Driving While Black

I had a great conversation late last week with a new co-worker of mine who is being trained to load packages into the Washington State trailers at my work (UPS, or Under Paid Slaves). He is the third person to be trained on our belt since I’ve starting working here in late February (but, I digress). His name is Casanova and he’s a young Black man of 21 years and dresses in the style of Bay Area hyphy.

As we were loading into Washington him and his trainer, a young Latino man named Mike, we all started talking about Dave Chappell and on his commentary on race, especially the difference of how cops treat whites and Blacks when they pull them over. Casanova started talking about how whenever he sees a cop he gets a little nervous, and if a cop is on the other side of the ride driving in the opposite direction as him and sees the cop pull a U-turn Casanova automatically knows that the cop is going to pull him over and question him. No if ands or buts about it. If he sees a cop pull a “Uey” in his rearview mirror he knows he’s in for a whole lot of shit. Even when he did nothing wrong.

I can just picture the cop taping on his window and asking. “Excuse me sir. Did you know you were DWB? [driving while Black]“

“Uh, yeah, kinda did know that officer.”

Anyways. This got Mike talking about his old neighborhood in the Mission district in San Francisco and how the cops harass him too due to his dark complexion and his “affiliation” with gang members (there is a knew “anti-gang” injunction being imposed on people in the Mission). Talking about having cops pull up in his driveway and asking to search his car even though he’s only working on the engine or how he gets harrassed by cops who want to use an anti-gang injunction order on him because he has family members in gangs (so he’s not supposed to speak to his family huh? Guess that’s the new “family values” that Bush wants) and how his mother works with an anti-violence and anti-gang org in the Mission and how he knows many gang members because of this, so he’s essentially being harrassed for trying to get kids out of gangs.

But what got me really thinking was this. Do whites really know what it’s like to live life as a person of color? I mean, sure we all see the movies and read about it, but do we actually experience it? No, we don’t. Yet whites are the first to come out and accuse people of color as being “reactionary,” “over sensitive,” and (my favorite!) playing the “race card.” Also, with America so segregated by class and race how could whites know about what goes on on the other side of th fence? Unless a white person actively seeks these things out and questions the statues quo a white person won’t know this (this brings us to the point of the recent Supreme Court ruling on desegregating the schools, but I’ll blog on that latter). I have the “advantage(??)” of working in a blue collar working class union job with many people of color (mostly men though) around me and I’m able to actually hear their experiences every single day I go to work.

Yet most whites (I’m assuming) don’t here these things every single day they go to work. Most whites will question the experiences of racism that people of color face today and claim that racism was left behind many decades ago. Yet how to whites know this? And why do they assume this? Again, have they experienced racism? Of course not, their white! By definition whiteness is privilege, privilege to not experience racism and many other isms out there.

This is something whites should think (all though they won’t) about the next time they accuse someone of being sensitive and playing the race card. And it’s something they should think about long and hard.

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Over the Rhine

Profile: The Beat Within

My girlfriend is doing a news article on a group of San Francisco State University students who have been behind bars at the Youth Guidance Centers (the most Orwellian name for a juvenile detention program I can think of) in the San Francisco Bay Area. Basically these students help edit the weekly magazine The Beat Within. I’ve been mulling over their website and magazines for the past couple of days and I’m telling you this is the some of the best shit I’ve read in a long time. Basically The Beat Within is a platform that allows incarcerated youth to speak their mind. The magazine states:

The Beat Within is a writing and conversation program in juvenile halls — and a weekly magazine that grows out of that program. The Beat was founded in 1996 when a social worker inside San Francisco’s Youth Guidance Center realized that there was no vehicle for the anguished voices of the incarcerated youth he heard. He decided to provide that vehicle, and The Beat was born

Here’s a few writing samples from these incarcerated youth (whom are mostly youth of color):

Everything turns into a mixture of black and white.
Everything was going good, then I just come in here for some stuff I didn’t do.
I feel like I’m in hell, I never been to jail before.
No one cares. I tried to say what I seen and they bound me.
This is a cold world. They can do as they feel. This ain’t right.

Who can I turn to about this situation?
No one, because no one in America gives a shit about this young black man.

