After 12 Years Outstanding Progressive Journalist and Social Critic Gary Younge Departs the U.S. for His Home in the U.K.

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The long read

Gary Younge: Farewell to America

After 12 years in the US, Gary Younge is preparing to depart – as the country’s racial frictions seem certain to spark another summer of conflict

by Gary Younge
@garyyounge
1 July 2015
The Guardian (UK)

A man is arrested during protests against the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer, in Ferguson, in August 2014. Photograph: Whitney Curtis/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

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.

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.

The Counted: people killed by police in the United States in 2015 – interactive

The Guardian is counting the people killed by US law enforcement agencies this year. Read their stories and contribute to our ongoing, crowdsourced project

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.
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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.

Gary Younge with his son in 2008. Photograph: Tara Mack

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.)

I was delighted when Obama won. But somehow I could never be quite as delighted as some people felt I should have been

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.”

Gary Younge covers Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign in 2008

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.

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, a feature writer and columnist for the Guardian, is the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the American South, and The Speech: The Story Behind Dr Martin Luther King Jr's Dream. Twitter: @garyyounge

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 GARY YOUNGE

Gary Younge (born 1969) is a British journalist, author and broadcaster.
Contents

1 Biography
2 References
3 Bibliography
4 External links
Biography

Younge is a feature writer and columnist for The Guardian. He writes a monthly column for The Nation, "Beneath the Radar". His book No Place Like Home, in which he retraced the route of the civil rights Freedom Riders, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in 1999.

In 2011, he moved to Chicago, where he now lives with his wife Tara Mack and his son, Osceola.[1] He intends to move to Hackney.[2] His brother Pat Younge is chief creative officer of BBC Vision.[3]

References
About Gary Younge
 
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america?CMP=share_btn_tw
 
Media Guardian 100 2010: 98. Pat Younge, The Guardian, 12 July 2010.
Bibliography

The English Question Gordon Marsden (Editor), Tony Wright (Editor), Robert Hazell, Ian McLean, Austin Mitchell, Mary J. Hickman, Gary Younge (Fabian Society, 2000, ISBN 0-716360020); (Manchester University Press, annotated edition 3 April 2006, ISBN 978-0719073694)
No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the American South (Picador, 1999, ISBN 978-0330369800); (Picador, 2000, ISBN 978-0330369817), OCLC 44485209; (University Press of Mississippi, 2002, ISBN 978-1578064885, OCLC 49226176
Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters in the Disunited States (The New Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1595580689), OCLC 62421357
Who Are We - And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? (Viking, 2010, ISBN 978-0670917037), OCLC 500783871
The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream (Haymarket, August 2013, ISBN 978-1608463220)
External links

Official website
Column archive at The Guardian
Memoirs of a teenage Trot, The Guardian, 19 February 2000
Column archive at The Nation
Gary Younge on Twitter
Appearances on C-SPAN
Works by or about Gary Younge in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Article archive at Journalisted
Gary Younge at DMOZ

"What to the Slave is the 4th of July?": James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass's Historic Speech from July 5, 1852

http://www.democracynow.org/20…/7/3/what_to_the_slave_is_4th 

 

"What to the Slave is the 4th of July?":

James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass’ Historic Speech:
 
VIDEO OF READING:

 
In a Fourth of July holiday special, we begin with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, he gave one of his most famous speeches, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro." He was addressing the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Society. This is actor James Earl Jones reading the speech during a performance of historian Howard Zinn’s acclaimed book, "Voices of a People’s History of the United States." He was introduced by Zinn.

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: In this holiday special, we begin with the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, he gave one of his most famous speeches, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro." He was addressing the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. This is James Earl Jones reading the historic address during a performance of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States. He was introduced by Howard Zinn.

HOWARD ZINN: Frederick Douglass, once a slave, became a brilliant and powerful leader of the anti-slavery movement. In 1852, he was asked to speak in celebration of the Fourth of July.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: [read by James Earl Jones] Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour forth a stream, a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

AMY GOODMAN: James Earl Jones reading Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 Independence Day address in Rochester, New York. That was part of a performance of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassjuly4.html
 
FREDERICK DOUGLASS ON THE MEANING OF THE 4TH OF JULY TO BLACK PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES

FREDERICK DOUGLASS
(1817-1895)

Excerpt from a speech given in Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852:
 
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival..."

