Showing posts with label George Floyd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Floyd. Show all posts

29 October 2020

22:51

By Malinda Words

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And in the USA, they are trying to catch a falling piano

 


Walter Wallace. Who is he? Well, I didn’t know about him 24 hours ago. The entire world didn’t know about him. Just like they didn’t know about George Floyd a few months ago. The world wouldn’t have known had people not taken to the streets. And it will be the streets that will tell the world the story of Walter Wallace.

Around 4 pm on Monday, October 26, responding to a call from Cobbs Creek, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, two white police officers arrived to find Wallace carrying a knife. Wallace, a 27 year old black man, was a mental patient. The officers may not have known. Patient or not, condition known or not, if they found Wallace to be a threat, that threat could have been neutralized without spraying him with bullets. Wallace died.

Philadelphia’s Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw (yes, that’s the name and yes, it struck me between the eyes as well!) claimed that the officers didn’t have a taser or a similar device, because the department didn’t have the funds. Well, a taser costs US$ 399. It was pointed out that Outlaw, who had ordered the tear gassing of citizens on June 1, is the head of the department that has a US $ 4.9 million budget and has enough money, US $ 20 million, to renovate (!) A new building. No wonder Outlaw’s armed subordinates are now being called ‘an armed militia’!

There were protests in Philadelphia. In fact the protests haven’t stopped.
 
A resident of Philadelphia who took part in the protests spoke about a popular protest chant: ‘Whose streets? OUR streets!’

‘It means nothing when you can’t actually proceed down a street because the police are armed for war. Literally. They can barely walk.’

It reminded me of a comment about a piano. You might wonder, ’Of all things! Well, let me make it more grotesque; it’s about a falling piano. It’s actually about trying to catch a falling piano! Here’s the story:

About a week ago, I wrote about Willie Dixon. It was about his work and his life. It included the following: “Well, I didn’t know about Willie Dixon and I didn’t know that he was jailed by the US government for refusing to go to war against Korea. In 1983 he released what is probably the most radical song he’s penned. It was titled ‘It don’t make sense if you can’t make peace.’”

I emailed the article to my friend Tony Courseault who replied, ‘Nice thoughts.  Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to catch a falling piano when I fight for this country to do right.’

Tony was talking of trying to ‘save the piano.’  He was talking of his country or his image of the country that the USA could be (or better be!) or that which is best in that country or, simply, protecting those under threat. He was talking of the United States of America. The USA where George Floyd couldn’t breathe and where Walter Wallace breathed his last on Monday the 26th of October.

He was talking of streets too, in a way. Whose streets? Well, according to claim, the streets of the people. Some people, let me interject. If you are white you don’t really have to say ‘these are my streets,’ but if you are not, whether or not you make the claim you get to meet a trigger happy armed militia (aka ‘police’).
It might be easier to catch a falling piano.

Reclaiming the streets, catching a falling piano, determining to breathe. Tough assignments, yes even the last. That's if you are not white. That’s the ‘America’ where my friend Tony lives and where George Floyd, Walter Wallace and countless others were murdered.
 
They deserve music. And if catching a piano is what it takes, then it has to be caught. The streets have to be taken. The armed have to be disarmed.

A call to arms, then? Well, try catching a falling piano! You would need strong arms for that wouldn’t you? Strong arms, strong minds and a strong safety net. 

All of a sudden I am thinking of Malcolm X. And these words come to me: ‘By any means necessary!’

malindasenevi@gmail.com
 
Other articles in the series 'In Passing...':  [published in the 'Daily News']  
 
