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Police planted drugs and guns on blacks for decades
Topic Started: Dec 3 2015, 02:14 AM (974 Views)
U Thant
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reddgirl64
Dec 3 2015, 04:33 PM
I like Canada, they screen..
Yep. And they also..

hate darkskinned-NI99ERS far, LESS, than their neighbors to the south.

Which is why I set shop there many moons ago and, which also means, lightskinned-racist fucclumps like you have LESS unfair undeserved White privilege to lean on.

I have proof, let me know if you need links to anything you need to know about T-Dot. You lil' racist ragdoll.
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Zechariah
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reddgirl64
Dec 3 2015, 02:57 PM
Zechariah
Dec 3 2015, 01:17 PM
reddgirl64
Dec 3 2015, 12:52 PM
Zechariah
Dec 3 2015, 12:27 PM
I don't know why Negros have such a hard time coming to grips with how hated they are in America. :'(
Where do you go in the world, where they are loved?

It's not just an America issue. Browns and blacks must learn to love who they are, before seeking others to love or accept them.

America is predominately white, always has been, probably always will be. They don't have to like, love or care for blacks, if they wanted, they could wipe us out, with no help or assistance from our brown/blacks brethren..

Would you advocating american blacks, move to Israel?
You're absolutely right, our people are universally hated. No I wouldn't advocate moving to Israel, it's not for everyone. However, I would sincerely search out alternatives to America. There are so many articles out there (just plug in "Americans leaving America" in your search engine) relating to whites who understand that an alternative is necessary and they're taking advantage of it. I know I'll hear arguments, but I'll say it anyway, America is a sinking ship, and it's time to get off. Many blacks have and continue to leave America. Do they know something that you don't? Just something to think about sister.
I've read stories of citizens leaving this country. Their reasons usually have to do with, the country is going down, because it's allowing others (blacks/browns) to have the same rights, as them, regulations, and taxes. I haven't read, where a lot of blacks are leaving.

I've considered leaving, Canada is on my radar..

This is a white country, Zechariah, blacks were never figured into the equation. The 'democracy' facade is fading, too many people now. I don't think whites are smarter than us, however the do plan for down the road.

This 'sinking' of America is some time off. Right now, Asia needs us to stay afloat.

There is ample evidence of blacks getting the hell out, some examples:

The Next Great Migration

By THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMSFEB. 27, 2015

PARIS — AT dinner last summer with my brother-in-law, a grandson of Jews who fled Algeria for France, the conversation turned to the rash of anti-Semitic incidents plaguing the country. At such times, the question inevitably arises in the minds of many Jews: “Where could we go?” He mentioned Tel Aviv, London and New York, but the location mattered less than the reassurance that departure remained an option. He’s not alone in this thinking: 7,000 French Jews emigrated in 2014.

Over the past year, as I watched with outrage at the dizzying spate of unpunished extrajudicial police killings of black men and women across America, I’ve wondered why more black Americans don’t think similarly. Why shouldn’t more of us weigh expatriation, even if only temporary, as a viable means of securing those lofty yet elusive ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Blacks leaving America in search of equality is not new. The practice dates from at least antebellum Louisiana, when free mulattoes in New Orleans sent their children to France to live in accordance with their means and not their color. It continued after World War II, when a number of black G.I.s, artists and jazzmen shared Richard Wright’s sentiment that there is “more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America.”

Today, that might sound hyperbolic — enormous gains have been made in America at every social level, and many blacks live as well as one can reasonably hope to anywhere. Yet we are consistently reminded of how tenuous this progress can be; how possible it still is to be humiliated on the front porch or cut down in Walmart by an officer who will never be held to account.

Watching what happened in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island and knowing that blacks are 21 times more likely than whites to be shot by the police constitute a heavy psychological tax. Freedom — and more broadly speaking, basic well-being — are relative goods. I lament that Paris can be a threatening space for Jews, Roma, Africans and Arabs, but the truth is, as a black American, I’ve never felt safer or less harassed anywhere. It’s difficult to exaggerate the existential boon of shedding one’s victimhood.

Of course there is no black Zion with a head of state urging the diaspora to return. But there have been movements for mass migration before, most notably Marcus Garvey’s early 20th-century Universal Negro Improvement Association, and its quixotic mission — based on the position that America would never grant blacks a fair shake — to forge a global black economy and create settlements for Americans in Africa by transporting blacks back to Africa by ship. W.E.B. Du Bois, a global citizen who was educated at the University of Berlin and later went into exile in Ghana, argued that Garvey’s plan to “unite Negrodom by a line of steamships was a brilliant suggestion and Garvey’s only original contribution to the race problem.” Garvey’s Black Star Line collapsed in 1921. It was a business catastrophe that swallowed many families’ savings, but it remains a potent symbol of exodus.

A realistic program of black expatriation today would start with appreciating the huge potential of cheap flights and Internet hyperconnectivity. And it would be tempered by a healthy skepticism toward the idea of finding utopia anywhere. It would focus instead on the strength and adaptability of individuals and the social networks they can create by integrating into societies that allow black expats the status — still too often denied in America — of being treated first and foremost as Americans and not as blacks.

Consider my friend Gerard from Queens. As with many black Americans, European vacations weren’t part of his upbringing. Last year, he left New York for a new job in London. When I called him to compare impressions of life abroad, he confessed, “The race situation back home occupies so much space in your mind, even just safety-wise, I actually never fully understood what it meant to be American, and all the advantages that come with it, until now.” There are subtler satisfactions, too: “You immediately remove that affirmative action target from your back. A work visa gives you the validation that you’re good at what you do.”

Certainly not everyone can just pick up and go, nor is expatriation a panacea for all that afflicts black America. But at a time when middle-class blacks remain unemployed at twice the rate of whites, and black college graduates have the same chance of being hired as high school-educated whites, the economic case for staying put is not airtight.One solution would be to increase applications by black students to foreign undergraduate and graduate programs. Years ago, I worked briefly as a consultant for Sciences-Po, one of Paris’s famed grandes écoles, encouraging American high school students and their parents to pursue an English-language education abroad. Sciences-Po was an attractive offer for anyone — a world-class degree and alumni network for less than $2,500 a year. It should have been particularly appealing to blacks since, as Bloomberg recently reported, blacks rely far more on student loans and are less likely to pay off debts after graduation. Studying abroad would sharply decrease this burden (my alma mater, Georgetown, now costs a staggering $65,000 a year), and also provide an entree into expansive new job — and marriage — markets, too.

Yet it’s a strategy that is severely underused. I don’t think I convinced a single black student to attend Sciences-Po. And even though 15 percent of American postsecondary students are black, we account for only about 5 percent of those who study abroad. This is a shame.

Many blacks dismiss expatriation as a luxury reserved for those with economic and social capital. But if “black lives matter” genuinely, then we must recognize minority individuality: Black people should pursue their own opportunities for the good life wherever they can. Yes, we hold an intrinsic stake in America and shouldn’t abandon lightly a homeland that is ours by right of birth and by dint of blood, sweat and hard labor. But if this stake remains unrecognized or unredeemable, its value is dubious.

A couple of years ago, leaving a restaurant near the Louvre, I held the door for a black man in a camel overcoat. Only as he passed did I realize it was the rapper Kanye West. Whatever one thinks of him, Mr. West has become the most prominent black American man to pursue his interests outside of America — a valuable model of blackness untethered to geography. What struck me most that night was precisely how much his demeanor resembled that of a college student on study abroad — still thrilled by the heady mix of anonymity and authority over his own identity that James Baldwin once called “the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself.”

A powerful way to sidestep America’s reluctance to become postracial would be for more black Americans to become postnational.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of “Losing My Cool: Love, Literature and a Black Man’s Escape From the Crowd.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/opinion/sunday/the-next-great-migration.html
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5 Places Black People Can Move to When They’ve Had Enough of America

There are plenty of options all over the globe that go beyond the traditional spots in Europe.

By: Tomika Anderson

Posted: July 14 2015 3:00 AM



Chris Rock summed up the black experience in the United States kind of perfectly during his HBO special Never Scared more than a decade ago: “If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different,” he joked, stone-faced. “You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college but who molested you.”

Since then, that “generous” uncle has moved from molesting to killing, with the list of victims growing by the day: the Charleston 9. Freddie Gray. Michael Brown. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Yuvette Henderson. Trayvon Martin.

Now, with only seconds left on the clock for that one person inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to consistently fight for some critical black issues—from universal health care and clemency for nonviolent drug offenders to the overall improvement of black male lives—pre-election jitters might be setting in, and some African Americans may want out.

