Fight Or Flight

One of the things we perhaps fail to comprehend is that the shooting of POC on the streets means different things to different people.

The author here, Easy G, writes from his perspective as a White American male. An apex creature as it were, in this world in which we live. He too has experienced the unholy fear of being attacked, though not by a police officer.

In this piece, he juxtaposes his attack with the *attack* on persons such as Philando Castile and Charleena Lyles. It's an interesting juxtaposition, one I had not, myself, considered.

Consider for a moment, a whole other perspective.

Read it. Share it.

~Elle~

Protester sign from one of the many anti-police brutality marches
Anytown, USA 2017

Almost two years ago, while my wife and I were walking our dogs, her ex rolled up on us, held a .40 caliber gun to my head, and shot me in the chest and stomach with it. So I can speak to this.

I'm not Black, I haven't spent a lifetime being harassed, bullied, and threatened by cops. But I understand the profound sense of vulnerability and helplessness a person can feel when you're unarmed and have an extremely hostile, volatile person screaming obscenities at you and placing a gun to your head. I understand how instinct suppresses your thoughts and your sensory input.

"Fight or flight" isn't a choice, it's a response. Your vision telescopes, you see only your attacker's face. Your peripheral vision dims and then disappears altogether. Your hearing becomes muted, your attacker's words become unintelligible. "Fight or flight" is a response, not a choice, but with cops you aren't allowed either option.

That people keep their composure with guns pointed at them amazes me. I didn't. I attacked my attacker - not as a calculated choice or as an act of bravery but in a fit of rage. This man with a gun wants to take everything you have and everything you will ever have away from you. Forever. Every memory, every future joy, every relationship, every possession, every good work, every whimsical thought. This rage you feel comes out of nowhere and it's overwhelming. But you can't express it, can't let it show with a flicker in your face or by the quiver in your hand.

The fact that cops consistently shoot people of color who are far more composed and compliant than I was - people who show true courage - is deeply, profoundly frustrating because, among other things, holding a gun in the face of an unarmed person is an act of cowardice, isn't it? Yet time and time again, the brave person dies and the coward gets exonerated.

I can speak to this, yes, but another critical difference, in my situation, is that my shooter was NOT a cop. It was NOT his job to protect me as a citizen, it was NOT his sworn duty to treat me lawfully. Shooting me was NOT, among other things, an act of social betrayal. He owed me nothing. He wasn't sworn to protect or serve. Quite the opposite. Cops, on the other hand, those protect and serve men and women in blue, place innocent, unarmed, compliant Black people in that position of vulnerability and then shoot them anyway. 

It's obscene. It's evil.

The experiments Schrodinger should have done

Erwin Schrödinger, do you know the name? He was a Nobel-winning, Austrian physicist who questioned the commonly held view of what quantum physicists call superposition. The core conundrum of superposition is that subatomic particles exist in multiple states at the same time. Schrödinger's challenge to this view came in the form of a mental puzzle, which is sometimes called a thought experiment, which forced other physicists, including Einstein, to acknowledge that superposition did not seem to hold with observable reality with non-subatomic things, like say cats.

OK, so that’s very heavy and science-y but I need you to stay with me! The actual thought experiment (all thoughts, no actual cats were harmed in the performance of this experiment. No need to call PETA on me. Or him.) helps to make this much easier to comprehend.

Schrödinger’s experiment imagines a cat in a box with a contraption that stands a 50/50 chance of setting off poisonous gas.  (Einstein had a version in which the contraption set off explosives).  Thus, once the experiment is concluded, the cat is either alive or dead, but before opening the box, you, standing on the outside of the box, don't know which is true.

According to the accepted theory of superposition, in that moment, the cat technically, is in both states: dead and alive. Again, according to the theory, it is the act of looking into the box that forces nature's decision, in the language of the video (above) and “collapses the dual reality”. It is quite literally our curiosity that kills the cat. To be perfectly clear, Schrödinger didn't believe this to be true; he devised the thought experiment to show that superposition, at least for visible objects, is absurd.

I lay all of that out to offer this for your consideration: if Schrödinger had done this thought experiment with African Americans instead of cats, his conclusion might have been completely different.    It seems that Black folk involved in dangerous, possibly life-ending encounters with the police are the proof that the dual state does in fact exist for things larger than subatomic particles. Perhaps it doesn’t for cats, but for Black, Native, and Hispanic folk? Oh yeah. That dual state, that superposition, is very real.

People of color live in a perpetual state of dual reality.

