A Critical Discourse

The first Wednesday of the month at 6pm

[acriticaldiscourse]

digital delivery, a love letter, from Deutschland to Los Angeles. “LIVE” Tonight 6PM KCHUNG RADIO 

[krxs10]

MENTALLY ILL WOMAN TASED TO DEATH WHILE SHACKELED, BEATEN, AND HANDCUFFED

Natasha Mckenna, a mentally ill woman who died after a stun gun was used on her at the Fairfax County jail in February, was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy tasered her four times, incident reports obtained by The Washington Post show.

Six members of the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, dressed in white full-body biohazard suits and gas masks, arrived and placed a wildly struggling 130-pound McKenna into full restraints, their reports state. But when McKenna wouldn’t bend her knees so she could be placed into a wheeled restraint chair, a lieutenant delivered four 50,000-volt shocks from the Taser, enabling the other deputies to strap her into the chair. 

Minutes later, she stopped breathing. Days later, she died.

The truth is, though, that police have been covering up the real details on Natasha’s death for months. And, even after all of this, police are not quite clear on why Natasha McKenna was even jailed in the first place. On the day she was arrested, she had actually called the police herself to report being assaulted and appeared to be struggling mightily with mental illness before she bounced around between hospitals and jails for days.

Nothing has happened to the officers yet.

Source / Source / Source 

#StayWoke

[anorganisch-deactivated20171123]

Marxist philosophy, as that which at least adequately addresses what is becoming and what is approaching, also knows the whole of the past in creative breadth, because it knows no past other than the still living, not yet discharged past. Marxist philosophy is that of the future, therefore also of the future in the past.

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vol. 1, Introduction. (via imkrebsgang)

[acriticaldiscourse]

“because some of them I didn’t want to be filmed..”

[acriticaldiscourse]

For a man who may have never been afraid of death, and used brave, fearlessness to express and push in his art and life, i find myself still afraid and saddened by his eventual and so premature end to something as seemingly minuscule but pervasive as cancer. May you rest with the fury of your passions and the love of your heart, Chris Burden. ‪

[acriticaldiscourse]

[acriticaldiscourse]

[acriticaldiscourse]

[acriticaldiscourse]

Tonight on KCHUNG Radio A Critical Discourse RePlays Lorraine O'Grady's lecture "And/Or" from MOCA/USC Roski Lecture Series.

[acriticaldiscourse]

Audre Lorde 

the function of erotic that encourages excellences, dispelling the differences between pornography and erotics, and to being at our highest strength, to be at a place of power and to not confuse the erotic strength with the tenet of the pornographic. 

[emiratizayn-deactivated20150816]

and the Iraqi people welcomed the Americans with flowers. I wanted to set a historical event to teach Bush a lesson from the Iraqis, telling him you lied, we did not welcome you with flowers, and instead we are saying goodbye with our shoes.” 

[emiratizayn-deactivated20150816]

Muntaza Al Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who became known as the guy who threw a shoe at Bush and later ended up in jail for three years because of it. 

[acriticaldiscourse]

MLK on love, power and justice

Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. - MLK

[milkiscold]

Environmental racism refers to the intentional and unintentional disproportionate imposition of environmental hazards on minorities (x). It is a term that can be used to describe a number of unjust realities faced by minority populations all over the world. In the United States, it is a term that can be used to explain why minorities are almost 80% more likely to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution poses an extreme threat to human health (x). It explains why 56% of the people living within a 3 mile radius of our nation’s hazardous waste facilities are people of color, and only 30% of the people living outside of those radii are people of color (x). It explains why even in big cities, poor white people still inhale less nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) from car and power plant pollution than affluent people of color (x). Race, it turns out, is a better predictor of the location of hazardous waste facilities than education or income, and is also a better predictor of dangerous exposure to air pollution than income (x)(x).

It is not uncommon in the world of developmental theory to read about the intergenerational transmission of racist ideologies from parent to child (x). What is discussed much less is the intergenerational perpetuation of race-based oppression that occurs when the lives of minority children are affected by environmental racism before they even gain individual autonomy. Because exposure to environmental pollution is an important determinant of infant health, inequities in exposure can lead to persistent group-level differences in health at birth (x), and those differences at birth can affect a child for their entire lifespan.

Besides unequal exposure to air pollution and hazardous waste contamination, minority populations are also more likely to experience adverse birth outcomes as a result of exposure to environmental contaminants such as tobacco smoke, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and pesticides (x).  The ramifications of environmental exposure to air pollution, various hazardous wastes, tobacco smoke, PAH, and pesticides in utero vary widely. However, many of the effects, such as asthma, reduced cognitive functioning, autism, and ADHD are lasting. No child deserves to have their life disproportionately affected by exposure to environmental toxins as a result of their race. 

[bobbysealeblackpanther]

We, the peaceful protesters, DO NOT ASSASSINATE POLICEMEN. And those who do, and those who chant to support such negativity are stooping to the low level of a racist fascist mentality. Real peoples constitutional democratic civil-human rights revolution is not about a need for violence....

[acriticaldiscourse]

The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles

The conditions that created Ferguson cannot be addressed without remedying a century of public policies that segregated our metropolitan landscape.

Every policy and practice segregating St. Louis over the last century was duplicated in almost every metropolis nationwide. Yet this story of racial isolation and disadvantage, enforced by federal, state, and local policies, many of which are no longer practiced, is central to an appreciation of what occurred in Ferguson in August 2014 when African American protests turned violent after police shot and killed an unarmed black 18-year-old. Policies that are no longer in effect and seemingly have been reformed still cast a long shadow.

Richard Rothstein's report not only addresses the grievances of segregation that reverberate nationwide but leads us to question the destruction and continued economic segregation that occurs under the contemporary auspices of gentrification. He notes that the only cities that appear to be integrated are just caught in a state of transition until a new segregation becomes complete.

[babylonfalling]

In the whole history of the United States the impact of racism has been to attempt to contain black people, has been to attempt to stifle the desires towards liberation. One of the ways in which this is accomplished is by trying to convince black people that they are completely powerless before this huge apparatus and that the police can just come into the community and pick someone out, kill them—as they have done on many, many occasions in the past—charge them with something they didn’t do, railroad them to prison, send them to the gas chamber. This is just one of the many ways that the system—and it’s not a contrived effort in the sense that it’s done consciously by a few men up at the top, it’s built into the system, it’s built into the nature of the society. And getting back to the question of what a revolutionary is, a black revolutionary realizes that we cannot begin to combat racism, we cannot begin to effectively destroy racism until we’ve destroyed the whole system.

Angela Davis in conversation with Rev. Cecil Williams on his KPIX-TV show, Vibrations for a New People, January 1972.

[pieto]

The greatest difficulty confronting groups that seek to create a new type of revolutionary organization is that of establishing new types of human relationships within the organization itself. The forces of the society exert an omnipresent pressure against such an effort. But unless this is accomplished, by methods yet to be experimented with, we will never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for participation on the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere abstract ideal, when in fact it is an absolute practical necessity for a really new organization and for the organization of a really new society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out the decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a specialization; and in this way the passivity relation of the old world is reproduced.

Instructions for an Insurrection - Internationale Situationniste #6