But where do you move outside the good ol’ U.S. of A. to fulfill the type of vision you have for yourself and your family, where you can be as black as you want to be without fearing for your safety? Where, literally on earth, can you go and maintain—or even enhance—the kind of lifestyle you’re accustomed to, from robust career opportunities to world-class health care?

Turns out that the options—give or take a potential visa drama or two—have expanded far beyond traditional European go-to spots, like London and Paris. We hollered at our friends over at the Nomadness Travel Tribe (their Facebook page has become a hub for black expats) to come up with a list of five destinations black people can escape to if America doesn’t work out.

Please note, however: No country is an across-the-board utopia, particularly as it pertains to race, and each expat experience is ultimately an individual one. The following is a roundup of places beyond the U.S. and the rest of the world’s 17 largest African Diaspora locations (e.g., Brazil, Cuba and most of the Caribbean) that generally score high points among our melanin-enhanced brothers and sisters, in no particular order.

1. Thailand

It’s not hard to feel right at home in Thailand. From its beautiful, tropical weather; low cost of living (in Chiang Mai, a rented two-bedroom home goes for about $500 a month); and access to high-quality medical care (in Ko Samui, it’s just $20 for a basic doctor’s visit), it’s altogether possible for the investment-minded among us to maintain residences in the heart of Southeast Asia as well as back at home.

Plus, the Thai come by their reputation for being among the world’s kindest people honestly; as a majority-Buddhist country, their literal attitude is to be kind always. This means that outside of the occasional, innocent staring (depending on how far beyond touristy areas like Bangkok or Phuket you travel), African Americans generally report receiving the red-carpet treatment (although plenty of African immigrants, who tend to work in large numbers there, report otherwise).

2. Costa Rica

Your stateside relatives can visit often (which may or may not be a good thing) if you adopt this Central American nation—just a three-hour plane ride from Florida—as your new home. With its perfect tropical weather, universal health care and consistently high marks among Latin American countries on the Human Development Index (pdf), Costa Rica has jumped in popularity for American expats overall within the past 10 years. Other pluses: its stable economy, low cost of living, strong middle class and robust diplomatic relations with the U.S. Add to this few reported natural disasters, low rates of violent crime (theft and credit card fraud are traditionally its biggest crime problems), a great mix of urban and rural areas, and the much-raved-about jungle and beach life, and you’ve got a virtual paradise.

This is particularly the case for telecommuting entrepreneurs and English teachers. “I love the vibe and I love speaking Spanish,” reports one Tribe member of the country’s primary language. “The cost of living is low, and I could afford to live in a house on the beach and just chill.”

3. New Zealand

An African-American couple currently raising their 2-year-old outside Wellington, the capital city of Australia’s gorgeous southeastern neighbor, reports, “We chose not to raise him in the USA for a myriad of reasons—the safety of our African-American child, the inconsistent quality of education there and other factors. New Zealand was a perfect place for us. The country was rated the fourth safest in the world, the public schools consistently rank in the top 10 in the world, violent crime is low—like, there was one murder in our town in the last eight years. Also, we have not experienced anything significant as far as racism. We feel welcome, supported and like true members of the community.”

4. Hong Kong

If you’ve ever given serious thought to chucking the deuces to your 9-to-5 and moving abroad to work in high-impact industries like finance or lower-impact industries like teaching (English), you already know we roll deep in the Pearl of the Orient. There are roughly 60,000 Americans living in Hong Kong, an estimated 10,000 of them black, according to an African-American expat who lives and works there. If you’re like most black people and don’t know Cantonese, you’re in luck—English is also an official language. One long-term black expat couple were so smitten by H.K.—and eager to educate curious natives about African-American culture and achievements—that they launched International Black History Month there earlier this year.

5. Dubai

If you follow tourism trends, you know that Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, is literally and figuratively hot right now, especially among people of color. With foreigners making up 71 percent of the city’s population, it’s nice to live somewhere “that is not ruled by white men,” exclaims one black expat. This has a huge impact on how black folks are treated. “You’ll find people of all races here to be quite humble,” she says of the most liberal of the Arab emirates, although American women should still expect to cover up inside the UAE, a majority-Muslim country. Plus, because it is by all accounts a young country, there is an unending list of services, goods and expertise needed there, opening itself up nicely to African-American professionals and entrepreneurs alike.

Tomika Anderson is a freelance writer, editor, producer and military brat who has traveled to 36 countries and counting. Follow her on Twitter.

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2015/07/_5_places_black_people_can_move_to_when_they_ve_had_enough_of_america.html
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Why I Am Glad I Am Leaving America

America's racial frictions seem certain to spark another summer of conflict.

By Gary Younge / The Guardian
July 1, 2015

For the past couple of years the summers, like hurricanes, have had names. Not single names like Katrina or Floyd – but full names like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown. Like hurricanes, their arrival was both predictable and predicted, and yet somehow, when they landed, the effect was still shocking.
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We do not yet know the name that will be attached to this particular season. He is still out there, playing Call of Duty, finding a way to feed his family or working to pay off his student loans. He (and it probably will be a he) has no idea that his days are numbered; and we have no idea what the number of those days will be.

The precise alchemy that makes one particular death politically totemic while others go unmourned beyond their families and communities is not quite clear. Video helps, but is not essential. Some footage of cops rolling up like death squads and effectively executing people who posed no real threat has barely pricked the popular imagination. When the authorities fail to heed community outrage, or substantively investigate, let alone discipline, the police, the situation can become explosive. An underlying, ongoing tension between authorities and those being policed has been a factor in some cases. So, we do not know quite why his death will capture the political imagination in a way that others will not.

But we do know, with gruesome certainty, that his number will come up – that one day he will be slain in cold blood by a policeman (once again it probably will be a man) who is supposed to protect him and his community. We know this because it is statistically inevitable and has historical precedent. We know this because we have seen it happen again and again. We know this because this is not just how America works; it is how America was built. Like a hurricane, we know it is coming – we just do not yet know where or when or how much damage it will do.

Summer is riot season. It’s when Watts, Newark and Detroit erupted in violence in the 1960s, sparked by callous policing. It’s when school is out, pool parties are on and domestic life, particularly in urban centres, is turned inside-out: from the living room to the stoop, from the couch to the street. It’s when tempers get short and resentments bubble up like molten asphalt. It’s when, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, deferred dreams explode.

This is not my desire; it is my prediction. You can feel it building with every new Facebook post, viral video and Twitter storm. You can hear it from conversations with strangers at post offices, liquor stores and coffee shops. It is an unpleasant prediction to make because, ultimately, these riots highlight a problem they cannot, in themselves, solve; and it is an easy one to make because, as one bystander in Baltimore put it when disturbances flared there earlier this year: “You can only put so much into a pressure cooker before it pop.”

This is the summer I will leave America, after 12 years as a foreign correspondent, and return to London. My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney.

But while the events of the last few years did not prompt the decision to come back, they do make me relieved that the decision had already been made. It is why I have not once had second thoughts.If I had to pick a summer to leave, this would be the one. Another season of black parents grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless anchors opining. Another season when America has to be reminded that black lives matter because black deaths at the hands of the state have been accepted as routine for so long. A summer ripe for rage.

* * *

I arrived in New York just a few months before the Iraq war. Americans seemed either angry at the rest of the world, angry at each other, or both. The top five books on the New York Times bestseller list the month I started were: Bush at War (Bob Woodward’s hagiographic account of the post-9/11 White House); The Right Man (Bush’s former speechwriter relives his first year in the White House); Portrait of a Killer (Patricia Cornwell on Jack the Ripper); The Savage Nation (a rightwing radio talkshow host saves America from “the liberal assault on our borders, language and culture”); and Leadership (Republican former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s post 9/11 victory lap).

There has barely been a quiet moment since. First there was the jingoism of the Iraq war, then the re-election of George W Bush in 2004, Hurricane Katrina, disillusionment with the Iraq war, the “Minutemen” anti-immigration vigilantes, the huge pro-immigrant “¡Sí se puede!” protests, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, the economic crash, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, Obama’s reelection and the current rise in anti-racist activism. Being a foreigner made all these phenomena intriguing. Politically and morally, I picked sides. But, when reporting, it was more like anthropology. I saw it as my mission to try and understand the US: why did poor white people vote against their economic interests? How did the descendants of immigrants become xenophobic? Why were people disappointed in Obama when he had promised so little? The search for the answer was illuminating, even when I never found it or didn’t like it.

But the cultural distance I enjoyed as a Briton in a foreign country felt like a blended veneer of invincibility and invisibility. I thought of myself less as a participant than an onlooker. While reporting from rural Mississippi in 2003, I stopped to ask directions at the house of an old white couple, and they threatened to shoot me. I thought this was funny. I got back into my car sharpish and drove off – but I never once thought they would actually shoot me. How crazy would that be? When I got home, I told my wife and brother-in-law, who are African American. Their parents grew up in the South under segregation; even today, my mother-in-law wouldn’t stop her car in Mississippi for anything but petrol. They didn’t think it was funny at all: what on earth did I think I was doing, stopping to ask old white folk in rural Mississippi for directions?