AFTER 54 YEARS U.S. GOVERNMENT FINALLY RESTORES DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH CUBA

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/2/a_new_chapter_after_half_a

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

Thursday, July 3, 2015 

"A New Chapter": After Half a Century, U.S. and Cuba Unveil Reopening of Embassies & Restored Ties

 

After half a century, the United States and Cuba have announced they will reopen embassies in each other’s capitals and formally re-establish diplomatic relations. Secretary of State John Kerry said he will travel to Havana to open the U.S. Embassy there. In a statement, the Cuban government said relations with the United States cannot be considered normalized until trade sanctions are lifted, the naval base at Guantánamo Bay is returned, and U.S.-backed programs aimed at "subversion and internal destabilization" are halted. But in a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Cuban President Raúl Castro acknowledged much progress has already been made, and confirmed the openings of permanent diplomatic missions later this month. We are joined by Peter Kornbluh, author of "Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana."

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with the historic news announced on Wednesday by President Obama that after more than half a century, the United States and Cuba will reopen embassies in each other’s capitals and formally re-establish diplomatic relations.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: More than 54 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the United States closed its embassy in Havana. Today, I can announce that the United States has agreed to formally re-establish diplomatic relations with the republic of Cuba and reopen embassies in our respective countries. This is a historic step forward in our efforts to normalize relations with the Cuban government and people, and begin a new chapter with our neighbors in the Americas.

AMY GOODMAN: In a statement, the Cuban government said relations with the United States cannot be considered normalized until trade sanctions are lifted, the naval base at Guantánamo Bay is returned, and U.S.-backed programs aimed at, quote, "subversion and internal destabilization" are halted. But in a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Cuba’s President Raúl Castro acknowledged much progress has already been made, and confirmed the openings of permanent diplomatic missions later this month.

PRESIDENT RAÚL CASTRO: [translated] It pleases me to confirm that the republic of Cuba has decided to re-establish diplomatic relations with the United States of America and open permanent diplomatic missions in our respective countries on the 20th of July, 2015. On Cuba’s part, we make this decision based on the reciprocal action to develop respectful and cooperative relations between our peoples and our governments.

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday he’ll travel to Havana to open the U.S. Embassy there, while Cuban officials say Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez will lead a delegation of "distinguished representatives of Cuban society" at an official ceremony to reopen the Cuban Embassy in Washington. All of this follows the U.S. decision in May to remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terror. It was just in December that Obama first announced loosened travel and economic restrictions between the two nations.

For more, we are joined by Democracy Now! video stream by Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. He’s co-author of the book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. An updated edition comes out in September with a new epilogue that tells the story of how President Obama re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Well, Peter Kornbluh, welcome back to Democracy Now! First, your reaction to President Obama’s announcement?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, thank you, Amy, for having me on the show, the first day of what Obama calls a new chapter in U.S.-Cuban relations. I don’t think that the true magnitude of Obama’s speech yesterday has quite sunk in, but this is a historic moment in bilateral relations. It’s a historic moment for Latin America as a whole. And it’s certainly an extraordinary kind of change of events in the whole history of U.S. foreign policy, which, as you know better than anybody and as your listeners know better than anybody and your audience knows better than anybody, has been a bitter history of imperial and imperialist intervention in Cuban affairs. And Barack Obama yesterday stepped forward, basically said we’re going to change the past and have a very different future. He actually said, "This is what change looks like." And it was very dramatic.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what this change looks like. What has been agreed to at this point? Tell us about the Cuban mission in Washington and the U.S. mission in Cuba, in Havana, and how they’ll change.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, you know, Jimmy Carter, back in the 1970s, 1977, initiated the first truly serious efforts of a president to normalize relations with Cuba. And he got as far as kind of reopening kind of mid-level diplomatic kind of representations called "interest sections." The United States would have an interest section in Havana; Cuba would have an interest section in Washington. They would not be headed by ambassadors. They would not have full embassy status. And today, President Obama and President Castro have now agreed that we are going to re-establish official diplomatic relations and kind of upgrade these interest sections to full embassies.

And this has a symbolic meaning. President Obama set out to accomplish this starting in 2013, when he directed his aides to find a way to change our policy towards Cuba and to arrive at this point where we have arrived today. That is what he could do as president without having to deal with the Congress on the issue of lifting the embargo.