They are simultaneously guilty (& not) [Walter Scott];
They are simultaneously compliant (& not) [Mike Brown];
They are simultaneously threatening (& not) [Terrence Crutcher];
They are simultaneously fitting the description (& not) [Philando Castile];

They are simultaneously adult (& not) [Tamir Rice];

They are simultaneously victim (& not) [Charleena Lyles].

There is another important difference.  Schrödinger's cats have a 50% survival rate, but Schrödinger's POC end up dead a whole lot more often.

Additionally, the revised thought experiment confirms that it is the observation (by the police) that causes Schrödinger's POC to die.  A siren, a flashing blue light, a badge, a gun, and the observation of a POC, and Schrödinger might deserve another Nobel Prize.  Which like justice for Schrödinger's POC, must be awarded posthumously.

Which brings us to the trials………

If we extend the Schrödinger metaphor to the trials of those charged with unlawfully killing POC in routine police encounters, we find that the probabilities that ought to apply simply do not.   Perhaps, once the dual reality of the alive and dead POC collapses, bringing the officers to court further “collapses [any semblance of a] dual reality”?

With cats and poison gas (or explosives), the laws of probability apply. With Schrödinger’s Police Trials, as with Schrödinger’s POC? Not so much. When we look at the trials, probabilities go entirely out the window. Malefactors get acquitted a whole lot more than 50% of the time.

When it comes to the trials, this ain’t much of an experiment. There is no duality, there is only reality. We don't have to get to the end of the experiment to know the outcome. There don’t seem to be two possible outcomes. Probability of acquittal seems to be 1 (which if you remember from high school math, means 100% certainty). All the time, 1. Sure thing. The glove never fits. The jury generally acquits. And in the rare event that it doesn't, sentences are commuted, or charges are completely vacated. So ~1.

When it comes to POC and police trials, there is no dual reality. There is death for POC and acquittal for the POB (people of blue).

Wouldja just look at us! We are busting science wide open! POC outchere proving superposition and shit.

*shrugs*

Voter suppression: facts & impacts

This piece originally appeared as a guest post on BlackandIntellectual.com

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“By 1895, Benjamin Tillman and the “Redeeming” Democrats in South Carolina had succeeded through violence, terror, and election fraud to reduce the number of African Americans registered to vote in the state from 81,000 in 1868, to less than 10,000 in 1894.” [i]

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

1895. 2017. What’s the difference really?

In a story that appeared a couple of days after the 2016 election, Craig Gilbert, Todd Spangler and Bill Laitner, writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Detroit Free Press, offered the following analysis of Hillary Clinton’s loss in November 2016, 

“It was Hillary Clinton’s “blue wall” — three Great Lakes battlegrounds that Republicans had banged their heads against for years.

But Donald Trump stormed the blue wall Tuesday, parlaying victories in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania into the presidency.

Trump did it on a tide of votes from rural and blue-collar whites.[ii]

But he was helped by Clinton’s neglect of the region and her failure to fully mobilize her party’s own base, including young voters and African-Americans.”[ii]

This was the story in many, if not most, news reports in the weeks and months after the election. Indeed, in many quarters, it remains the story today. Except there is much more to Secretary Clinton’s loss than this.

As Brian discussed in his piece on Interstate CrossCheck, (ISCC) much of that success is built on the Kris Kobach-designed program currently in use in as many as 33 states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.

ISCC has had a profound impact on voter rolls nationwide. In those states where the program was in use, the program’s less-than-rigorous name matching protocols sought out and purged voters who the program’s sponsors claim, might be registered in more than one state. While on the surface, this sounds like a great idea (what could be wrong with a clean voter list after all), the reality is that if the matching protocols are weak John Q. Washington (DOB 1/1/1985) and John F. Washington (DOB2/2/1976) might be considered similar enough to warrant deletion of one person’s registration! While the ISCC claimed that its matching was rigorous. In practice though the matching wasn’t quite as rigorous as promised, resulting in an error-prone deletion process. Once a voter was deleted, the responsibility is theirs to rpove their citizenship and have their voting rights restored.  And in the absence of any oversight from impartial observers insisting that duplicates have been properly verified before deletions occur, the resulting voter purges probably did result in folk being denied access to the ballot box.

A tale of [a lot more than] two cities

 “Thanks to new laws passed by Republicans, 1.28 million votes that were cast in the 2012 presidential election won’t be cast in 2016.

That’s because, of the 12 states considered up for grabs in 2016, four—Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Ohio—have passed onerous new voter suppression laws, which disproportionately affect communities of color and other Democratic constituencies.

For example, in North Carolina, the Republican-controlled legislature and Republican governor eliminated early voting days. In 2012, 900,000 voters cast their ballots during the early voting window. In 2016, that number will be zero.