Yet, somewhere along the way, I became invested. That was partly about time: as I came to know people – rather than just interviewing them – I came to relate to the issues more intimately. When someone close to you struggles with chronic pain because they have no healthcare, has their kitchen window pierced by gunfire or cannot pay a visit to their home country because they are undocumented, your relationship to issues like health reform, gun control or immigration is transformed. Not because your views change but because knowing and understanding something simply does not provide the same intensity as having it in your life.

But my investment was primarily about circumstances. On the weekend in 2007 that Barack Obama declared his presidential candidacy, our son was born. Six years later, we had a daughter. For the most part I have kept my English accent. But my language relating to children is reflexively American: diapers, strollers, pacifiers, recess, candy and long pants. I have only ever been a parent here – a role for which my own upbringing in England provides no real reference point. One summer evening, a couple years after we moved to Chicago, our daughter was struggling to settle down and so my wife decided to take a short walk to the local supermarket to bob her to sleep in the carrier. On the way back there was shooting in the street and she had to seek shelter in a local barbershop. When the snow finally melted this year one discarded gun was found in the alley behind our local park and another showed up in the alley behind my son’s school. My days of being an onlooker were over. I was dealing with daycare, summer camps, schools, doctor’s visits, parks and other parents. The day we brought my son home, an article in the New York Times pointed out that in America “a black male who drops out of high school is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than one with a bachelor’s degree”. Previously, I’d have found that interesting and troubling. Now it was personal. I had skin in the game. Black skin in a game where the odds are stacked against it.

* * *

Obama’s ascent, I was told by many and frequently during his campaign, would change these odds. Whenever I asked “How?” no one could say exactly. But his very presence, they insisted, would provide a marker for my son and all who look like him. I never believed that. First of all, one person cannot undo centuries of discrimination, no matter how much nominal power they have. Second, given the institutions into which Obama would be embedded – namely the Democratic party and the presidency – there would only ever be so much he could or would do. He was aspiring to sit atop a system awash with corporate donations in which congressional seats are openly gerrymandered and 41% of the upper chamber can block almost anything. He was the most progressive candidate viable for the presidency, which says a great deal, given the alternatives, but means very little, given what would be needed to significantly shift the dial on such issues as race and inequality.

Pointing this out amid the hoopla of his candidacy made you sound like Eeyore. I was delighted when he won. But somehow I could never be quite as delighted as some people felt I should have been. When Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary – in the first southern state to secede from the union, which sparked the civil war, where the Confederate flag still flies above the state capitol and a white supremacist recently gunned down nine parishioners at a black church – the crowds chanted “Race Doesn’t Matter”. (An odd rallying cry, since it was precisely because he was a black candidate that they were shouting it; it’s not like Hillary’s crowd would have shouted the same thing if she had won.)

The symbolic advantages of Obama’s election were clear. For two years I pushed my son around in his stroller surrounded by a picture of a black man framed by the words “Hope” and “Change”. A year or so after Obama came to office, my son had a playdate with a four-year-old white friend who looked up from his Thomas the Tank Engine and told my son: “You’re black.” It was a reasonable thing for a child of that age to point out – he was noticing difference, not race. But when my son looked at me for a cue, I now had a new arrow in my quiver to deflect any potential awkwardness. “That’s right,” I said. “Just like the president.”

But the substantial benefits were elusive. Obama inherited an economic crisis that hurt African Americans more than any other community. The discrepancy between black and white employment and wealth grew during his first few years and has barely narrowed since. In 2010, I used this anecdote in a column by way of pointing out the limited symbolic value of having a black president. “True, it is something,”I wrote. “But when Thomas is safely back in the station and the moment is over, it is not very much. Because for all the white noise emanating from the Tea Party movement, it has been black Americans who have suffered most since Obama took office. Over the last 14 months the gap between my son’s life chances and his friend’s have been widening.”

This last statement was as undeniably true as it was apparently controversial. I had not claimed that my son was likely to do badly, simply that his odds for success were far worse than the kid he was playing with, and that they were further deteriorating. A study in 2014 found that a black college student has the same chances of getting a job as a white high-school dropout. “As the recession has dragged on,” the New York Times pointed out just a couple months before my son’s playdate, the disparity between black and white unemployment “has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field – in fact, it appears to have made it more uneven.” But insisting that racism would have a material effect on my son’s life ruffled some readers’ feathers.

“Nonsense,” wrote one commenter. “Your middle-class status means his future will have more in common with his white friends than any poor black kid.” Another – a Guardian contributor, no less – also chimed in: “For you to claim shared victimhood on skin colour alone is highly disingenuous. Your son is highly likely to do OK, to say the least. He has most of the advantages in the world.”

Such responses betrayed complete ignorance about the lived experience of race in a country as segregated as the United States. Class does makes a big difference, of course: this is America. We have healthcare, jobs, university educations and a car; we live in a community with reasonable schools, supermarkets and restaurants. In short, we have resources and therefore we have options.

We do not, however, have the option not to be black. And in this time and this place that is no minor factor. That is not “claiming shared victimhood”, it is recognising a fact of life. Class offers a range of privileges; but it is not a sealant that protects you from everything else. If it was, rich women would never get raped and wealthy gay couples could marry all around the world.

To even try to have the kind of gilded black life to which these detractors alluded, we would have to do far more than just revel in our bank accounts and leverage our cultural capital. We would have to live in an area with few other black people, since black neighbourhoods are policed with insufficient respect for life or liberty; send our children to a school with few other black students, since majority-black schools are underfunded; tell them not to wear anything that would associate them with black culture, since doing so would make them more vulnerable to profiling; tell them not to mix with other black children, since they are likely to live in the very areas and go to the very schools from which we would be trying to escape; and not let the children go out after dark, since being young and black after sunset makes the police suspect that you have done or are about to do something.

The list could go on. None of this self-loathing behaviour would provide any guarantees, of course. Racism does what it says on the packet; it discriminates against people on the grounds of race. It can be as arbitrary in its choice of victim as it is systemic in its execution. And while it never works alone (but in concert with class, gender and a host of other rogue characters), it can operate independently. No one is going to be checking my bank account or professional status when they are looking at my kids.

Trayvon Martin was walking through a gated community when George Zimmerman pegged him for a thug and shot him dead. Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator, was in one of Charleston’s most impressive churches when Dylann Roof murdered him and eight others.

I have not only never met an African American who thought they could buy themselves the advantages of a white American; I have yet to meet one who thinks they can even buy themselves out of the disadvantages of being black. All you can do is limit the odds. And when one in three black boys born in 2001 is destined for the prison system, those odds are pretty bad. Having a black man in the White House has not changed that.

* * *

Most days, the park closest to us looks like Sesame Street. White, black and Vietnamese American kids climbing, swinging and sliding. Occasionally, particularly late on weekday afternoons, teenagers show up. Like adolescents the western world over, they are bored, broke, horny and lost. They don’t want to stay at home, but can’t afford to be anywhere that costs money, and so they come to the public space most approximate to their needs, where they squeeze into swings that are meant for smaller kids and joke, flirt and banter. Very occasionally they swear and get a little rowdy – but nothing that an adult could not deal with by simply asking them to keep the language down because there are little kids around. Oh, and in this park the teenagers are usually black.

Their presence certainly changes the mood. But the only time it ever really gets tense is when the police come. The better police chat with them, the worse ones interrogate them. Either way, the presence of armed, uniformed people in this children’s space is both unsettling and unnecessary. The smaller kids and those new to the park imagine something seriously wrong must have happened for the police to be there; the older ones (by which I mean those aged seven and over), and those who are already familiar with the drill just shrug: the cops are in our park again. It is difficult to tell which response is worse.

Once, when some adolescents were hanging out relatively quietly one afternoon, I struck up a conversation with a white woman. Her son was roughly the same age as mine, we both lived nearby and neither of our kids would have to cross a road to get to the park. We were discussing at what age we thought it would be appropriate to let our boys come by themselves. “The thing is, you just don’t know if it’s going to be quiet or if the junior gangbangers are going to be hanging around,” she said, gesturing to the youths on the swings.

I was stunned. Whenever I have written about police killings at least one reader reminds me that black people are most likely to be killed by black people. This is both true and irrelevant. First, because all Americans are overwhelmingly likely to be killed by assailants of their own race, so what some brand “black-on-black crime” should, more accurately, just be called crime. But also because black people are not, by dint of their melanin content, entrusted to protect and serve the public. The police are. Over the last decade I have reported from many impoverished neighbourhoods, populated by all races, where I have felt unsafe. That hasn’t made me fear black people or any other racial group; it has just made me loathe poverty and gun culture in general, since it is that toxic combination that both drives the crime and makes it lethal.