And, you know, it’s a symbolic move in many ways, but it creates a kind of a new framework of our interaction and certainly is going to pave the way, I think, to an acceleration of ties—bilateral ties, cultural ties, economic ties, political ties—between the United States and Cuba. And I think it’s going to accelerate leaving the past in the past and creating a very different kind of ambiance and environment of the ties between the two countries, which really have a lot of common interests, which will now rise to the surface of the relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us the history of the U.S. mission in Cuba? I remember when I was in Havana, there were sort of major billboards that the U.S. mission had to face, that the Cubans had put up. But the U.S. had done things with the U.S. mission that Fidel Castro wanted to cover, what, with a series of flags?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, that was during the last Bush administration, where George Bush decided that he would kind of stick it to the Cubans by putting a ticker tape on the top of the building of the U.S. interest section that kind of, you know, broadcast news, like down there in Times Square, that was hostile to the Cuban government. And Fidel Castro’s response was to erect 119 flagpoles and put 119 black flags, kind of with a pirate-type sign on the top, to mask the ticker tape and to kind of make a statement of how evil the United States was.

Now, you can contrast kind of the animosity, the—what Henry Kissinger once called the perpetual hostility of that kind of interaction, with what’s going to happen today. And that visual contrast will be John Kerry, the highest-ranking U.S. official since the Cuban revolution to travel to Cuba, overseeing the hoisting of the American flag of the new U.S. Embassy on the Malecón there in Havana. The visuals will be rather dramatic and, I think, will appeal, quite frankly, to Cubans and to the American public here in the United States in a very dramatic way. And I think it’s going to help visually push the idea of a normal relationship forward in a big way.

AMY GOODMAN: The restoration of relations with Cuba is not sitting well with Republican presidential contender, Cuban-American Marco Rubio. He issued a statement that read, quote, "I intend to oppose the confirmation of an Ambassador to Cuba until these issues are addressed. It is time for our unilateral concessions to this odious regime to end." Peter Kornbluh, talk about Rubio’s attitude toward Cuba and his own history.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, he distorted his own history for many years. He left the public impression, and even stated it specifically, that his parents had fled after Fidel Castro took power, that they were political refugees, when in fact they had left Cuba three years before the revolution, and they were simple economic refugees, just like anybody else, so many others who have come to the United States from Latin American countries or other Third World countries, seeking better economic situations for themselves and their families. So his parents and his family, he does not have a background of persecution during the Castro regime.

But, of course, he is beholden and a fixture in the dwindling community of hardline anti-Castro Cubans in Florida, and he is catering to them in his presidential bid. There are still a number of older Cuban Americans who have made a lot of money and who are going to be supportive financially of Rubio’s candidacy. But in terms of broad numbers, his position no longer reflects, in any way, shape or form, the majority view of Floridians and Cuban Americans in Florida.

Having said that, let me be clear that Cuba is obviously going to be a political hot potato, and Cuban policy is going to be a political hot potato, in the next presidential election. Hillary Clinton came out very early calling for an end to the embargo. She sees that there is financial support among the more moderate Cuban-American community in Florida. And she also, I think, sees that this is much in the interest, both international and domestic, of the United States of America to normalize fully relations with Cuba. On the other side, you have, you know, Republican candidates like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, who, like Marco Rubio, is vying for the support of the anti-Castro Cuban community in Florida, who are obviously going to attack the president on this policy change.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, in Havana, Cubans welcomed news that U.S. and Cuba will open embassies in each other’s country.

CUBAN MAN: [translated] We’ve been in this situation for 56 years, and I think this will benefit the country in certain respects, and I think it benefits those of us who want to see our families, our children, who are in the U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to read a comment made by Elián González. He was the boy at the center of a bitter international custody battle in 2000 that highlighted the poor relations between the United States and Cuba. In a 2015 interview with Granma, he said, quote—Granma is the Cuban newspaper—"Sometimes we young people think that if we stop being a socialist country, and give way to capitalism, we will become a developed country like the United States, France, Italy ... But it must be understood that if Cuba stops being socialist, it won’t be like the U.S., it would be a colony, it would be Haiti, a poor country, a lot poorer than it is now, and everything that has been achieved would be lost. It is true that we could have accomplished more, but we can never forget the most important historic question: we have been a country besieged by a blockade." And, of course, for people who don’t quite remember who Elián González is, he was made famous with the standoff with his relatives in Florida and his father, who was trying to take him home to Cuba. He had come in a boat, and his mother had died on the boat. And the image of the U.S. military with a gun at his head as the U.S. government took him away from his Miami family to reunite him with his father and brother. Your comment, Peter Kornbluh?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, Elián González raises an important point that a number of Cubans feel, which is that they don’t want to lose all the vestiges of the revolution. And Raúl Castro himself has said, "We want to have an economic model that allows us to have sustainable socialism." The problem for Cuba is that they can’t sustain the advances of the Cuban revolution in education and health unless their economy changes and they are able to be a productive society generating the resources to do these social programs in the future. And that is why, in a opening of the economy, the economy is—under Raúl Castro, is evolving away from a strict communist model to a much more kind of—more social democratic model, eventually, and perhaps like Vietnam, perhaps like China. It’s hard to know where it will end up. But it is evolving steadily towards that new model of the economy, and it’s up to the Cuban government, of course, to decide what kind of interaction they’re going to have with American economic interests. We can no more tell them what to do now than we can—than we could before the normalization of diplomatic relations. But they know what’s in their interests, and I’m sure that they are going to act accordingly.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Peter Kornbluh, talk about what has to happen now. And what does Congress have to do, which President Obama alluded to as he spoke yesterday? And how could a change of a presidential administration, or even the current Congress, stop anything—or could they—from moving forward?