By God’s Child

…

Crack and AIDS are a product of the CIA. Just looking at it, it’s so easy to see how it (crack) spread in the colored community. Look at AIDS, how it only kills the undesirable gays, blacks, Asians, Latinos. I don’t see a lot of rich white people with AIDS. Also crack is hella easy to make, and it kills people in the inner city.

I think the system is run by the white man to control the colored man’s neck in institutionalized racism. I believe the CIA created the AIDS virus in the ‘50s to kill off the undesirables–the homosexuals, Blacks, Latinos, Asians. I feel that the colored people will prevail, especially in the 21st century.

By Dexter

…

Dad,
I wish you were here to protect me from what I’ve been caught up in.
I wish you were here so you could have made mom keep me for all of those years. I wish you were here when I met him.
I wish you could have told me how older guys only want one thing.
I wish you could have told me how they’ll manipulate and brainwash you.
I wish you could have taught me that there is more to the world
than hustlers, thieves and prostitutes.
I wish we were a family
so I didn’t have to resort to being jumped in and jumped out.
It took me a lot to realize that the people I thoughts were my family weren’t.
It took me a lot to realize that I ain’t gonna get nowhere on the streets
bangin’ and smokin’ dope.
It took me a lot to realize that my mom loves me.
It took me a lot to realize that I love myself.
It took me a lot to realize that I have doe this all on my own.
No one helped me through anything, but I still got through it and I stay strong.
It’s still takin’ a lot to realize that I’m in SEF (juvenile) for a reason.
I couldn’t continue what I was doing and still be alive.
Every night I think of you and I want to do better for mom, you and myself
RIP – David Shane Burnett

Love Always, your Baby Girl

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–> By Megan

Every one should definitely check this website out and even subscribe if you can.

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The Beat Within

Anti-Gang Injunction Polarizes West Sacramento

I recently read an article in the Nov. 26, 2006 paper of the San Francisco Chronicle about how police in West Sacramento are serving gang members and alleged gang members with injunctions that impose travel restrictions and curfews. Many of these, if not all, people being served with these injunctions are Latino youth from a lower class area in West Sacramento.

West Sacramento, Yolo County — A police officer stopped Robert Sanchez one night in April as he walked near his home in this blue-collar city, though Sanchez wasn’t suspected of committing a crime.

Sanchez, 18, admitted he was a member of the Norteño gang, the officer said. He also wore a gang tattoo and was with another Norteño, his sister’s fiance.

“You are being served with a permanent gang injunction,” the officer told him.

With that, Sanchez lost the right to move freely in his neighborhood. He’s now prohibited indefinitely from hanging out with more than 125 other alleged Norteños, some of them relatives, in a wide swath of the city. He must also obey other restrictions, including a 10 p.m. curfew.

The court injunction against the Norteño “Broderick Boys,” named for the neighborhood where many of them live, has stirred controversy since a judge issued it nearly two years ago, dividing residents who feel safer because of it from those who see it as racial profiling.

West Sacramento’s experience may be a lesson for San Francisco, where City Attorney Dennis Herrera secured the city’s first anti-gang injunction last month and is preparing to ask for more.

So while Sanchez was a member of the gang he wasn’t prosecuted with a crime or even charged with a crime, just through affiliation he was presumed guilty. While these injunctions are legal the way they are used are normally contested in courts around the country. Essentially Latino youth are being targeted because of their socio-economic status and the color of their skin. While crime has presumably gone down (I won’t against the effectiveness of injunctions since draconian measures tend to work in deterring crime) what is going on in West Sacramento is racial profiling. The thing one has to remember is that racial profiling isn’t racism in the classical sense of the word but it’s racism in a contemporary sense, which is just as powerful and harmful as the former. Frank H. Wu in his book Yellow, if I remember correctly, Wu states that racial profiling, for many, is racism that “makes sense.” It’s not the racism of old and the Jim Crow era, it’s racism that essentially “makes sense.” Think of the classical SAT example (only slightly modified for this blog): Police have caught many Latinos committing crimes in West Sacramento: Latinos are committing crime in Wes Sacramento: Therefore all Latinos in West Sacramento are committing crime. The answer to the SAT question similar to that would have been false, yet that is what Wu states is racism that “makes sense.” But just because it “makes sense” to many doesn’t mean it’s not wrong. Wu states that socially conscious people and activists must attack racial profiling just as much as they would have attacked segregation since it is a wrong that must be corrected and is racism no matter if it is in the classical or contemporary sense. The article goes on to make a few good points:

Some residents, like Ray Martinez, are excited about the growth. “Cleaning up the neighborhood is good,” said Martinez, 48, a floor designer who lives in Broderick. “If it wasn’t for the real estate market, I don’t think the police would be doing this.”