This woman and I were looking at the same kids but seeing quite different things.

“What makes you think they’re going to become gangbangers?” I asked. She shrugged. The conversation pretty much dried up after that.

There is a section of white society – a broad section that includes affable mothers who will speak to black strangers like me in the park – who understand black kids as an inherent threat. Beyond the segregated ghettos where few white people venture, the presence of black youth apparently marks not just the potential for trouble but the arrival of it. When George Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin, he didn’t see a 17-year-old boy walking home from the store. He saw someone “real suspicious”, “up to no good”, whom he assumed bore some responsibility for recent burglaries.

“Fucking punks,” he told the police, referring to Trayvon. “These assholes, they always get away.”

Indeed black children are often not even regarded as children at all. In Goose Creek, South Carolina, police demanded DNA samples from two middle school students after they were mistaken for a 32-year-old suspect. After the killing of Tamir Rice – the 12-year-old shot dead by police in Cleveland after someone reported him brandishing what they assumed was a “probably fake” gun – a police spokesman said it was his own fault. “Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5ft 7in, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body.” When testifying before the grand jury into the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Darren Wilson described his assailant more like an animal than a 18-year-old: “He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” Even after Wilson shot Brown he continued to depict him as both physically superhuman and emotionally subhuman. “He was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”

The evidence is not merely anecdotal. A study last year published in the American Psychological Association’s online Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed that white Americans overestimated the age of black boys over the age of 10 by an average of four and a half years; white respondents also assumed that black children were more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes. “Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” wrote Phillip Atiba Goff PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles.“Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.” My son is tall for his age; these are the things you worry about.

It wasn’t long before my wife and I began to notice the degree to which some white adults felt entitled to shout at black children – be it in the street, or on school trips – for infractions either minor or imagined.

Last summer, on the afternoon I arrived home from reporting on the disturbances after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, there was a barbecue and music at the local park. I took the kids. The park has a water feature that shoots wet jets from the ground and sprays kids in fountains from all sides as they paddle around. The younger ones peel down to their underwear while the older ones just pile in whatever they have on. It was a scorching day and my son and several other kids were having a water fight – a tame affair with very little collateral damage for those not involved beyond the odd sprinkling. At one stage, while in hot pursuit of his main rival, my son splashed a woman on her leg. She yelled at him as though he’d hit her with a brick.

I’d seen the whole thing and ran over.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“Look. He’s covered me in water,” she shouted.

I looked. She was barely wet. But even if he had …

“You’re standing in a children’s park, on a hot day, next to a water feature,” I said. “Deal with it. Just stop shouting at him.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she barked.

“Now you’re shouting at me,” I said. “Just stop it.”

“Who the hell are you?” she yelled.

“I’m his dad that’s who.”

“You’re nobody, that’s who you are,” she bellowed. “Nobody.”

* * *

One of the first stories I covered on my arrival was the funeral of Mamie Till Mobley, the 81-year-old mother of the late Emmett Till. In 1955 Mamie sent her 14-year-old son, Emmett, from Chicago to rural Mississippi to spend his summer holiday with family. She packed him off with a warning: “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past,” she told him, “do it willingly.”

Emmett didn’t follow her advice. While in the small town of Money, in the Delta region, he either said “Bye, baby” or wolf-whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. Three days later his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie river with a bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out and his forehead crushed on one side.

Raising a black child in a racist society poses a very particular set of challenges. On the one hand, you want them to be proud and confident of who they are. On the other, you have to teach them that they are vulnerable precisely because of who they are, in the knowledge that awareness of that vulnerability just might save their life. We are trying to raise self-confident children for long lives, not hashtags for slaughter.

Explaining the complex historical and social forces that make such a dance necessary is not easy at the best of times. Making them comprehensible to a child is nigh impossible without gross simplifications and cutting corners. Once, during our 10-minute walk to daycare, my son asked if we could take another route. “Why?” I asked.

“Because that way they stop all the black boys,” he said.

He was right. Roughly twice a week we would pass young black men being frisked or arrested, usually on the way home. He was also four, and until that point I was not aware that he had even noticed. I tried to make him feel safe.

“Well don’t worry. You’re with me and they’re not going to stop us,” I told him.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because we haven’t done anything,” I said.

“What have they done?” he asked.

He had me. From then on we took another route.

When I interviewed Maya Angelou in 2002, she told me that the September 11 attacks of the previous year were understood differently by African Americans. “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America,” she said. “But black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.” It is that state of terror that has been laid bare these last few years.

The American polity and media episodically “discovers” this daily reality in much the same way that teenagers discover sex – urgently, earnestly, voraciously and carelessly, with great self-indulgence but precious little self-awareness. They have always been aware of it but somehow when confronted with it, it nonetheless takes them by surprise.

The week I arrived, in December 2002, the Senate minority leader, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, resigned from his leadership position after he said in a speech that America would have been a better place had the segregationist Strom Thurmond won the presidency in 1948. The mainstream media saw nothing outrageous in this – as if it was just the kind of thing a conservative southern senator might say. It took bloggers to make it a story. As I write, some southern states are debating whether to keep the Confederate flag flying on state grounds in various guises – as though it took nine people dying on their doorstep to understand its racist connotations.

It is as though the centuries-old narrative of racial inequality is too tiresome to acknowledge, except as a footnote, until it appears in dramatic fashion, as it did after Hurricane Katrina or the protests in Ferguson. At that point the bored become suddenly scandalised. In a nation that prides itself on always moving forward, the notion that they are “still dealing with this” feels like an affront to the national character. That’s why Obama’s candidacy had such a simple and uplifting appeal to so many Americans. As the radical academic and 1970s icon Angela Davis explained to me in 2007, it represented “a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change”.

This most recent episode of racial awakening has lasted longer than most. For the last couple of years the brutal banality of daily life for some people in this country has become visible and undeniable to those who have no immediate connection to it. But nothing new has happened. There has been no spike in police brutality. What’s new is that people are looking. And thanks to new technology (namely the democratisation of the ability to film and distribute), they have lots to look at. As a result, a significant section of white America is outraged at the sight of what it had previously chosen to ignore, while a dwindling but still sizeable and vocal few still refuse to believe their eyes.

* * *

I’ve never found it particularly useful to compare racisms – as though one manifestation might be better than another. Every society, regardless of its racial composition, has overlapping and interweaving hierarchies. Insisting on the superiority of one over another suggests there are racisms out there worth having – a race to the bottom with no moral centre.

In June 1998, as the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence laid bare one of the more insidious examples of British racism, news arrived from Jasper, Texas, about the murder of James Byrd. Byrd, an African American, had been picked up by three men, one of whom he knew and two of whom were white supremacists. Instead of driving him home, they took him to a remote country road, beat him, urinated on him and chained him by his ankles to their pickup truck before dragging him for more than a mile until his head came off. Then they went for a barbecue.

The next day, during an editorial meeting at the Guardian which featured a discussion of the Lawrence inquiry followed by the Byrd murder, one of my colleagues remarked, of Byrd’s killing: “Well at least we don’t do that here.”

“That will be of little comfort to Doreen and Neville Lawrence,” I thought.

I have more cousins in the US than in Britain. They are doing fine. At one stage I fully intended to immigrate here. While that plan no longer stands, it still doesn’t strike me as insane.

While I have been in America, I have not been shot at, arrested, imprisoned or otherwise seriously inconvenienced by the state. I do not live in the hollowed out, jobless zones of urban economic despair to which many African Americans have been abandoned. I have been shouted at in a park, taken different routes to school, and occasionally dealt with bigoted officials. (While driving through Mississippi to cover Katrina I approached a roadblock that all the other journalists had easily passed through, only to have a policeman pat the gun in his holster and turn me around). These experiences are aggravating. They are not life-threatening.

I am not Michael Brown. But then Michael Brown wasn’t Michael Brown before he was shot dead and had his body left on the street for four hours; Eric Garner was just a man trying to sell cigarettes in the street before he was choked to death in Staten Island; Tamir Rice was just a boisterous kid acting out in a park before a policeman leaped out of his squad car and shot him within seconds. Being shot dead by the police or anyone else is not the daily experience of black people in America.

But what became clear following the Department of Justice report into the Ferguson police force was just how extreme and commonplace these aggravations could be. To cite just a few examples: between 2007 to 2014, one woman in Ferguson was arrested twice, spent six days in jail and paid $550 as a result of one parking ticket for which she was originally charged $151. She tried to pay in smaller instalments - $25 or $50 a time - but the court refused to accept anything less than the full payment, which she could not afford. Seven years after the original infraction she still owed $541 – this was how the town raised its revenue. It was not a glitch in the system; it was the system.

