any point — but the point when, well, the nations asking that question were busy enslaving and exploiting the world.

Yes, really. That’s not an overstatement. The Greeks and Romans had slaves, sure — but it was America (and Britain) who built an intercontinental slave trade, and chewed their way across the world like locusts. Roman and Greek slaves were debtors and prisoners of war, who could buy their way, often, into freedom — but American slaves, and European colonial subjects — they were different: they were subhuman. They were objects to be used and abused and discarded.

We did something truly horrific, my friends, the scale of which we have yet to grapple with. We constructed a world of predators and prey. We made ourselves the predators — and then invented science after science to justify it. There was a biology which said human beings are made of different nobilities, and evolve to different standards. There was a sociology that ascribed every kind of vice to that newfound biology’s defects.

And today I think that I rank economics in just that place: as a pseudoscience riddled through with the corrosion of supremacy. In just the same way we laugh today at a biology that said yesterday whites are genetically superior — so today we should begin laughing at an economics that asks the question: where does wealth come from?

After all, the answer is obvious. If by “wealth” we mean “the things and privileges and freedoms that American white people enjoyed”, then the origin of wealth couldn’t be more obvious. Slavery. Exploitation. Violence. Centuries of it.

Remember when I said the wrong question is “where does wealth come from?” and the right question is “why are some people poor?”

Is it just history’s biggest coincidence that the nations who were enslaved, exploited, and plundered for centuries are the ones who are still “poor” today? Is it just an even bigger coincidence that the pattern of their poverty follows the extent of their depredation and degradation — Africa mostly still savagely poor, which was brutally enslaved, Asia rising just a touch, which was allowed to live a little freer, and so on?

My friends, if you ask me to believe that is a coincidence, then you are also asking me to be a fool. It isn’t a coincidence that the rich world is the world that centuries of brutality made upon the poor world. Those two worlds are still vastly separate and vastly unequal because there is a relationship there.

They are poor because we are rich, and we are rich because they are poor.

You’d be correct to accuse me of “zero-sum thinking” right about now. But it isn’t really me you’re accusing. It’s the slavemasters, who were our forefathers in the rich West. They are the ones who thought that they could only really prosper if other limbs did all the work, and other bodies sweated. Not all of them thought that — but enough did. The zero-sum thinking isn’t mine. It’s history’s. And so like I said — to not see a rich world that was also a predatory one, and a poor world that was also a brutalized one by that very rich world is not to see the world at all, I think.

You’d also be correct to say something like: “but what about innovation! Science! Technology! These things have made us rich!!” Correct. But only in an incorrect way. Darwin discovered evolution precisely because Britain had a class of aristocrats who could think at leisure — but that was only really possible because there was an empire slaving away to make them tea and crumpets. Edison invented the lightbulb — but only because there was a whole economy of slaves behind him, picking that cotton, giving him the freedom to do a thing only a white man could, which was dedicate his life to something better than slavery.

Do you see what I mean? In economic jargon, slavery and exploitation were the “primary public good” that created “positive externalities”…for the true humans, for whites, for masters, to enjoy. The slaves and colonial subjects were the ones investing their labour and sweat, their broken bodies and minds, to ultimately create all those grand things the masters took for granted — whether tea and crumpets or debating halls to propound fine theories in.

Now, you might think: well, that only means we should enslave the world all over again. Science! Tech! Progress! But you are wrong.

I’ve told you a dismal story so far. It goes like this. Economics keeps asking what the origin of wealth is. And curiously, suspiciously, it began asking that question at just the time the societies asking it were getting rich by enslaving much of the world. Call it a psychological defense mechanism, call it a case of protesting too much…call it a case of not being able to see the obvious.

The rich world didn’t get rich through some kind of noble virtue — it grew wealthy by taking what was the poor world’s. Minerals and oil and dust and trees and gems. But not just that, and not really that. Labour. Lives. Possibilities.