The address of 'The Nation'
Willie Dixon made sense
There's a 'some mother's child' we rarely notice
Fear days and days of fear
'Sightings' that are simply blinding
Words: their sources, halfway houses and journeys
Maheel Kuragama cannot leave the building
It had to be Samansiri who flew, who else?
Indrani in her long ago
There's poetry and history resident in photographs
Silence: the unrecognized travel companion
Recognize frame, then un-frame
Eyes that watch the world and cannot be forgotten   Let's start with the credits, shall we? 
The 'We' that 'I' forgot 
'Duwapang Askey,' screamed a legend, almost 40 years ago
Dances with daughters
Reflections on shameless writing
Is the old house still standing?
 Magic doesn't make its way into the classifieds
Small is beautiful and is a consolation  
Distance is a product of the will
Akalanka Athukorala, at 13+ already a hurricane hunter
Did the mountain move, and if so why?
Ever been out of Colombo?
Anya Raux educated me about Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA)
Wicky's Story You can always go to GOAT Mountain
Let's learn the art of embracing damage
Kandy Lake is lined with poetry
There's never a 'right moment' for love
A love note to an unknown address in Los Angeles
A dusk song for Rasika Jayakody
How about creating some history?
How far away are the faraway places?
There ARE good people!
Re-placing people in the story of schooldays  
When we stop, we can begin to learn
Routine and pattern can checkmate poetry
Janani Amanda Umandi threw a b'day party for her father 
Sriyani and her serendipity shop
Forget constellations and the names of oceans
Where's your 'One, Galle Face'?
Maps as wrapping paper, roads as ribbons
Yasaratne, the gentle giant of Divulgane  
Katharagama and Athara Maga
Victories are made by assists
Lost and found between weaver and weave
The Dhammapada and word-intricacies
S.A. Dissanayake taught children to walk in the clouds
White is a color we forget too often  
The most beautiful road is yet to meet a cartographer
 
 
 

25 June 2020

09:34

By Malinda Words

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Racism and police brutality: the USA and Sri Lanka


T. Greg Doucette, a US lawyer, and a mathematician named Jason Miller have compiled a list of 780 videos (as of June 16) showing police brutality. The investigative journalism website  Bellingcat has documented over 140 incidents of police violence against journalists during the protests.
 
A website called www.copcrisis.com claims ‘only a small fraction of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the USA track misconduct reports,’ and that the report of the Department of Justice on police conduct (in 2001) ‘was based on statistics given voluntary by just 5% of police departments in the USA.’

The following is a short list of violent incidents that took place a 72 hour period ending May 31, 2020 and were caught on camera.

A New York City police officer tore a protective mask off of a young black man and assaulted him with pepper spray which the victim stoop peacefully with his hands up. New York City police officers, in two separate vehicles rammed into crowds. Security forces in Minneapolis marched down a quiet residential street and shot paint canisters at residents who were watching from their private porch. Atlanta police stopped two black people, inexplicably shooting them with tasers and pulling them out of their car. Rubber bullets, tear gas and batons, pepper sprays and spraying other chemical agents, attacking people already on the ground or were even handcuffed have been reported all over the USA. Fourteen people have been killed and at least eight of them were involved in protests while some were bystanders while the involvement/presence of the rest haven’t been confirmed as yet (as of June 18). Please note that Black Americans account for less than 13% of the U.S population but are killed by police at more than double the rate of white Americans. In 2019, 250 Black people were fatally shot by the police. 

There’s a civil war in the United States of America and it’s happening now. No exaggeration. It’s about race and it is about racism. Police and police brutality. It’s not random, undisciplined officers but systemic racism that pervades that country and finds expression in the form of police brutality.
The USA doesn’t want to acknowledge any of this. Even after calling the UN’s human rights outfit ‘a cesspool of bias’ and walking out, the USA is using all means deemed necessary to prevails on the body to desist from passing resolutions on the country’s human rights situation. 

Washington is in a way the headquarters of racism and brutality insofar as decisions, domestic and international, are driven by the former and manifest as the latter. Of course the overarching policy imperative is serving capital interests, especially the arms and pharmaceutical industries but not necessarily limited to these.

However, capitalism (and all the violence that goes with it and generates), racism and police brutality do not make up some jealously guarded private property of the USA. Poverty and powerlessness go hand in hand with the sustained development of capital interests in other countries as well, big and small, rich and poor. There is racism outside the USA and Europe. Countries with numerically strong majorities privilege those communities. 

As such the question can be asked, for example, ‘Isn’t what is happening in the USA also happening in Sri Lanka?’ There are other questions that can be asked: 1) Doesn’t Buddhism have a special place in the constitution? 2) Wasn’t violence unleashed on minorities (Tamil and Muslim)?  3) Aren’t minorities systematically excluded from political and administrative office? There can be more of course, but these are key.