PETER KORNBLUH: I think what President Obama has done in normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba is irreversible. And Congress can certainly stand in the way—the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dominated by Republicans like Marco Rubio, can thwart kind of a naming of a new ambassador. They can hold up any ambassador—ambassadorial nomination that President Obama gives them. But I think what he is going to do is simply assign the diplomat that is there, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who’s head of the interest section and who already is an ambassador, in the sense that he was ambassador previous to his posting in Cuba, with the kind of interim status. So, 'til the end of the Obama administration, I believe that he's not going to pick a fight with Congress over this nomination.

You know, Obama has two years left. He’s going to move quickly and with all the power that he has as president to kind of consolidate this change in policy. He has normalized diplomatic relations. To normalize overall relations, of course, we do have to lift the embargo. The United States does have to address Cuba’s interest in the return of the Guantánamo military base. And these regime change programs that USAID has been running for all these years, kind of in a kind of bureaucratic imperative mandated by Congress, do have to be reconfigured to some kind of more educational-oriented or economic sharing, as opposed to an effort to roll back the Cuban revolution. Those things are down the road. I think Obama wants to create an ambiance, a very new ambiance, a very new framework of relations, and then have the countries negotiate accordingly.

A new president could certainly create a much more hostile policy towards Cuba. A new Congress with Democrats could actually vote to lift the embargo and lift the travel ban that prevents people like you and I from freely going on vacation in Varadero Beach, to Cuba, at this point. But I think that Obama’s strategy is simply to create constituencies in the business community, among American citizens, as well as support in Cuba for going forward with this relationship, to the point where it will be very difficult for a Republican president, like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, to reverse this process.

AMY GOODMAN: The issue of trade, Peter, what exactly is going to happen now? I mean, many Republican and Democratic governors, for example, not to mention CEOs, have been going back and forth to Cuba. What happens next?

PETER KORNBLUH: You’ve had the president of Google going. You’ve had the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce going to Cuba. There are all sorts of businessmen who have been there. And President Obama has kind of looked at the embargo like a dam, and he’s used his executive powers to poke holes in it, with the hope that as the kind of economic waters pour through the holes that he has created in the embargo, the dam weakens and eventually collapses. I think that’s his strategy, and it’s being supported by the business community and by the advocacy community. There’s a new organization out there called Cuba Engage, which is trying to organize business and advocates to lift the travel ban—very important to support that. And I think that that’s his idea.

And Obama, using executive orders, has created all sorts of clauses in the—for the business community. The United States can now import goods from Cuba from private businesses in Cuba. We can sell them more food. Internet companies of the United States of America are now going to Cuba and are going to work with Cubans to build a Internet network there. So there’s a loosening of the restrictions on trade. You still are not going to see, you know, Hilton Hotels building hotels in Cuba. You’re not going to see a McDonald’s or a Wal-Mart or major U.S. mining companies arriving in Cuba and investing in Cuba, unless Congress lifts the trade embargo on Cuba. But you are going to see quite a bit more economic activity in the years to come.

AMY GOODMAN: And the visits—President Obama says he personally will go next year, and the pope, before he comes to the United States, will be going to Cuba first. Is that right, Peter Kornbluh? And the pope’s role in the negotiation that has opened up the relationship between Cuba and the United States?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the next edition, the paperback edition, of the book that I did with William LeoGrande, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, is going to have a whole new 50-page epilogue that tells the story of how the pope got involved with the secret talks to improve relations between the United States and Cuba. And certainly, when the pope goes to Cuba in mid-September, he is going to raise the issue of the embargo. He’s going to come to the United States afterwards, and I’m sure the issue will actually come up.