The motive is clear: In 2012, 48 percent of North Carolina’s early voters were registered Democrats and 32 percent were registered Republicans, an edge of 140,000 Democratic voters. Mitt Romney won the state by just 92,004 votes in 2012 after Barack Obama carried the state in 2008. In other words, banning early voting could keep this swing state in the Republican column this November.

The Republican lawmakers suppressing voters have had help from Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices. The Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder made it easier for states to make voting harder. Virginia quickly took advantage, passing a strict Voter identification law, which would disqualify the 200,000 voters in the state who lack photo ID. They, too, skew Democrat: the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that 25 percent of African American citizens lack a government-issued photo ID, compared to just 8 percent of whites. Low-income and elderly voters are also disproportionately affected.[iii]

Jay Michaelson

To further develop this idea of massive voter disenfranchisement as presented by Mr. Michaelson, in the table below I’ve given a brief overview of the lay of the voter suppression land in several states.

See more at Health of State Democracies

                                                               

State	Status	2016 Winner	Interstate Cross Check	Notes
Florida	Purple state	Trump	No	This state has a history (see 2000 election result) of purging voter rolls. Under Governor Rick Scott, that has NOT changed. Voter suppression, not fraud, is Florida’s problem
Colorado & Iowa	Swing	Clinton Trump	Yes	The question is to be asked, given what has occurred in so many other ISCC states, what can we expect to see in Iowa & Colorado? What is it reasonable to expect? What does the preponderance of evidence tell us we should expect?
Michigan	Usually reliably blue	Trump	Yes	Per Greg Palast’s investigative reporting, as many as 75,000 votes may have simply not been counted. DJT won the state by fewer than 10,000 votes and recount efforts were frustrated and eventually abandoned. Michigan recount effort stopped
Minnesota	Swing	Clinton	No	ISCC is not currently in use in MN, however, the legislature has passed a voter ID law that will, inevitably suppress turnout and ballots cast Minnesota voter ID law
Nevada	Swing	Clinton	Yes	Lest we fall into the trap of thinking that ONLY Republicans have their finger on the scale, here’s a story about Democrats in Nevada Dems attempt to suppress the vote
New Hampshire		Clinton	No	Like Minnesota, ISCC isn’t needed to get to the destination of suppressing votes. New Hampshire Republicans work on voter ID
North Carolina	Purple (won by Obama in 2008)	Trump	Yes	Trump won the state by ~200,000 votes but North Carolina has a long history of voter suppression activity. It is NC that recently had its signature voter ID law ruled unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court and the SCOTUS refused to revisit the NC voter ID law struck down in '16, leaving the lower court’s order in place.
Ohio	Swing state	Trump	Yes	Trump won this state  by ~500,000 votes but there are serious questions about voter suppression tactics in the run up to the election.   Thousands of Ohio voters purged
Pennsylvania	Usually reliably blue	Trump	Yes	Trump won by ~50,000 votes. See video above – voter suppression was to have handed this state to Mitt Romney in 2012. Pennsylvania voter suppression tactics
Virginia	Swing state	Clinton	Yes	Immediately after the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, under Republican governor Bob MacDonell, Virginia passed a strict Voter identification law, which would disqualify the 200,000 voters in the state who lack photo ID. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that 25 percent of African American citizens lack a government-issued photo ID, compared to just 8 percent of whites. This move likely disenfranchised thousands of Black and low-income citizens. It’s now harder to vote in VA
Wisconsin	Potential swing state	Trump	No	In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by ~22,000 votes, but 300,000 registered voters didn't have requisite forms of voter ID and were likely disenfranchised. “Neil Albrecht, the executive director of Milwaukee’s Election Commission, believes the policy depressed turnout in the blue counties Clinton desperately needed to carry Wisconsin. Compared to 2012, 60,000 fewer people voted in this year. Milwaukee – the county that holds the vast majority of the state’s Black population. Statewide, turnout was the lowest it has been for a presidential election in two decades.” So writes Ian Millhiser for Think Progress reports.

What all these states and these news stories show, is that there is a concerted move to limit voter participation. The attitude of those in power seems to be: if you can’t win, cheat.

In addition to the structural forces trying to limit participation, there is the related issue of voter ignorance. What you don’t know, can and will hurt you when it comes to casting your ballot.

If voters hear a news report that references a need for voter ID but fail to follow the story closely, there is a real possibility that they will show up at the polls without the required ID. Moreover, inattention may mean that when a voter ID law is overturned in the courts, and voter ID is NOT needed, malicious or ill-informed elections officials can demand ID that the law says they do not need. If you don’t know the law, you will allow yourself to be turned away. In states like Wisconsin for example, in the final weeks leading up to the election, voting rights groups discovered that Wisconsin officials at local DMV offices were giving false information to voters attempting to get the proper ID, putting those officials in violation of a federal court order. Knowledge is power. But do we all have the knowledge?