You see, we will never know — never — how many Einsteins or Edisons or Salks there might have been among all those lives that were shattered and destroyed. Ever. We have no idea of the possibilities that were lost. They are uncountable and infinite. Who can say what that beautiful mind might have discovered — the one picking the tea? Who can say what that person might have created — the one bent over the mine? What about the one serving the tea, and hammering together the shackle for another slave?

We will never know. I feel a terrible grief when I write that sentence. Do you feel it, just a touch of it? A kind of sorrow as deep as an ocean and as wide as winter hits me, all at once. I feel like I’m drowning. Like I’m numb.

How could we have built a world like that? A world so ugly? So morally wrong? So stupid and foolish? Were our forefathers really such violent and disgusting people?

I’m sorry. Do you feel insulted? Forgive me, maybe. I still feel that grief of all those lost lives, all that possibility…gone.

But let me come back to the point. One way to think about the above is: the West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but at least we now have science and medicine and technology and whatnot.

But that is absolutely wrong. The correct question, if you understand all the above, is this.

The West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but if it hadn’t enslaved the world, what might have happened?

Well, for an example, for some insight, we can look at. modern Europe versus America. America didn’t invest in itself. It chose violence instead. It thought that if everyone just exploited everyone else enough, that somehow — don’t ask me how — it would prosper. Cruelty and greed would breed virtue and discipline and toughness.

But it was wrong. Everyone exploiting everyone else only led, in the end, to what America is now: a failed state and a collapsed society.

All that wealth created by centuries of slavery…where is it now? The average American dies in debt, literally. He never owns or saves or earns anything, in real net terms. So that wealth can’t be with him. That wealth is not anywhere, really — not even in the hands of the billionaires, who just own a tiny portion of the majority of what’s left of it. All that wealth created by centuries of exploitation…America squandered it. On toys and trinkets and wars. Hence, it ended up a failed state.

I want to put that in a way you really understand.

It went in a circle. Americans arrived on the shores of a Promised Land, poor and desperate. They enslaved whom they couldn’t exterminate. They grew rich on the labour of others they considered subhumans. But where did it all end up? Nowhere — because today, the average American…dies broke.

Do you see the terrible irony? Ah, but do you see the terrible lesson? The horrific truth? All that savagery, brutality, the hatred and suffering of slavery…was for nothing. Americans didn’t end up rich. They only ended up poor. Precisely because the ghosts of the enslaved haunt them to this very day, ripping old wounds open, whispering — “which subhumans will you hurt today?”

The lesson — which economics doesn’t seem able to see, much less learn — couldn’t be clearer.

Wealth earned through violence and exploitation doesn’t endure and last. But see the paradox: the origin of wealth is exploitation and violence — but only of a certain kind of wealth. A thin kind, let us say. One as costly as it is heavy to carry.

And now let’s look at Europe. There are those who’ll say: Europe had colonies too! They are right. But after the war, whatever wealth Europe had was literally ashes and dust. Europe began with nothing. Literally nothing. A little investment from America, to be sure — but all those centuries of slavery and exploitation were wiped out by the war. It’s nations weren’t wealthy anymore — they were now poor, devastated, and ruined.

And yet in one human lifetime, Europe rose from ashes to enjoy the world’s highest living standards. Without, crucially, this time, violence and exploitation and slavery. For the first time in history. Do you see how momentous and beautiful that is?

The true secret of wealth revealed itself, at last. At least to those with eyes to see.

Europe’s secret wasn’t America’s initial pool of investment. It could easily have squandered that, too.

Europe’s secret was simply…people investing in each other. Modern European societies were the first ones in human history, ever, anywhere, anytime, to guarantee people healthcare, retirement, transport, media, income, savings, shelter, food, safety, even dignity…as basic human rights.

Nobody in history had ever attempted that. American economists, by the way, laughed and that it was all going to be a a miserable failure.

Now, European leaders did all that for a strange reason. Not to get rich — but to have peace. The idea was simply that desperate people won’t turn on one another — because a hungry person will do anything to fill their childs’ belly. Americans laughed at that idea — they championed exploiting and abusing each other, the ghost of the slavemaster haunting them.

Which idea won? Exploitation, or investment?