Then there was the 14-year-old boy that the Ferguson police found in an abandoned building, who was chased down by a dog that bit his ankle and his left arm as he protected his face. The boy says officers kicked him in the head and then laughed about it after. The officers say they thought he was armed; he wasn’t. Department of Justice investigators found that every time a police dog in Ferguson bit someone, the victim was black.

Then there was the man pulled out of his house by the police after reports of an altercation inside. As they dragged him out he told them: “You don’t have a reason to lock me up.”

“Nigger, I can find something to lock you up on,” the officer told him.

“Good luck with that,” the man responded. The officer slammed the man’s face into a wall and he fell to the floor.

“Don’t pass out, motherfucker, because I’m not carrying you to my car,” the officer is claimed to have said.

This was the same month Brown was killed. Were it not for the disturbances following Brown’s death, there would have been no investigation – not only would we have heard nothing of these things but, because no light had been shone on them, the Ferguson police would be carrying on with the same level of impunity. This was a small midwestern suburb few had heard of – unremarkable in every way, which is precisely what makes the goings on there noteworthy. If it was happening there, then it could be happening anywhere.

It is exhausting. When the videos of brutality go viral I can’t watch them unless I have to write about them. I don’t need to be shocked – which is just as well because these videos emerge with such regularity that they cease to be shocking. Were it not for the thrill of seeing an unjaded younger generation reviving the best of the nation’s traditions of anti-racist resistance, I would be in despair.

The altercations in the park, the rerouted walks to school, the aggravations of daily life are the lower end of a continuum – a dull drumbeat that occasionally crescendos into violent confrontation and even social conflagration. As spring turns to summer the volume keeps ratcheting up.

“Terror,” the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes in his book Fear of Small Numbers, “is first of all the terror of the next attack.” The terrorism resides not just in the fact that it happens, but that one is braced for the possibility that it could happen to you at any moment. Seven children and teenagers are shot on an average day in the US. I have just finished writing a book in which I take a random day and interview the families and friends of those who perished. Ten young people died the day I chose. Eight were black. All of the black parents said they had assumed this could happen to their son.

As one bereaved dad told me: “You wouldn’t be doing your job as a father if you didn’t.”

Gary Younge is a feature writer and columnist for the Guardian.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-i-am-glad-i-am-leaving-america
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Website Warns That Blacks May Have To Leave US When Obama’s Term Is Up

Brian Anderson
July 14, 2015

According to black website The Root, black people will not be safe when Obama leaves office at the end of his second term. Not only is America’s first black president the only thing that is keeping blacks from being murdered, they claim, but also he’s the only thing keeping them from being incarcerated. As such, the website recommends that blacks leave America and even gives a handy guide to “black-friendly” nations they can relocate to.

5 Places Black People Can Move to When They’ve Had Enough of America starts out by detailing what a miserable experience blacks have living in the United States:

Chris Rock summed up the black experience in the United States kind of perfectly during his HBO special Never Scared more than a decade ago: “If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different,” he joked, stone-faced. “You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college but who molested you.”

Since then, that “generous” uncle has moved from molesting to killing, with the list of victims growing by the day: the Charleston 9. Freddie Gray. Michael Brown. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Yuvette Henderson. Trayvon Martin.

Of those 17 black people who were killed, 9 were at the hands of a lunatic and 7 were determined to be justifiable homicides. The Freddie Gray case is still pending, but his accused murderer is black as are two of the accused co-conspirators. The inclusion of Yuvette Henderson is particularly ridiculous because she was killed after she attempted 3 armed carjackings and then pointed a gun at police.

Ignoring the 8-10,000 blacks killed every year by other blacks, the author has an even bigger reason why blacks should want to leave America:

Now, with only seconds left on the clock for that one person inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to consistently fight for some critical black issues—from universal health care and clemency for nonviolent drug offenders to the overall improvement of black male lives—pre-election jitters might be setting in, and some African Americans may want out.

Blacks have been hyper-critical of Obama because they say he has ignored them during his presidency. Also it should be noted that during his tenure race relations have deteriorated and the overall condition of black people in terms of wealth and opportunity has decreased at an alarming rate. I would think that blacks would be excited to get rid of Obama. It can only get better.

But where do you move outside the good ol’ U.S. of A. to fulfill the type of vision you have for yourself and your family, where you can be as black as you want to be without fearing for your safety? Where, literally on earth, can you go and maintain—or even enhance—the kind of lifestyle you’re accustomed to, from robust career opportunities to world-class health care?

If blacks have “robust career opportunities” and “world-class health care” what the hell are they complaining about?

Now here’s the really funny thing about this article: none of the countries the author recommends black people move to are black nations. There’s no Jamaica, Haiti, or any black-majority country in Africa. Instead, blacks are steered to Thailand, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Dubai. What about the Motherland?

Blacks always talk about how proud they are to be descended from Africans and how angry they are about being robbed of their culture and heritage. Why wouldn’t they want to move to Africa when they’ve had enough of America? Maybe because most of the continent is a disease-infested 3rd world hellhole in a constant state of violence and civil war?

Judging by this article, it would seem as if blacks don’t want to live around other blacks.

When whites move out of the city to escape crime and poverty it is called racism. When blacks don’t want to move to a place because of crime and poverty it is called empowerment. Ain’t the racial double-standard cool?

Follow Brian Anderson on Twitter

http://downtrend.com/71superb/website-warns-that-blacks-may-have-to-leave-us-when-obamas-term-is-up
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cisslybee2012
The REBEL
Zechariah
Dec 3 2015, 01:17 PM
reddgirl64
Dec 3 2015, 12:52 PM
Zechariah
Dec 3 2015, 12:27 PM
I don't know why Negros have such a hard time coming to grips with how hated they are in America. :'(
Where do you go in the world, where they are loved?

It's not just an America issue. Browns and blacks must learn to love who they are, before seeking others to love or accept them.

America is predominately white, always has been, probably always will be. They don't have to like, love or care for blacks, if they wanted, they could wipe us out, with no help or assistance from our brown/blacks brethren..

Would you advocating american blacks, move to Israel?
You're absolutely right, our people are universally hated. No I wouldn't advocate moving to Israel, it's not for everyone. However, I would sincerely search out alternatives to America. There are so many articles out there (just plug in "Americans leaving America" in your search engine) relating to whites who understand that an alternative is necessary and they're taking advantage of it. I know I'll hear arguments, but I'll say it anyway, America is a sinking ship, and it's time to get off. Many blacks have and continue to leave America. Do they know something that you don't? Just something to think about sister.
I can't see it.

I don't see America going anywhere anytime soon. :)
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Seeking Sanctuary

Why We Left

by Chaédria LaBouvier



“A powerful way to sidestep America’s reluctance to become post-racial would be for more Black Americans to become post national.” — Thomas Chatterton Williams

As 2015 already seems exhausting with regards to the frequency of police brutality, I’ve been having parallel conversations with a number of friends, mostly Black, about their holiday travels. Non-ironically, almost all of them went abroad. Between the friend who spent three weeks in Trinidad and Jamaica, the friend who went to Ghana for almost a month, and my own holiday in France, it was clear without having to be stated: the fatigue of American life has sent a number of my friends, particularly my Black friends, abroad.

Going out of the country is hardly newsworthy. Facebook is full of travelers, mostly childless Millennials flexing their international check-in muscles at hole-in-the-wall bistros across Europe and half-ruined Buddhist temples. A few friends are feeling thirsty and bohemian, trapezing across Southeast Asia; another friend is hiking across East Africa; a poet friend is planning her tour across South Africa. But the reasons my friends are travelling doesn’t quite split down a racial line — rather, race and class illuminate the fractured spaces. Ostensibly, my friends, irrespective of race, are travelling to get away from the ties that make life respectable but taxing. Everyone said, “I need a break,” but the subtext from my Black friends was screaming, “I needed to get out of the United States because I can not breathe.”

And then there are those who can neither breathe nor leave. The activists across the country who organize, who fight, who sacrifice, who make decisions like choosing between bus fare to protests and eating dinner — they can’t leave. Most Black Americans, when shit starts hitting the fan, the walls, etc. — they can’t leave. It’s not that they don’t want to. They too dream of lying on beaches of white sand and warm waters with their families. They too want to travel the world. They want to know what it’s like to mention places like the Louvre and the Tate with a casual boredom that happens when money, opportunity, and freedom have bred familiar contempt. Eric Garner was selling cigarette loosies (but not that day) because of a judicial and economic system that denied him more formal alternatives; the probability that he or Mike Brown or Kimani Gray could “just get away” is laughably and insultingly, low.