Buddhism has a special place in the constitution, yes (Article 9). This ‘special place’ is effectively nullified by Articles 10 and 14. This redundancy should be eliminated. However, those who wail about the ‘unfairness’ and demand secularism are loathe to eliminate exceptions based on religion and race or ‘customary law’ (for example the Thesavalamai law for Tamils in Jaffna, the Kandyan marriage laws and the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act). 

Violence. Yes. Various regimes have turned a blind eye on violence against Tamils and Muslims. In 1983, the Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya (JSS) the trade union arm of the then ruling party, the UNP, led the race riots. Minorities haven’t been innocent either. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was the world’s most brutal terrorist outfit for decades. It was also a racist organization, targeting Sinhalese (the vast majority of whom are Buddhsits) and Buddhist places of worship. The LTTE also turned its guns on the Muslims, ethnically cleansing the Jaffna Peninsula of that community and turning one in ten Muslims in the Eastern Province into refugees. As for the Muslims, the Easter Sunday attacks were orchestrated by the ‘National Thowheeth Jama’ath,’ an outfit that has been spreading Islamic Fundamentalism for well over a decade. 

Sri Lanka hasn’t had an Obama, true. However, it is not that people in the USA voted for Obama because he was black. Neither did people in Sri Lanka vote for Chandrika Kumaratunga or her mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike because they were women. Racism in the USA wasn’t ‘suspended’ during Obama’s reign and gender imbalances in Sri Lanka didn’t disappear when we had female heads of state. It would be simplistic to say that a country has to be racist if the head of state is from the majority community. 

In the case of privileges in top posts in the institutional arrangement, we need to take into account the identity (religious and ethnic) of the officials. Key institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Central Bank have had heads from minority communities. In fact Sinhala Buddhist ‘representation’ in the top ranks of certain institutions have been low and even non-existent historically. 

Such ‘anomalies’ don’t necessarily say things are all beautiful and equal. Indeed, certain minority political groups believe that only a federal arrangement would amount to ‘equality’ never mind that grievance claims are exaggerated, aspirations presented as citizenship anomalies and ‘solutions’ deliberately avoiding any comment on historical, geographical and demographic realities.  There are grievances. There are citizenship anomalies. 

We are comparing and contrasting here, however. The USA has one religious holiday, Christmas (Good Friday is a holiday in the UK and in other European countries as well as in Canada, Australian and New Zealand). Sri Lanka has holidays for all religious communities with Christians and Muslims enjoying a disproportionately high number. All the above mentioned countries have religious iconography associated with the state. Theism reigns. Christian theism, to be precise. You see it in flags, anthems and even currency notes. Nothing of the kind in Sri Lanka.

Let’s talk of prisons and police brutality. If ‘racism’ is to be extracted from percentages of the incarcerated, the so-called Sinhala Buddhist State is a masochistic edifice! Sri Lanka has known police brutality but here again if you talk numbers the victims have been disproportionately Sinhala Buddhists. The issue however was not race or religion. The police defended regimes. In the USA, obviously the police defends systems, but the issue was and is race and the violence was racist. 

Innocent Tamils were certainly targeted by the coercive apparatus of the Sri Lankan state, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, but this very apparatus moved to kill 60,000 Sinhala people in just two years. The victims saw themselves as nationalists. Identity was important to them. They were unarmed and weren’t exactly caught in a crossfire or killed by undisciplined soldiers. THAT was ‘policy’ and is very different from the realities of a war-theater where a monumental hostage rescue operation was successfully completed. There were costs, as always. 

That said, Sri Lanka is a long way from obtaining inter-ethnic and inter-religious resolve. We don’t have an ideal police force. Our justice system is flawed. Our constitution needs corrective amendment. At the same time,  we have nothing even close to the kind of systemic racism and police brutality whose existence the USA can no longer deny. 