The answer should be obvious — though it’s probably not. Europe has had something like one of history’s great miracles. Rising from the ashes to achieve history’s highest living standards ever, period…in one human lifetime. Without slavery and violence and exploitation at some kind of horrific, mass scale.

Nobody in human history ever did that. Because nobody in human history ever believed such a thing was possible. Certainly not Americans — who still don’t, even if they don’t know they don’t.

The miracle was that the most improbable thing of all turned out to be the origin of wealth. For millennia, violent men had said exploitation and enslavement were the origin of wealth. The world believed them. Bitterly, ironically, even the very societies who followed that principle then turned right around and asked, as if dumbfounded — “what’s the origin of wealth?” — while they were busy building history’s greatest slave-empires. But the true secret of wealth was revealed in the aftermath of a great war, by a desperate and broken and impoverished people, who’d spent so long killing each other, there was nothing left to destroy. There was no one left to kill. There was nothing left to kill each other for.

The only thing left was to invest in each other, to nourish each other, to grant one another inalienable and intrinsic worth, that none could ever take away. And just a few decades of that made Europe rich — while America plunged into poverty.

The lesson, to me, couldn’t shine any clearer. The origin of wealth was slavery, exploitation, hate, violence. But the origin of poverty, disgrace, and collapse was, too. The origin of truer wealth — that lasted, endured, mattered, which was made of happiness, meaning, trust, truth, peace, courage, gentleness — was people, standing beside one another, on the long, twisting, difficult road through the desert, back home. I wonder, some days, when the grief of all those lives lost pours through me, how long it will take the world to see it.

Umair Haque
February 2020

Powerful and courageous testimonio by Dr. José L. Medina | Joe: My Personal English Learner Story

Powerful and courageous testimonio by Dr. José L. Medina, Director of Dual Language and Bilingual Education at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, DC.

Tomorrow is my birthday and aside from good health and mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being, I only have two wishes. One, is to go and see Coco, the movie. I hear it's an intense, beautiful movie—a tear-jerker. 

The other is that all my friends and family read this compelling account that expresses in the clearest of terms, how and why assimilation to U.S. culture for many Mexican Americans and other language minorities is and has been a violent proposition. This is certainly so to the degree that it entails cultural and linguistic annihilation which happens to define so much of what passes for "education" today. 

Like Dr. Medina, I am also from West Texas and this story resonates on a really deep level. For me—and I think for the majority of most language minorities—the violence is mostly symbolic, beginning with the taking away and distortion, of our names and cultures. The accents in our written names also drop. Ángela and Angela were my childhood names, but in school it was just "Angela," anglicized, with no accent. I call this process of forced de-identification from one's culture, language, and community-based identities, "subtractive schooling," in my own work.

However, in Dr. Medina's case, it went beyond the symbolic to also consist of brutal and humiliating physical violence that for me harkens back to the forceful assimilation experience of the American Indians to Euro-American standards and values in the infamous Native American Boarding School experiment where many children died. Coined by Army Officer Richard Henry Pratt, "Kill the Indian, Save the Man," was a reigning motif and rationale for the perceived necessity of the schools themselves. 

Consider reading this historical account by scholar Ward Churchill of this terrifying and deeply shocking and saddening chapter in our history as a country. Another powerful text by David Wallace Adams that I have some of my students read is titled, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928.

Crazily, this motif was the "benign" response during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the actual killing of Indians which was policy and practice. Not surprisingly, then, many children literally died in the schools that held them in forced captivity—a logical, if horrific, outcome of stripping them of any and all vestiges of their "Indian-ness." 

Thankfully, Dr. José Medina survived schooling to tell his story. Today, he is a cultural and linguistic warrior in his position as Director of Dual Language and Bilingual Education at CAL. 

The takeaway from this story should never be, "Well, you made it Dr. Medina, so what's wrong with the system if it worked for you?" No, José, like myself, are the exceptions. The takeaway instead should be, "We need to stop harming and traumatizing children in our nation's assimilationist classrooms and opt through policy and practice for additive, late-exit bilingual—preferably, dual language— education, culturally relevant pedagogy, authentic caring, and Ethnic Studies. Ideally, all can work in concert to disrupt the corrosive effects of subtractive cultural assimilation. 