Whether misinformation is given maliciously or not doesn’t matter. An opportunity to cast a ballot is lost. Repeat this action enough times and an election is stolen.  

In our next instalment, we’ll talk about what each of us needs to do to address this going forward. This isn’t about winning or losing elections any more. This is about democracy itself. If it’s at risk then it’s up to every voter to get in the game and bring it back from the brink.

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[i] http://www.robertsmalls.com/history4.html

[ii] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/11/09/how-clinton-lost-blue-wall-states-mich-pa-wis/93577628

[iii] http://www.thedailybeast.com/voter-suppression-could-stop-13-million-from-voting-in-swing-states

The painting on her wall

In case you missed this story earlier this week..........

Wealthy socialite Agnes Gund, sold a painting off her wall for $165,000,000 and has used $100,000,000 of that sales price to fund non-profits working in the criminal justice reform space. Frankly, that's a beautiful thing. It really is. So why does that make me equal parts happy, sad and pissed as hell?

Ms. Gund's 1962 Roy Lichtenstein painting “Masterpiece”.

I appreciate Ms. Gund's gift to the non-profit community broadly and I especially appreciate her focus on the work of criminal justice reform-minded warriors. I just find myself conflicted, very conflicted in my response.

Happy

It goes without saying that money makes social justice work happen. That's not something we can argue about. Professionals need to be paid to bring their skills and time to bear on the issues of the day; office spaces need to be rented; lights and water need to be paid for; internet ain't free neither are the computers that use it. Donations and massive grants like these make it possible for organizations to procure those services and make long range plans that achieve desired goals. So yay! Money! and yet..........

Sad

I'm saddened that we still need so very many social justice warriors. 240+ years as a nation and the social system is still so damn jacked up? When y'all planning to get your shite together?

I'm terrified that we still need criminal justice reformers and activists because by every possible measure, there is little to no justice for some of us. The data proves this. There's evidence here and here should you need it. 

The data continue to bear out one simple fact: that justice is a commodity which some of us will never be able to buy. And so yes, Ms. Gund's contribution is desperately needed and gratefully accepted, I'm sure. The battle for equal justice is far from won and the troops have little ammunition. Thanks to Gund, the warriors will live to fight another 10,000 days. And from the looks of it, we're gonna need every one of those 10,000 days....and probably 10,000 more beyond that.

And yet, I'm also Pissed-As-Hell

I appreciate, deeply, Ms. Gund's willingness to withdraw from her children's future (and basically pass to mine and others') the massive sum of $100,000,000. I can't say that too many times. That she would turn such an enormous sum over to strangers to do work that she may only recently have come to realize is critically necessary? Yuge.

I appreciate Ms. Gund's love for her African-American grandchildren that opened her eyes, her mind and her wallet but gathdammit! Why are we still here? Why. Are. We. Still. Here? Why is proximity still the only way to get folk to 'get it' with some of these social issues? Why? 

And while we wait for this magnificent gift to plow the ground, to plant the seeds, to sprout seedlings and finally bear a harvest of justice, WTF are people like Philando Castile's mother supposed to do with their grief, their loss and their anger? Huh? WHAT? How many more will die, be wrongfully imprisoned, or receive excessive punishments while we await the rich harvest of justice that lies ahead?

Why are some of us still begging to be seen as equally human. equally worthy of any damn thing even justice?

Why is the young woman who texted a boy encouraging him to end his life going to jail, but the man who actually shot Philando Castile is not? 

Why is Brock Turner already out of jail after being convicted of rape (having barely served three months) but Michael Vick spent two entire years in prison for dog fighting? 

Thank you Ms. Gund for your gift. Thank you Ms. Gund's grandchildren for opening her eyes to how different the world is for Black men and women, even extraordinarily wealthy ones.

I'm going to just gulp down my frustration, my angst and whatever the hell this is and keep it movin'. 

Voter suppression: deeply rooted in American history

Originally published on BlackandIntellectual.com

Voter suppression is deeply rooted in American history. Keep that in mind.

Lauren Victoria Burke, writing in The Root offers that ”according to many experts who watch elections, the real controversy of 2016 is [sic] the hundreds of thousands of votes that were never cast in the first place because of widespread voter suppression.”