However, if there were 780 videos showing police brutality and 140 incidents of police violence against journalists during the protests held over ten days in Sri Lanka, we would have the US State Department issuing warnings, Ambassador Alaina B Teplitz taking a knee and the UN issuing statements of censure. No, forget the numbers 780, 140 and 10. They’d still do it if it was just one video of a police officer kicking a protestors, one claim of even a journalist with dubious credentials whining about persecution over a period of 365 days. On the flip side, these entities AND their local lackeys have gone all quiet over rights violations in the USA. Telling!

Equivalency. Nice word. Misleads. Pernicious. The USA is in the middle of a civil war. Sri Lanka is not. 


malindasenevi@gmail.com







08:34

By Malinda Words

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Paul Robeson didn’t scream ‘BLM’ but he knew what mattered


The Biddle. What’s that? And what has that got to do with sport? Legitimate questions. The Biddle came about at a time when countries such as the United States of America (USA) didn’t have to be cute about racism, brutality and well, repression in general. Things haven’t changed much as the murder of George Floyd and brutality unleashed on those who protested that murder demonstrate. None of it is new.

More people get to see it now. That’s the difference. ’The ship be sinking,’ as my friend, ardent basketball fan and insightful commentator on race politics in US sport Tony Courseault puts it:

‘…ask 10 people to define the system, and you get 10 different answers. The ship be sinking. It’s been rudderless for a minute. And social media, that great capitalist invention, is quickly becoming the tool for us to widen the crevasse of that formerly indomitable structure.’ 

That, and the fact of those in the sinking ship being forced to shed cloaks and wade in naked with knee, boot, baton, bullet and teargas. Horses and police cars too of course.

Back in the day things were different. The Biddle got its name from President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Attorney General, Francis Biddle, who came up with a list of ‘subversive organizations.’ This was in 1941. There were 11 to begin with but by the end of the decade there were more than 90. McCarthyism would follow soon enough.

The list did not mention individuals but people were certainly targeted. Among them a man called Paul Leroy Robeson.

He was born in 1898. His father was born into slavery, escaped and later became the minister of Princeton's Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church. Paul became the third African-American student ever enrolled at Rutgers College and the only one at the time. He was made to suffer a broken nose and a dislocated shoulder before being selected to the school’s football team. He was a member of other teams but was once benched because a Southern team refused to compete because Rutgers ‘was fielding a Negro.’ He was a debater, a singer and an actor, skills which marked his later life and in fact added to his stature as an activist. He was elected the class valedictorian and in his speech urged classmates to work for equality of all Americans (of the USA).

That’s what he did. He worked for equality — of all peoples, not just ‘all Americans.’ He stood up for the British working class and colonized peoples of the British Empire. He supported the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War and became active in the Council on African Affairs (CAA) which was listed by The Biddle. Yes, that. He was investigated during McCarthyism. He was denied a passport and suffered serious decline in income.

On July 25, 1946, four African Americans were lynched (according to some) or shot dead (according to others) by a mob of white males. No suspects were prosecuted for the murder of George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom.

Robeson met and admonished President Harry Truman, warning that if legislation to end lynching was not enacted, ‘the Negros will defend themselves.’  Truman terminated the meeting declaring that it was not the right time to propose anti-lynching legislation! Robeson then issued a call demanding that Congress passes civil rights legislation and founded the ‘American Crusade Against Lynching' in 1946. Yes, long before anyone had heard of Rev Martin Luther King (jr). In 1951 he presented to the UN an anti-lynching petition titled ‘We Charge Genocide,’ insisting that the US Government had failed to stop the barbaric practice and therefore was guilty of violating the UN Genocide Convention. Interestingly, today, as I write, the US is using all means deemed necessary to stop the UN from investigating systemic racism.

The following extract from a wiki entry tells a lot about Robeson, the racism that’s part of US sports DNA and the systemic racism in that country.

‘A book reviewed in early 1950 as “the most complete record on college football” failed to list Robeson as ever having played for Rutgers and that he been an All-American. The NBC canceled Robeson’s appearance on Eleanor Roosevelt’s television program. The State Department denied Robeson a passport and issued a “stop notice’ at all ports.”’