The end of 2014 was a traumatic period for lived Blackness; the miscarriages of justice for Clinton Allen, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner left me completely drained. Being Black at the end of 2014 left me with an overwhelming mix of anger and despair that can only be described as fighting with an opponent whose arms are so long it feels like air boxing. For many, “Black Lives Matter” reminded them how much their lives actually don’t. The paradoxes of Blackness in late 2014 were reconciling the love of a country that your Blackness has built, but that hates you. We left because of fatigue, because the arc is long and we are still so very young to be this exhausted. Anywhere but here was appealing. “Why are we even staying in a country that hates us?” someone asked me on Twitter. I couldn’t really answer that. I was conflicted. As much as I needed to go, I didn’t want to. I stalled looking for an Airbnb. I waited until the absolute last minute to renew my passport. I was late when contacting friends in Paris. I briefly wondered if I’d regret not booking a one-way ticket. I wasn’t even completely sure what I’d be writing about in Paris. I just knew that I wouldn’t be in the States. But I felt forced out.

I chose Paris because I like problems and paradoxes. I went knowing that Paris was not free; Paris has not been free since the Romans colonized and humiliated the Gauls, who never forgot it and in turn, colonized and brutalized Algeria, Morocco, Vietnam, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, and more. I knew better than most that racism in Paris can be acute, if not for African-Americans, most surely for the North Africans, whom I have been mistaken for on occasion. Paris has always loved African-Americans, even if French history itself has despised and exploited Blackness. As such, while New York was filled with protests through the holidays, I floated through Paris for nearly two weeks mostly unbothered, the assumption being until I opened my mouth that I was from Martinique or Guadalupe. The Martiniquaises and Guadeloupéens more or less, are people from island colonies in which their very racially mixed population are widely cited testaments to the alleged French commitment to racial mixing and thus, racial harmony. Even when my Americaness was revealed, it was not a problem for two reasons: one, I was African-American (the only Americans the French respect) and two, I would be leaving soon — but while I was there I was spending money, not like those other Black immigrants sponging off the French economy.Perhaps this is what White privilege feels like, I remember thinking. You can convince yourself that none of this is really about you. Should you even think that hard about it to begin with.

I failed this practice test of White privilege miserably and immediately. The protests that I left behind in the States had ignited passions in Paris; weeks before I arrived, activists took to the streets to protest the human zoo exhibit. Gross old Frenchmen suggestively raised their eyebrows and when they could, whispered loud enough, “café au lait.” I interviewed people of color in Paris about their experiences, which ranged from wanting to open a Black Panther Party chapter at the Sorbonne to forced indifference. The correct answer, had I passed this test, would have been to assign it all to Frenchness, to the lasciviousness of French men, to the complex colorblindness of French society that I, as a race-obsessed American, would never understand. But it seemed like a trick answer given how deeply French functions as a proxy for “White.”

I thought of another dear friend, who now lives in London with no immediate plans to return to the States. His words before he left always ring clear: “There’s no law that say that you have to make your home in the country you were born in. In fact, America was built on a whole mass of people that did exactly the opposite of that.” But I didn’t want to be French, or British, or even African for that matter. How could I be? I am so thoroughly American. And part of what makes me so deeply American is my Blackness. Blackness, as a concept of not Whiteness and a justification for exploitation, was put on the books in the Americas first, most notably in 1639 and 1705, though the slave trade had begun and been perfected by the Europeans.

If culture has always been America’s most valuable export, the fruits of Black labor are still its biggest and most lucrative. And since Blackness and subsequent racial constructs were first created, used, and exported to the rest of the Americas, Europe, and even Africa in order to justify the economic system of slavery, how, in my Blackness, could I be anything but American?

African-Americans, as it pertains to descendants of American slaves, have every logical reason to permanently leave the United States of America. African-Americans have also ingeniously employed every seemingly illogical reason to stay. Incredibly, many of them are returning to the lands of plantations, sharecropping, and lynching that just a generation or two ago sent their grandparents fleeing north as political refugees. If we were to look at this objectively, it is clear that African-Americans should consider their investment in America as sunk costs. The cultural capital of Black America would presumably travel wherever they go. Try elsewhere. Start over. But yet, African-Americans do not. Why they do not leave, collectively, I can’t answer. But I know why I cannot permanently leave. I have lived elsewhere, but it is here, to me, that the breadth of Black sorrow has become the most radiant form of life affirming brilliance — and it is addictive. Living while Black in America requires an intellectual and mental athleticism and finesse that has few peers. It is the startup of all startups. It is the ultimate marathon. Blackness demands from its cognizant participant a rigor and focus that can only produce majesty and mania. It is both heaven and hell. It is mercilessly reviled and hopelessly imitated. It is in short, a spiritual experience.

The reasons why we left are explicit and endless. The reasons why we returned are more complex, more paradoxical. Black America has consistently provided the moral compass and blueprint for a country in which its White faction has consistently, more or less, asked us to leave. And perhaps we would have left, if we knew that America — one of the brilliant masterpieces that Blackness has created, the thing which our soul, over centuries, has been given to and pillaged for — would be all right without us. Would you abandon your masterpiece? For a people denied property, rights, the opportunity to possess much less bequeath, America is what we own. It is our life’s work, our investment, our birthright, our trust fund. We are past the point of sunk costs, or even investments; it is a matter of ownership, stewardship. Our deeds and receipts are written in blood that still flows out of brutality and exploitation. And while America as a proxy for Whiteness has never thought to wonder this, many of us are more terrified of what America would become without us. Or perhaps it has. And it could be that the inability for Blackness to breathe is what America would feel too, if we left.

This post originally appeared as a part of Medium’s Human Parts collection.

http://fusion.net/story/109306/why-we-left/
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It’s time to admit that America will never really include black America

Last week, after watching another black man die at the hands of the New York City police, I can’t help but wonder whether there will ever be true equality for African Americans. The number of African Americans that have been victimized, murdered, terrorized, shot, and left for dead seems not just to be a legacy of some bloodstained Jim Crow past, but a part of a present moment that seems just as bleak. While there has been some progress, the narrative of the black experience in America feels remarkably static, as if it’s just shaken up, flipped, and twisted for a new generation.

It’s making me question whether America is truly the best place for African Americans.

I recently watched a film from the 1970s called Space is the Place. It’s about an African American leader who wants blacks to leave an oppressive America for a new land in outer space where blacks will have more agency and equal opportunities to thrive. On the surface, the movie is every form of ridiculousness you can imagine, with a slick-talking pimp, outrageous wardrobes, and a spaceship that looks like a pair of binoculars. But the heart of the film, the idea of mobility and liberation through migration is intriguing—and one that has been missing for nearly a century from our current dialogue about upward mobility and the state of black America.

Is it time to revisit?

I don’t have to repeat all of the ways in which black lives are challenged in America. You’ve heard all the statistics. Read about Trayvon, Jordan, and Emmett. Watched as the nation grieves for missing white girls, while the stories of 64,000 black and brown girls remain unheard. Look at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ piece on reparations or glance at some of the most recent reports about black life and you’ll find higher rates of unemployment, a larger wealth gap, more foreclosed homes and lower education rates. Last year the Washington Post found that “the economic disparities separating blacks and whites remain as wide as they were when marchers assembled on the Mall in 1963.”

1963!

But none of this is a surprise. Nowadays it seems as if the stagnant state of the black community has been normalized, accepted as part of a reality instead of a crisis that needs to be attacked as ferociously as one would a plague.

Perhaps, as the crazy film poses, leaving America is a legitimate path to mobility for black Americans. So why not attempt a new movement, right now, today, that expands our notion of mobility beyond the borders of America, that calls for at least some blacks to leave America in order to have a more just, and satisfying life? Just to even see if it’s possible?

The idea of migration is not new in the black community; we’ve understood the connection between movement and upward mobility for centuries, whether it was escaping up North to freedom, to Liberia in the 1920s, during the Great Migration when six million blacks moved to the North in search of better opportunity, or back down South and into the suburbs after the turn of the 21st century. Yet advocating a better life beyond the borders of the United States still seem absurd to many blacks and whites alike rather than a realistic solution to the many ills of the black community.

In 2008, Pat Buchanan said that America has been “the best country on earth for black folks,” but I find it hard to believe that blacks living in some parts of Africa, the Caribbean, Europe or other parts of the world aren’t as content and fulfilled as my friends in New York or Washington that are struggling to make ends meet. (Trinidad and Tobago, for example, recently just reported its lowest unemployment rate ever recorded: 3.7%.)