Dr. Medina also provides helpful guidance in this regard. Read on!

Sinceramente, Yours truly,

Ángela Valenzuela

Joe: My Personal English Learner Story

By Dual Language S...

December 18, 2017

By: Dr. José Medina, Director of Dual Language and Bilingual Education, Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC

My name is José, but when I was six years old, my first-grade teacher changed it to Joe. Her decision to do so, continues to impact my life daily - as a person, as an educator, and as an advocate for all students, but especially for those who like me, are looked down upon for not having English as a first language.
It started when I was kicked out of Kindergarten. My parents, in their early twenties and recently having moved to El Paso from Ciudad Juárez, took me to my local elementary escuela in one of the large school districts in the city. Because I only spoke español like my parents, and also, because I was a nervous child, I did not react positively to school. I kicked, I bit adults, I urinated on myself, and I would run out of the classroom daily. After several weeks, the principal informed my parents that I "had to mature" and, therefore, would need to stay home and be brought back as a first grader.

I guess I was afraid that I would never be enough if people knew my real name – if people knew that Spanish, not English, was the language closest to my heart.

At the age of six, I returned to the same school only to do the exact same thing as before. Once again, the school principal informed my padres that I could no longer attend the school. This was in 1977 and the U.S. Supreme Court Case, Lau vs. Nichols, had not yet fully made its way to the border town in Texas. I was a six-year old English learner without a school to attend.
My Godmother, mi madrina, informed my parents that they should enroll me in a local Catholic School because there, the nuns would be able to "fix" me. On the first day at the private school, I once again did the things that got me kicked out of public school. However, this time it was different. Una monja, a nun, who my parents understood to be the principal, had a gurney rolled into her office from the nurse's office. I was placed on the rolling bed, strapped in so that my arms and legs were not able to move, and I was rolled through the school hallways to my first-grade class.
Even as I remember this life-altering event, I can see my young Mamá and Papá with tears in their eyes, seeing their firstborn child tied and delivered to his classroom. My teacher introduced me to the rest of the class as the new student – Joe. So, I lay there, watching my parents escorted away from the classroom, urine-stained clothes on my body, and flat on my back, wishing that I was somewhere else…anywhere…but not in that classroom.

Continue reading to find out more of José's journey.... 

Days later, having decided that I no longer wanted to be tied to a gurney, I told myself that I had to learn English…that I had to "act" like the other students. I asked my parents if I should let my teacher know that my name was José. Mi Mamá me dijo, "haces lo que te diga la maestra." Do what the teacher tells you. So, I dutifully and without objection, became Joe.

In that moment, when my identity and name were taken from me, my life was forever altered. Spanish, my beautiful native language, la música de Juan Gabriel, my favorite telenovelas on the Televisa Network, and the TV show el Chavo del Ocho – were forbidden in my English world, in my school.
As you read this, some of you may be thinking, "but José, you made it; you are doing great for yourself." Stop. Realize. I am the exception, not the norm.
English learners today may no longer be tied to gurneys in a physical fashion, but many are still lying flat on their backs with their hands and legs bound by metaphorical straps. Some of you may even know teachers that are responsible for such situations. Perhaps, even you, have been the one tying language learners down without realizing it.
We are good people. We are educators. And, we became teachers because we wanted to help others have educational access. As we serve students who are adding English to their repertoire while in U.S. schools, we must remember the following three things:

• Value all that a student brings into our classroom. If an English learner enrolls in our school and is placed in our classroom, we should not say to others that the student "doesn't know a thing." Each language learner is a unique and awesome individual who is just waiting for us, their teacher, to create connections between that which they know and that which we want them to learn. Just because a student does not speak and/or understand English, it does not erase all that he/she brings into the classroom!
• Have an additive mindset about language learning. Our job is not to transition kids to English. The students' native tongue is not something to be exploited in order to ensure success on standardized assessments. We must instead, value our students' first language and culture as we strengthen connections between the native tongue and English simultaneously. English and other languages can co-exist in the mind and the heart of a student beautifully!
• We must learn, practice, and write our students' names correctly. My real name is not Joe. My true name is José. José has an accent over the letter "e" and if you don't place the accent when writing my name, you are diminishing my language and culture. María is not Mary. Françoise's name should not be changed to Frankie. Nuan is a beautiful name, so we must learn it. The name Akmal-Alam signifies a beautiful universe and does not deserve to be change to Alan. We learned how to pronounce the names Dostoyevsky and Schwarzennegger and we must now, also give value to the names of the students and families we serve!

I want you to know that I often think of my first-grade teacher. A part of me wants to be angry towards her, but I am not. Although I will never know her intent in changing my name to Joe, the name is now a part of me.
It took me decades, really not until my twenties and thirties, to slowly begin to take ownership of my birth name, my family background, my culture, and my language. I guess I was afraid that I would never be enough if people knew my real name – if people knew that Spanish, not English, was the language closest to my heart.
So, there are those that to this day call me Joe – and I graciously respond because that is the name that at the age of six was given to me by an educator. But, now that I am fully capable of owning ALL that I am, I prefer to introduce myself using my real name.
¡Hola, mi nombre es Dr. José Luis Medina Hernández Franco López Jr. Díaz-Cruz!


Dr. José L. Medina is the Director of Dual Language and Bilingual Education at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington DC. In this role, Dr. Medina provides dual language technical assistance, professional development, and job-embedded support to dual language programs across the United States and globally. He is a former dual language school principal and has served as an administrator and educator at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Dr. Medina is one of the authors of the third edition of the widely-used Guiding Principles for Dual Language Education and also serves as the Director of the National Dual Language Forum. Dr. Medina can be reached via email at jmedina@cal.org or follow him on Twitter @josemedinajr89.

My Reflection this Evening on the WWI Battlefield Sacrifice of José de la Luz Sáenz, a Critically Conscious Educator

Enjoying the evening, the French countryside, far, far away from Texas near a village named Montaville whose peaceful, scenic views belie its history of unspeakable horror during the First World War.

As per the World War I Diary authored by Jose de la Luz Saenz (and translated by Emilio Zamora [see previous post]), the town was obliterated by the Germans with 12 large projectiles.

Shortly thereafter on Monday, September 2, 1918, "Luz"—as he referred to himself—and the other U.S. soldiers that accompanied him from the 90th Division discovered 50 German supply horses—yes, 50.  With the aim of thwarting their usefulness to the nearby German army, French forces mercilessly bombed them, decimating them all.  At least up until that point in his war diary, Luz described this as one of the "ugliest, most difficult scenes" that unfolded before their very eyes.

After this, a 150-millimeter cannon began to bomb Luz and his fellow soldiers with him writing his concluding thought that day, 

It was a horrible day for the soldiers. The shells were flying over our heads, howling like souls from hell. (p. 195)

Without a doubt, Luz was an extraordinary person.  He voluntarily joined the military in order to be able to return home and make the case for civil rights for Mexican Americans, having paid with others the ultimate price of wartime sacrifice on behalf of the homeland.

Particularly between September and November, 1918, they endured the fiercest fighting in this territory of northeastern France where thousands of American—and of course French, British, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh—soldiers lost their lives.  

The relative few like Luz that survived, endured the cold, rain, gas warfare, bombs, sniper fire, sleepless nights, and hunger as a result of their continuous strategic movements against the unrelenting German army that sought to reach Paris.  

Yet Luz managed to write on napkins, paper, and and whatever he could get his hands on in order to produce an intimate record of the war that not even the French of this very area are likely to have.  Or if any survived, it would still be a different one from another perspective.

Luz was a former school teacher with a critical consciousness and social justice ethic. He sought to leave a record that Emilio Zamora has miraculously recovered.  

Even as we trace Luz' steps through this theater of war, we discuss and ponder its larger significance in our lives and in our history as Mexican Americans in the U.S., as the progeny of a subject people whose ascendancy—however uneven, incomplete, and ever evolving—was purchased with the sacrificial hardship and blood that was shed on the battlefield in places like Montaville and beyond.