An interesting reason had been offered: ‘an isolated existence inside United States borders not only afforded him less freedom of expression but also avenge his "extreme advocacy on behalf of the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.”’ Robeson was also told that ‘his frequent criticism of the treatment of blacks in the United States should not be aired in foreign countries.’

Today, athletes such as LeBron James (Los Angeles Lakers) and Colin Kaepernick (formerly of the San Francisco 49ers) speak up against racism in the USA and of course police brutality. Hundreds of athletes have made their positions clear. They stand. They march. They speak.

Back then there was Paul Robeson. As for much of the rest of the world, it was like the river Mississippi as depicted in later renditions by Robeson of ‘Old Man River,’ originally a tune in the musical ‘Show Boat,’ the screen version of which featured Robeson: ‘What does he (meaning ‘Old Man River,’ or ‘The Mississippi’) care if the world’s got trouble, what does he care if the land ain’t free?’

The Biddle still exists, only it is not called that any more. And Robeson is alive, even though few mention his name. The Mississippi can’t keep on rolling along forever.

Other articles in the series titled 'The Interception' [published in 'The Morning']

 The plus, minus and equal of improvement
Do you have a plan?
Strengths and weaknesses
Wait, it's a strategy
The virtues of risk-free generosity
Thinking and out-thinking in sports
Read, locked-down people, read!
The team, the team!
Who should take the last shot?
It's all about partnerships
'The done thing' is rarely done
'Practice, lots of practice'
Special, always and forever
The shortcut to greatness
It's healthy to retire the braggadocio 
Money talks, gold rules: are we ok with that?
Sometimes if you don't stand up, you fall
Selections and the political economy of disappointment
So who is the GOAT?
Predecessors are great teachers
When things go wrong check the fundamentals
There's always only one more game left
Mind games are part of the sporting story
Those nervous ninetiesOut-think the opposition
School sports and parents
The importing mania in school cricket
Sportsmen and sportswomen beware: your accounts will be hacked soon!
Not all victories are recorded



22 June 2020

09:58

By Malinda Words

In: , , , , ,

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Monumental Blunders



An oft-quoted line from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’ has King Arthur reflecting on change thus:

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
and God fulfils himself in many ways,
lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’

‘The Order’ in this case was certainly changing and Arthur had come to terms with his passing. The legend paints Arthur and his knights in colorful and heroic hues. As such the relevant customs are shown to be good. Arthur had no way of knowing if what would supplant the heroic would be better or as good in a different way. However, turns of history, especially after long reigns or an extended essay of a particular order do make for hope and/or consolation of a Tennysonian kind. At least for a while. Think 'Arab Spring'. Think 'Yahapalanaya'.

Sometimes the sheer magnitude of a moment of objection persuades people to see imminent rupture or indeed a collapse that cannot be reversed. Systems however are resilient and those who have benefited from them typically leave no stone unturned when looking for ways of retaining privileges.

That said, we are seeing something unprecedented in many parts of the world, principally the United States of America. Monuments and memorials, symbols and insignias, buildings, names and nomenclature are not just being questioned and debated, they have been torn down, effaced and protested against and not just in the USA.  The statues have typically been of slave traders, Confederate leaders, conquistadors such as Christopher Columbus and Juan de Oñate, but the wave has traveled to Europe and all the way to New Zealand. Statues were either toppled or the threat of the same has prompted assurances from relevant authorities that they will be removed.

Some have cried out in horror at the looting and vandalism, but not surprisingly such ‘objectors’ belong to a broad camp that cheered on when statues and symbols associated with the Soviet Bloc came down. They’ve not uttered one word of protest against that great Temple of Looting, the British Museum. The vandalism whose yield is proudly displayed therein remains a non-issue for such people.

'Part of history and therefore should remain' wasn't an argument when Lenin's statue was brought down


It is not hard to understand the anger of those who targeted these symbols of tyranny, racism and barbarity. Their very existence can be seen as an affront to humanity. It is also history, however. Sordid yes, but historic. Reminds me of a short exchange in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ translated as given below:

‘Brother, brother, what are you saying? Why, you have shed blood?" cried Dunia in despair. "Which all men shed," he put in almost frantically, "which flows and has always flowed in streams, which is spilt like champagne, and for which men are crowned in the Capitol and are called afterwards benefactors of mankind... If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I'm trapped.”’