There will never be a perfect place for blacks to live. There’s racism and strife virtually everywhere, but amid rising inequality, a diminishing political voice for the poor, increasing student debt, and stifled economic opportunities for minorities, can blacks ever truly “win” in America? I’m encouraged by some of the political organizing and movement building that is occurring today, such as strikes among low-wage workers. But I still wonder if blacks need to take things further in order to progress.

Let me be clear. I love America. I always have. I eat apple pie, revel in freedom of the press, and believe in the “American Dream,” probably way more than I should. I watched the recent the World Cup and was legitimately heartbroken when America lost to Belgium. I feel a connection to America, more than any other place in the world, and while half of my family migrated here from the Caribbean, I totally feel Chris Rock, who says, “If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different. You’ve got to look at America like the uncle that paid for you to go to college… but molested you.”

Part of me feels like a wuss for saying this. The abolitionist Frederick Douglas was staunchly opposed to the idea of blacks leaving America. He believed that blacks should stay and fight for equality. I can understand why. America is our home and we have just as much a stake in it as any other group.

But while there has been individual achievement, as a community African Americans have never exactly thrived. I think it’s part of the reason why blacks have continued to flirt with the idea of expatriation over the years. There was Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, a plethora of black artists that departed for Paris in the 1940s, and scholars like W.E.B. Dubois who took up residence in Ghana in the 60s. These movements, some of them with separatist roots, never really caught on with the larger black community.

As a whole, black Americans, despite centuries of frustration and despair, have been and continue to be so tied to the idea of America that it seems sacrilegious to even talk about expatriation. I think that’s a mistake. How long must blacks wait for the promise of America to be fulfilled? When do we say enough is enough? When do we reach our breaking point? Is it in another 50 years? 100? Ever? Never?

I’m not saying all black people should move back to Africa or some specific “Garden of Eden.” I’m not saying they should separate from whites and other Americans either. One solution for all of the “black” community isn’t even possible anymore as our needs and wants are so disparate (Blacks from other places like the West Indies and Africa seem far more open to this idea of expatriation,). But having a movement that pushes blacks to look at various paths to upward mobility, and exposes them to places that have a high quality of life and thriving middle class, like Canada, Switzerland, South Africa or Germany could be an important key to black American “freedom” in this “what’s next” moment.
It is happening

It’s hard to tell how many African Americans are living abroad, because the government does not keep official statistics. The BBC has reported that the number of overall Americans living abroad to be about six million. The number of blacks within that group most likely would be significantly smaller. Anecdotally, though, it seems more blacks are exploring life abroad, including some prominent ones: rapper Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def ) lives in South Africa now, poet Saul Williams moved to France, singer Tina Turner just traded in her US passport for a Swiss one, and there’s a thriving black expat blogosphere.

Michelle Commander, an English professor at the University of Tennessee, studies black expatriation to Ghana and Brazil. She said expatriation is growing, particularly with younger blacks. However she noted that while racial equity may be part of this narrative of expatriation, a lot of movement is simply driven by the idea of better opportunity overall:

It seems people are looking for good, stable jobs which makes sense. People are also drawn to things like health care and other social availability. It’s not about wanting a handout, it’s just thinking, ‘there are things that I want, I’m paying for this tax system, perhaps there is a better social structure that speaks more to the things that I want in the future.’

Still Commander said it would be hard to imagine blacks leaving the United States en masse.

I don’t know if there will be a huge movement and that has to do with people kind of being very comfortable in their communities, not having the sort of exposure to foreign countries before hand. For a lot of people the idea of even traveling as a tourist to another country, seems so far outside of the realm of possibility that they don’t even get to that point of ‘I want to move away.’

Sabrina Pendergrass, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said historically blacks move where they have the most social connections and those social connections tend to be in the United States. “It’s about kind of the network and institutions that people are tapped into. If you look in the past with some of the African American expatriates who went to Europe or even Ghana or places like that, there were still those institutional mechanisms that helped. They had tours that they did in Europe prior to going over there.” She said being able to imagine yourself living somewhere else is key; so until blacks’ networks expand, they will mainly continue to re-migrate down South. According to research by Brookings demographer William Frey, in 2010, 57% of blacks lived in the South—the highest percentage since 1960.

Both professors, however, caution that the idea of even moving itself is a very elite notion. They suspect that most of the black expatriation today is driven by the middle class since they are the ones with the exposure, networks, and resources to move away from home.

I agree, and believe that with just the right tools, and a shift in narrative, a new movement could at least begin to emerge and empower African Americans, of all classes to dream differently about their future opportunities.

But as with any big idea, there are many complications to what life looks like outside of America.
All inclusive

Terra Robinson moved to London from Atlanta when she realized the cost of a graduate degree would be cheaper abroad than at home. She intended to return to America, but a string of job opportunities presented themselves and she stayed abroad. Five years later, now in Copenhagen, Robinson doesn’t see any reason to move back. She has a permanent job, a good work-life balance (something she said is missing in the US, despite our noble work ethic), and six weeks of vacation a year:

For educated African Americans, exploring opportunities abroad, just in terms of being able to expand their skillset, expand their experience as well, and sometimes in terms of making more money, its not a bad idea to look abroad. If you’re coming here with a high school education it’s going to be hard to get a job that pays well. On the flip side, in Denmark they do a lot around making sure no ones poor. Income gaps exist but not like in the States.

But she cautions against any utopian fantasies of life abroad.

I don’t feel particularly burdened by my race in America, and I don’t feel particularly burdened by my race in any of the European countries that I’ve been in either. It’s not to say that I don’t realize racism exists, it totally exists, it exists everywhere. It’s not always this malicious intent; it’s a difference between prejudice based on ignorance, and prejudice based on hatred. I haven’t come across too much prejudice based on hatred.

Philip Henderson, a black ex-pat in Germany, said of Berlin in a piece for Konch Magazine, that he has…

… heard “nigger” used more frequently on these streets than in Richmond, Virginia. I have had confrontations with Nazi scum, as well as Turks, Arabs or Africans who despise black Americans. One doesn’t come to Berlin to escape the overwhelming racial tension that exists in, say, New York, the way that black expats came to Paris to escape the overwhelming tension of pre-Civil Rights America; one comes because one imagines it’s better to simmer in the German pot than to roast in the American fire.

Regina Walton, a California native lived in South Korea for nine years. She went purely to experience life abroad and had a positive experience, except when it came to romantic interactions. After so many years away she said it was simply time to come “home.”

She said she didn’t meet any other blacks abroad that planned on leaving the United States indefinitely. “If you’re black American and your family hails from slaves, you really just don’t know, we really don’t have a homeland. I’ve done the genetic testing. It’s been pinned down to a general area [in Africa], but still it’s not like I hail from a country that I know of, that I can then get on a plane and go back to. Maybe the closest thing we have to a home-love it or hate it-is the USA.”

Walton may be right but I don’t think the idea of building new roots somewhere else should be left out of the conversation when we talk about upward mobility in the black community. I don’t want to give up on the idea of America, this land that we built and toiled. It’s more that I want to see more black folk fighting for change, joining the low wage workers and protesting voter ID laws. But I also want to see a future for black America, a future that is thriving. I want to see a future where all black families have options, have mobility, and opportunity.

I don’t want to wait another 100 years.

I’m sure some of us ready to escape the “roast” of the “American fire.” We’ve hit our breaking point and it’s time to start a movement that looks forward and beyond our borders.

Really, I’m not sure what I’ll do. I’m going to keep working to fight for change in America, but thoughts of a new movement, a new way of thinking of black progress will be a constant presence in my mind. Perhaps a new movement that thinks about change and mobility outside of the United States could be the key to true equality and freedom for African Americans. It’s time to at least raise the question. We owe ourselves that much.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

http://qz.com/237642/its-time-to-admit-that-america-will-never-really-include-black-america/
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cisslybee2012
The REBEL
Zechariah
Dec 4 2015, 12:30 AM
Website Warns That Blacks May Have To Leave US When Obama’s Term Is Up

Brian Anderson
July 14, 2015

According to black website The Root, black people will not be safe when Obama leaves office at the end of his second term. Not only is America’s first black president the only thing that is keeping blacks from being murdered, they claim, but also he’s the only thing keeping them from being incarcerated. As such, the website recommends that blacks leave America and even gives a handy guide to “black-friendly” nations they can relocate to.

5 Places Black People Can Move to When They’ve Had Enough of America starts out by detailing what a miserable experience blacks have living in the United States:

Chris Rock summed up the black experience in the United States kind of perfectly during his HBO special Never Scared more than a decade ago: “If you’re black, you got to look at America a little bit different,” he joked, stone-faced. “You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college but who molested you.”