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

Source:  Zamora, E. (2014). The World War I Diary of José de la Luz Sáenz. College Station, Tx: 

Texas A & M University Press.

 

 

Amazing story about one of the AME's church founders, Denmark Vesey, who in 1799 won his freedom in a lottery and who then planned in 1822 an armed insurrection to free the slaves on plantations in the Charleston area.
-Angela

Charleston’s ‘Mother Emanuel Church’ Has Stared Down Racist Violence for 200 Years

June 19, 2015

by Dave Zirin

This post first appeared at The Nation.

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Image: Google Street View)

The more you read about Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, otherwise known as “Mother Emanuel,” the more awe you feel for its historic resilience amidst white-supremacist terror.
This church is now known as the scene of a massacre, which is being investigated as a “hate crime.” Nine are dead, but this institution will not fall. We know this because it has stood tall amidst the specter of racist violence for 200 years. Next year, in fact, was to be the 200th anniversary of the founding of the church. It was 1816 when the Rev. Morris Brown formed “Mother Emanuel” under the umbrella of the Free African Society of the AME Church. They were one of three area churches known as the Bethel Circuit. This means that a free church in the heart of the confederacy was formed and thrived 50 years before the start of the Civil War. It had a congregation of almost 2,000, roughly 15 percent of black people in what was, including the enslaved, the majority-black city of Charleston. Because the church opened its doors to the enslaved and free alike, services were often raided by police and private militias for violating laws about the hours when slaves could be out among “the public.” They were also raided for breaking laws that prohibited teaching slaves to read at Bible study sessions. (It was at one of these Bible study sessions that the shooter opened fire Wednesday night, after sitting among the people for over an hour.)
More violence against the church was to come, as one of its founders was Denmark Vesey. If you don’t know that name, then your US history class failed you. Vesey was born into bondage on St. Thomas Island where he was known as Telemaque. At age 32 in 1799, Vesey won a city lottery of $1,500 that allowed him to buy his freedom from slavery.
But his former master would not sell Vesey his wife or children. Under patriarchal master/slave law, this also meant that any future children they had would also be in bondage. This was not a state of affairs Vesey was willing to let stand. He achieved financial success as a skilled carpenter. He became a city leader. He also looked at Charleston, this majority-black city amidst lush plantations, and planned an insurrection. He said, "We are free but the white people here won't let us be so; and the only way is to raise up and fight the whites."
In 1822, Vesey was executed on charges of attempting to organize this unprecedented slave revolt. The plan — organized in meticulous fashion and involving thousands of adherents — was to sack the area plantations, liberate the slaves, and sail to Haiti, which had liberated itself from slavery 20 years earlier in its own revolution. The plan was audacious in its scope and remarkable in its reach, and as a result provoked mass hysteria throughout Dixie.
Vesey was one of five insurrection freedom fighters executed on July 2, 1822, two days before Independence Day. The proximity was said to have inspired Frederick Douglass’s speech delivered almost exactly 30 years later on July 5, 1852, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” where he thundered,

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Douglass would later invoke Vesey to recruit for the all-black Civil War 54th Regiment, featured in the film Glory.
Even though Vesey’s plan never extended beyond the initial stages, there was a call by the genteel city leaders of Charleston for even more blood. Thirty more were executed that month, legal mass lynching meant to strike fear in the hearts of Charleston’s black community. What is remarkable is that more were not arrested or executed. This is attributed to a remarkable level of solidarity amongst Charleston’s black population. No one would talk about a popular campaign that turned slaves into active insurrectionists. As part of this campaign — which combined legal and extralegal terrorism — Mother Emanuel Church was burned to the ground. That did not stop people from gathering. It did not end the church.
The violence of this week will not end the church either. The killing of nine people inside Mother Emmanuel calls backward to the 1960s civil rights — era church bombings. It also calls to a present in 2015 where video after video is showing white America a policing system that sees black life as having little value, a present in 2015 where mass media relish black death but do not acknowledge black life, and a present in 2015 where Charleston’s Walter Scott can be calmly shot in the back by police. It also calls to a present where police officials and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley speak solemnly about the Mother Emanuel martyrs, under that enduring symbol of racist terror the Confederate flag. This demonstrates with utter clarity that the past that Charleston leaders try to tuck away with a statue of Denmark Vesey – amidst the city's lucrative plantation tourism – is far from past.
In moments such as this, few words from the present can resonate as powerfully as the words of Frederick Douglass in his Fourth of July speech when he said,

Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

This is not history. It’s a guide to action. This action can be heard in the words of Mother Emanuel Reverend and South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney. The Reverend was one of those killed on Wednesday. In a 2013 speech about “freedom,” Pinckney said, “…sometimes you’ve got to make noise…. Sometimes you may have to die like Denmark Vesey.… Sometimes you have to march…

Dave Zirin, The Nation’s sports correspondent, is the author, most recently, of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,” Zirin is a frequent guest on MSNBC, ESPN and Democracy Now! He also hosts his own weekly Sirius XM show, Edge of Sports Radio. You can find all his work at edgeofsports.com.

2014 A Year Of 'Unspeakable Brutality' For Children In Conflict Zones

Staggering statistics of violence against children worldwide.  So shameful.

It is sadly ironic that in this, the 25th anniversary year of the Convention on the Rights of the Child when we have been able to celebrate so much progress for children globally, the rights of so many millions of other children have been so brutally violated,” said Lake. “Violence and trauma do more than harm individual children – they undermine the strength of societies. The world can and must do more to make 2015 a much better year for every child. For every child who grows up strong, safe, healthy and educated is a child who can go on to contribute to her own, her family’s, her community’s, her nation’s and, indeed, to our common future.” 

Amen.

Here is a fact sheet that provides added perspective. We must end all wars and we must save and protect our children—all children.

-Angela

2014 A Year Of 'Unspeakable Brutality' For Children In Conflict Zones

December 08, 2014 2:19 PM ET

Michele Kelemen

Twitter

A Syrian Kurdish child looks through the fence of a refugee camp in the town of Suruc, Turkey, last month. The advance of Islamic State jihadists on Kobane has forced some 200,000 refugees to flee across the border to Turkey.

Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images 

 

The United Nations Children's Fund calls 2014 a devastating year for children, reporting that as many as 15 million young people are caught in conflicts in the Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, the Palestinian territories, Syria and Ukraine.

Among the grim statistics in a newly released UNICEF report: There are more than 1.7 million child refugees from the conflict in Syria, and 105 children have been killed in the more than 35 attacks on schools in that country. In the Central African Republic, as many as 10,000 children are believed to have been recruited by armed groups in the past year, and more than 430 have been killed or maimed.

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A Palestinian girl cries while receiving treatment at a hospital in the Gaza Strip following shelling in July of a U.N. school in the Jebaliya refugee camp. 

Khalil Hamra/AP 

 

"Children have been killed while studying in the classroom and while sleeping in their beds," says UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake. "They have been orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped and even sold as slaves."

South Sudan, a new nation that is in the midst of a nearly yearlong conflict, has seen almost 750,000 children displaced and several hundred-thousand more forced to flee across borders. Amid fears of famine in South Sudan, an estimated 235,000 children under the age of 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition.

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas this summer in Gaza left about 54,000 Palestinian children homeless and 538 dead.

Aid groups have been stretched thin by the sheer number of conflicts and the long-simmering ones that have faded from the headlines. UNICEF says the Ebola outbreak in West Africa presents yet another threat. Thousands of children have been orphaned and, according to UNICEF, some 5 million are out of school in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

UNICEF says it is responding where it can, trying to get children back to school in places such as the Central African Republic and working in Ebola-hit countries to try to prevent the spread of the disease.

Still, the report makes for grim reading. It notes that an estimated 230 million children live in countries where there are armed conflicts, from Iraq to Nigeria.

As Lake puts it, "Never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such unspeakable brutality."