Others think gentrification is harming longtime residents and refer to a wall that separates Broderick from a housing development called the Rivers as the “Great Wall of Divide.”

“What we’ve learned is you follow the money,” said Rebecca Sandoval, a Sacramento activist who has organized injunction opponents. “Wherever the developers go, up comes an injunction.”

Reisig, the county prosecutor, said development had nothing to do with the suit he filed in December 2004. It called the Broderick Boys the city’s “most powerful criminal street gang,” with 350 members acting in packs to deal drugs, rob and assault.

While Jeff Reisig, a Yolo County prosecutor, denies that this is the case (and in his mind it may not have been a factor in his conscious thinking when he was filing these injunctions) most of the time the communities that are effected by such police actions and “innovative” crime deterrents are communities that have a low socio-economic status and are communities that are predominately made up of people of color.

“It’s absolutely worked,” said Jeff Reisig, the Yolo County prosecutor who sought the injunction before his successful run this year to become district attorney. “The fact that San Francisco has decided to pursue a gang injunction is telling. This works, and it’s legal.”

Taking a break from his custodial job at a West Sacramento elementary school, Danny Velez, 56, said the injunction hurt his son, even though the 15-year-old has nothing to do with the Norteños.

“Ever since this injunction, it’s been pure hell to raise a son. They’ve been profiled and segregated,” Velez said of young Latinos. “He’s constantly harassed about whether he’s in a gang, by teachers and by police.”

Danny Velez’s son is being targeted because he is Latino and because he is young. While these injunctions may “work” they are adversely effecting young people of color. All one needs to do is put one’s self in another one’s shoes. How would you feel if you were constantly profiled everyday by people around you and people in authority just because of the color of your skin? Also, one has to ask: Why are so many young Latinos being caught up in gangs? Why are many of the crimes in West Sacramento and other lower class areas being perpetrated by people of color? Why is there so much violence in communities that are of low socio-economic status? Etc. Also, while these injunctions may work the Chronicle writes:

Whether the injunction has made the community safer is difficult to determine. Yolo County Public Defender Barry Melton said the strategy has worked “to some degree. But if I imposed a curfew in the Tenderloin, crime would go down there, too. It’s been used more than anything else for monitoring, to stop folks and control them.”

Farmer said crime is down in Broderick but said he could not give statistics. Reisig said violent crime prosecutions of Broderick Norteños dropped 80 percent in the year after the injunction.

Reisig said he has prosecuted more than 75 violations of the injunction; one person served 90 days. Melton said two fathers were detained for attending the same youth baseball game, an account Farmer called inaccurate.

I view this as targeting people of color and just another way the government (city, county, state, or federal) targets people of low income and people of color. The Chronicle ends its story with this:

Police and opponents disagree on whether officers are honoring the injunction’s exceptions for school and church, or traveling to legitimate business and entertainment activities at night.

Standing outside his apartment with family members on a recent afternoon, Sanchez said the injunction was not reforming Norteños. He suggested, though, that it might have some benefit for West Sacramento.

“Hell no, people are just getting smarter,” he said. “They’re taking it to Sacramento.”

His 17-year-old brother, Angel — who sipped from a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor — and his sister’s fiance, Jesse Contreras Jr., 20, each said they had been served with papers.

“How can I provide for my family?” asked Contreras, a warehouseman whose fiancee is seven months pregnant. “What if we run out of diapers at 11 at night and I have to go to the store?”

Each said it was hard for young men to avoid Norteño membership when, in Contreras’ words, “it’s all around you. It’s never OK to bang, but you grow up in it.”

By continuing to identify themselves as Norteños, they said, they were not admitting to being involved in crime.

“You’re still where you’re from,” said Contreras, who wore a striped red polo shirt common among Norteños, “but you’re not acting stupid anymore.”

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Hispanic Muslim