Since then, that “generous” uncle has moved from molesting to killing, with the list of victims growing by the day: the Charleston 9. Freddie Gray. Michael Brown. Rekia Boyd. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Yuvette Henderson. Trayvon Martin.

Of those 17 black people who were killed, 9 were at the hands of a lunatic and 7 were determined to be justifiable homicides. The Freddie Gray case is still pending, but his accused murderer is black as are two of the accused co-conspirators. The inclusion of Yuvette Henderson is particularly ridiculous because she was killed after she attempted 3 armed carjackings and then pointed a gun at police.

Ignoring the 8-10,000 blacks killed every year by other blacks, the author has an even bigger reason why blacks should want to leave America:

Now, with only seconds left on the clock for that one person inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to consistently fight for some critical black issues—from universal health care and clemency for nonviolent drug offenders to the overall improvement of black male lives—pre-election jitters might be setting in, and some African Americans may want out.

Blacks have been hyper-critical of Obama because they say he has ignored them during his presidency. Also it should be noted that during his tenure race relations have deteriorated and the overall condition of black people in terms of wealth and opportunity has decreased at an alarming rate. I would think that blacks would be excited to get rid of Obama. It can only get better.

But where do you move outside the good ol’ U.S. of A. to fulfill the type of vision you have for yourself and your family, where you can be as black as you want to be without fearing for your safety? Where, literally on earth, can you go and maintain—or even enhance—the kind of lifestyle you’re accustomed to, from robust career opportunities to world-class health care?

If blacks have “robust career opportunities” and “world-class health care” what the hell are they complaining about?

Now here’s the really funny thing about this article: none of the countries the author recommends black people move to are black nations. There’s no Jamaica, Haiti, or any black-majority country in Africa. Instead, blacks are steered to Thailand, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Dubai. What about the Motherland?

Blacks always talk about how proud they are to be descended from Africans and how angry they are about being robbed of their culture and heritage. Why wouldn’t they want to move to Africa when they’ve had enough of America? Maybe because most of the continent is a disease-infested 3rd world hellhole in a constant state of violence and civil war?

Judging by this article, it would seem as if blacks don’t want to live around other blacks.

When whites move out of the city to escape crime and poverty it is called racism. When blacks don’t want to move to a place because of crime and poverty it is called empowerment. Ain’t the racial double-standard cool?

Follow Brian Anderson on Twitter

http://downtrend.com/71superb/website-warns-that-blacks-may-have-to-leave-us-when-obamas-term-is-up
I never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. :D

It's the same stupid shit that was said about South Africa when Nelson Mandela dies. South Africa is going to self destruct when Mandela is gone. Well Mandela is gone and South Africa is still doing fine.

Some people just get off living in fear so they create fear to live in. :D
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Zechariah
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Zechariah
Black and No Longer Safe in America: Why Black Americans Are Looking Abroad For Respect

The documentary Seeking Asylum chronicles the plight of black Americans who no longer feel safe in the U.S. due to rampant police brutality and are looking to settle elsewhere.

In a country that his ancestors built, Darnell Walker feels estranged from his bequeathed home.

“We are black in a space that is very white,” says Walker.

This “space” is the United States of America—a country the disillusioned 33-year-old has a tenuous relationship with, at best.

But Darnell Walker’s distrust of America began at an early age.

His first encounter with the police was at the age of 10. Walker says he was held for over an hour during a game of hide-and-seek in Charlottesville, Virginia. Authorities claimed they were suspicious when the young Walker ran away after making eye contact, and deemed that a black child playing hide-and-seek wasn’t a sufficient reason. Through the years he’s witnessed a similar narrative of white officers wielding their power to control and oppress black bodies—especially from family and friends. And two decades after his first interaction with the police, racist policing practices in the United States make Walker fear for his life.

“My heart stops and my hands start shaking,” he says of being stopped by the police. Then he thinks, “Oh my God. I am going to die right now? Is something going to happen?”

The owner of a 1987 Chevy Caprice Classic—which he says cops stereotypically associate with drug dealers—Walker goes through this spiral of emotions often. And after being held at gunpoint by the authorities, Walker mulls over the sobering reality that one day he might not make it home alive.

But Black Lives Matter. And Seeking Asylum is Walker’s contribution to the protest movement.

Debuting online on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, the documentary is a 45-minute account of his travels to four European countries. Over a period of three weeks, Walker explored Europe in an effort to find a place of refuge. The film is a compilation of man-on-the-street interviews—looking for an international perspective on race relations in America—coupled with his visceral reflections on the black experience in America. Themes of terror, disgust, and freedom persist throughout.
The documentary ‘Seeking Asylum’ chronicles the plight of black Americans who no longer feel safe in the U.S. due to rampant police brutality and are looking to settle elsewhere.

In his film, Walker actively explores the idea of leaving the country, but this trend of black people leaving the United States for social and political reasons is nothing new.

James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Nina Simone (to name a few) would all leave the United States to avoid the harsh reality of being black in America.

Rapper Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) decided to leave the United States, too, and is living in South Africa. “America is a very challenging place for me,” Bey said in a May 2015 interview with Beats by Dre. The MC went on to note the social, political, and economic climate as being unnecessarily difficult, and ultimately a hindrance to his creative process. “It does something to me. The whole shit. Yemen. Iraq. Baltimore. On and on,” Bey continued. “And to know that this isn’t an isolated moment in history, this is some sort of continuum of something that is completely whack to begin with.”

“My heart stops and my hands start shaking,” he says of being stopped by the police. Then he thinks, “Oh my God. I am going to die right now? Is something going to happen?”

Miles Marshall Lewis, the arts and culture editor for Ebony.com, moved to France in 2004 and stayed for seven years. He mused on his experience in “No Country for Black Men.” Published in 2014, the piece was a response to the wave of police killings targeting blacks, and the decision not to indict the officers responsible for Eric Garner’s death. Now a father of two black boys, his family lives in Harlem but he is still uneasy. “It weighs heavily on my mind—the situation for black men and black boys.”

Inspired by James Baldwin, Lewis, too, returned to the United States. He wanted to experience an Obama presidency and also acknowledges that the presence and power of black voices are necessary to moving race relations forward. “Something needs to be said, as well, for staying here on the home front and protesting what’s going on. Rather than just flee the problem, stay and be a part of the solution. It cuts both ways.”

Though unsure of whether or not he will stay abroad for good, Walker has set a goal to leave the United States by 2017. “I know that I’d be better in other places. I’m looking for a place that’s as far away from America—mentally, at least,” he says.

At the top of his list are Amsterdam, Norway, Morocco, and Canada. Though the U.S.-Canadian border is relatively close, and Canada is the most accessible country on his docket, Walker admits that his decision will be more based on intuition than distance. “I don’t feel scared when I’m in Canada. I don’t fear for my life if I encounter a police officer.”

Kyle Canty made headlines weeks ago when he sought asylum in Vancouver. A black man in the United States, Canty also fears for his life. He argued that blacks are “being exterminated at an alarming rate.”

But Canada also has a troubled past.

“Black people in Canada have faced racism since the first African person set foot in the country,” says Simon Black, an assistant professor of labor studies at Brock University in Ontario. “Canada was not free from slavery, and we had our own version of Jim Crow.”

As a white man, Black refuses to instruct how black people should respond to white supremacy, but he thinks that Canada may be seen as a place of refuge because of its association with the Underground Railroad and freedom. “What limited history people might know about Canada is that it was the end of the Underground Railroad,” Black says. “It was a destination point.”

But black people haven’t exactly been at ease in Canada. In “A People’s History of the Yonge Street Rebellion,” Black explains a string of police shootings of young black men and women in the early ’90s—Michael Wade Lawson, Lester Donaldson, Sophia Cook, and Raymond Lawrence—which led to an uprising.

And in Toronto, the violence has continued.

“In terms of police violence, you only have to look to 2015 to see violence to black bodies by the state,” says Black. Andrew Loku, an African man wielding a hammer, was shot dead by police in July. Jermaine Carby was also shot three times by police officers last year.

Aside from the police shootings, Black says that institutionalized anti-black racism is rampant, noting big disparities in education and incarceration rates. “To see Canada as a place of refuge for black Americans is a bit problematic,” he says.

Darnell Walker acknowledges the race issues abroad, and remains undeterred. To Walker, leaving the United States doesn’t signify defeat, though he admits grappling with this notion, saying, “It’s more that we are tired of fighting.”

Sadly, like many black Americans, Walker longs for a sense of belonging, a sense of solidarity. “What we’ve been fighting for is the right to call ourselves American, like everyone else,” he says. “What can we claim? Who will take us and say, ‘This is what you can call home’?”

“That’s the search that I am on.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/10/black-and-no-longer-safe-in-america-why-black-americans-are-looking-abroad-for-respect.html
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