So we have statues of those who ‘succeeded’ whereas the defeated are often not even footnoted in historical accounts. The architects of the British Museum obviously did not set out to create a monument to theft, vandalism and genocide. The looters, vandals and butchers were not named as such. King Leopold II of Belgium supervised the murder of as many as 10 million people in the Congo Free State between 1885 and 1908 but those who erected his statue in Ekeren (it was removed by the Municipality before protestors could do the honors) clearly didn’t see him as anything but a hero [His first cousin Queen Victoria, my friend Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta reminds me, 'Victoria stole much more than her cousin and that's her secret].

Such people in Europe, tyrants all, after all delivered to their subjects ‘the good life’ courtesy the tyranny. Butchery was in Winston Churchill’s political and ideological DNA, so to speak, but he’s hailed as a hero. Hitler is the exception and that’s simply because he did to white people what white people did to non-white people. And they are not done yet!

Time is long and this is something that is easily forgotten. It’s the moment, it’s the carpe diem frame of mind that comes to the fore. And sometimes memory dies and is buried by century after century replete with outright lies and creative and pernicious historiography. When memory survives and moments present themselves for a different version to emerge, statues are taken down.

If history is useful at least to the extent that it teaches us about horrors we must avoid then an argument can be made against complete erasure. Better to have King Leopold along with a prominent account of what he did and who benefited from the bloodletting he was responsible for, one could argue. That however is for people to decide. The winners make the call, typically, and although that’s not something anyone should cheer, it's something we are forced to live with.

What’s forgotten in the fixation over monument is that they are but symbols. We could re-define the symbol; Columbus as a butcher not an explorer or discoverer of a ‘new’ world, for example. But in the end, powerful though symbols are they essentially make the frill of political reality.

You can’t bring back the murdered. You can’t go back in time and reset ecologies, cultural and physical. You could however return loot. You could compensate nations.

A catalogue of antiquities and other cultural objects from Sri Lanka (Ceylon) abroad compiled by P.H.D.H. De Silva and published in 1974, lists over 15,000 artifacts stolen from the island.  The loot ended up in 23 countries and 140 holding facilities.  The vast majority are in Britain.  Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Berkshire, Leicester, Liverpool, London, Sheffield, and Windsor all have ‘Little pieces of Ceylon’ so to speak.  All stolen goods.  For antique and historical value, each and every amulet, the tiniest statuette, the most fragile manuscript with hardly legible lettering, is priceless. 

In other words it is easy for relevant authorities in the USA, Canada, Britain, Belgium, Australia, Portugal, New Zealand, the Netherlands etc to play progressive by removing statues, changing names and nomenclature, efface symbols and insignia and leave it at that. It’s easy to ‘take a knee’ as per that trending symbolic gesture objecting to racism and police brutality and leave it at that. That’s pittance. Does not compensate. Most importantly it does absolutely nothing to transform a system that is racist, violent and is made for and buttressed by deceit, theft and butchery.

When the symbols come down, the oppressed cheer. When the British left, those living in the countries looted and vandalized by the British cheered. The vandal figured different ways to vandalize, the thief became more skillful at theft. The paraphernalia of freedom were ‘conceded’ but the substance of enslavement remained robust.

Monuments will come down. Tyrannies end. Nothing is permanent. But, to take from Tennyson, we do have ample historical evidence regarding one bad custom being replaced by another, although the latter will be celebrated as good, wholesome, democratic, civilized etc. For a while at least.

When under siege, the besieged will (or must) compromise, but rest assured that the dictum, ‘one step back now so two steps forward remains viable’ is what frames concession. The more formidable monuments don’t come named. They do not have physical form. They are more elusive. Perhaps this is one reason why statues are targeted. They are, in the end, the softer of all things that ought to be targeted. Leaving it all there with the rubble after point is made would be a blunder. A monumental blunder.



RELEVANT ARTICLES
David Dungay couldn't breathe either
Where have all the internationalists gone?
I can't breathe Ms Teplitz
Those who kneel are actually standing


malindasenevi@gmail.com