Thanks to John Roberts’ SCOTUS – in the Shelby v Holder decision of 2013 – and the flurry of voter ID laws passed thereafter, Republican efforts to disenfranchise vast swathes of the country have been largely very successful.

in the run up to 2012 Republicans told us, in both word and deed, what they were about to do: suppress the vote and steal an election. We didn’t believe them and we certainly didn’t respond aggressively enough, to our eternal peril.

We had forgotten that voter suppression is deeply rooted in American history.

For years, Republicans have been selling the notion that government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub and they have been singularly focused on making that possible. The reality of course, is that Republicans  want to drown the parts of government that serve people, but the parts that support corporations? Those parts they would sustain.

In the pursuit of their goals, since they can’t very well go full-on authoritarian and suspend all elections, Republicans have had to do one better: limit the eligible voting pool by means fair or foul. But so-called conservatives, which is to say, those wishing to conserve the status quo, have been doing such things since America was begun. This is not new.

Voter suppression is deeply rooted in American history.

“Even as the rising American electorate gains momentum, new regressive laws, rulings, and maneuvers are threatening voting rights without facing the strict scrutiny that would come with a constitutional right to vote”[i]

Because the Constitution does not specifically enshrine the right to vote to all legal citizens of a certain age, in every era, efforts have had to be made to either secure the right to vote or to protect that right.

“While the franchise expanded during some moments and in some places, it contracted in others, depriving Americans of a right they had once held. Between 1790 and 1850 — the period when property requirements were being dropped — four Northern states disenfranchised African-American voters, and New Jersey halted a 17-year experiment permitting women to vote. During this same period, nine states passed laws excluding “paupers” from political rights.

Many of the late 19th- and early 20th-century laws operated not by excluding specific classes of citizens but by erecting procedural obstacles that were justified as measures to prevent fraud or corruption. It was to “preserve the purity of the ballot box”[ii]

That latter point, “erecting procedural obstacles…justified as measures to prevent fraud or corruption” is very much a part of today’s voter suppression play book. Replace the words ‘erecting procedural obstacles’ with the words ‘requiring voter ID’ and you get my point.

The history of voter suppression

Given that the Constitution does not explicitly indicate who may vote, each state may – entirely within its rights – make that determination, and write laws that include or exclude various groups.  Consequently, any state that chooses so to do, may decide to remove individuals’ names from the voter rolls for any reason – reasonable or not – that they choose.

Even as some minorities were being welcomed into the body politic (property-owning Black males in 1870, women in 1920), others were simultaneously being excluded. In 1850 for example, when the 15th Amendment was ratified, all women, non-African-American minorities and many non-Christian religious groups were being denied access to the ballot box.

After Reconstruction, newly elected conservative Democrats began to write legislation that would have the effect of suppressing the black vote. These laws introduced literacy tests, poll taxes or in some cases "whites only" primaries in direct opposition to federal law. Attempts by would-be voters or candidates to break these rules would often lead to deadly consequences. These intimidation and suppression campaigns were so successful that only 3 percent of voting-age African-American southerners were registered to vote in 1940.[iii]

It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that literacy tests were explicitly banned. Poll taxes were banned a year later after the Supreme Court determined that they were unconstitutional.

But voter suppression didn't end in the 1960s. Still very much with us today are some of voter suppression’s best tactics: intimidation; disinformation; voter ID; reduction of early voting; removal of same day registration and the closure of polling stations. All of these are methods currently in use to reduce turnout and swing election outcomes.

Today, joining the family of suppression tactics, we now have Interstate CrossCheck, the mammoth voter purging system that allegedly removed 1.1 million voters from the rolls in 2016.

America learned in her formative days that the surest way to ensure the outcome of an election, to protect the status quo and those it benefitted most, was to exclude from consideration, the views of those who sought change. And so, in every generation different groups have had to fight for the granting and protection of their access to the ballot box. This current age is no different but we have become so accustomed to having the right to vote, that we have forgotten that access wasn’t always quite so broad or so easy. But we forget the history of suppression at our peril. By forgetting, we have allowed it to return and it has returned with a vengeance.

As a nation, we may claim that our foundational principles are “democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity, and equality”, but our history doesn’t bear this out. We have long claimed democracy as a foundational principle and then suppressed the voices of parts of the populace. We have long claimed equality as a foundational the principle of and then had unequal access to the ballot. These contradictions run through American history and we forget these contradictions at our peril.

In the next installment, we’ll take a closer look at Interstate CrossCheck, how it works, and where it may have worked in 2016, to subvert the will of the people.

                                                               

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[i] From http://www.fairvote.org/

[ii] From NYT article The Strange Career of Voter Suppression, February 17 2012

[iii] Source: American Civil Liberties Union