The pope will be following John Kerry, who is going to be going to Cuba later this month. That is going to receive quite a bit of media attention. And, of course, there’s going to be a parade of celebrities, businessmen, political figures continuing to go to Cuba 'til the end of the year. Obama—certainly the White House has said that Obama would relish his own trip to Cuba in 2016. That would be history making. That would be Obama's Nixon-in-China moment, and he would go down in history as the president who ended the Cold War in the Caribbean once and for all, and actually took steps to set foot on the island of Cuba while the Cuban existence—while a Castro was still in power. I think that will go a long way to normalizing simply the kind of people-to-people relationship between this country, and I hope we all live to see the day that a president of the United States sets foot on the island of Cuba in the near future.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, I want to thank you for being with us. He directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, which is at George Washington University in D.C., co-author of the book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. Updated edition with that epilogue that tells the story of President Obama, the pope and President Castro are all in that book. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

Interview with Bree Newsome, Who Climbed Flagpole & Took Down SC Confederate Flag on Democracy Now

http://www.democracynow.org/…/exclusive_extended_interview_…
 

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Exclusive: Extended Interview with Bree Newsome, Who Climbed Flagpole & Took Down SC Confederate Flag

BREE NEWSOME  INTERVIEW:

In this exclusive, extended interview, we speak with Bree Newsome, who scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol on Saturday and brought down the Confederate flag. We also speak with James Tyson, who helped her. The pair were immediately arrested and could face up to three years in prison. Their action came 10 days after Dylann Roof, who embraced the Confederate flag, allegedly massacred nine African-American churchgoers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

From atop the flagpole, Bree Newsome said, "You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today!" Newsome explained her choice of words. "In one of those nights where I was pondering, 'Have I completely lost my mind in doing this?' I read the story of David and Goliath, and David says to Goliath, 'You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, and I come against you in the name of the Lord,' and that, for me as a black woman in America, that’s what that moment felt like, because I come from a historically completely disempowered place," Newsome said. "And so I think that’s why it was so powerful to a lot of people, especially to black women, to see me up there holding that flag in that way."

Tune in Monday, July 6, for the full interview with Bree Newsome and James Tyson. There is much more to come, including plenty of surprises!

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! recently returned from South Carolina, where the massacre of nine African-Americans by a racist alleged shooter who embraced the Confederate flag has renewed protests to remove the flag from the state Capitol grounds in Columbia. Last Tuesday, South Carolina state lawmakers agreed to debate removing the flag later this summer. By early Saturday morning, a 30-year-old African-American woman named Bree Newsome, equipped with a helmet and climbing gear, scaled the 30-foot flagpole and unhooked the Confederate flag.

BREE NEWSOME: You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today!

AMY GOODMAN: Bree Newsome recited Psalm 27 and the Lord’s Prayer as she brought the flag down. As soon as she reached the ground, she was arrested, along with James Tyson, who had stood at the bottom of the pole as she climbed.

Bree Newsome’s action went viral, was seen around the world. Her bail fund has raised over $120,000. Ava DuVernay, director of the Oscar-nominated film Selma, was among the many to hail her, writing on Twitter, quote, "I hope I get the call to direct the motion picture about a black superhero I admire. Her name is @BreeNewsome."

But within about an hour, workers had raised a new Confederate flag at the Capitol. On Saturday, as funeral services began for Cynthia Hurd, a 54-year-old librarian killed in the Charleston massacre by the suspect, Dylann Roof, Confederate flag supporters rallied in front of the newly replaced flag on the Capitol grounds in Columbia. Anti-racist counter-protesters also attended, asking passing drivers to "honk the flag down."

Down the road, at 2:00 p.m., at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Columbia, a bond hearing was held for Bree Newsome and James Tyson. They were charged with defacing state property, which can carry three years in prison and a $5,000 fine. About a dozen supporters waited in the lobby of the jail for their release. I spoke to some of them. I asked Tamika Lewis to talk about what Bree Newsome’s action meant to her.

TAMIKA LEWIS: As you can see my glee, it was one of the most liberating and beautiful moments that I have known in all my 25 years of life, besides my daughter being born. To see that flag actually come down and all of the things that it represents being taken down by a strong black woman was one of the greatest symbols—symbolic images that one person could ever witness, I feel, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you tell us your name?

KARIL TINAE PARKER: Hi. I’m Karil Parker.

AMY GOODMAN: And you came out here on your own to the detention center?

KARIL TINAE PARKER: I did. I came out here to show my support for Bree, that this is just—this is not her battle alone, that we stand with her. She did what many people have not had the courage to do, and that we are proud of her, that we support her. Whatever she needs, we are here for her. And I wanted her to know that, and that’s why I came. But it doesn’t matter how you feel about whether she should or should not have done it. She did it. It’s done. And it needs to come down. And she has done what our governor hasn’t had the courage to do, what our General Assembly hasn’t had the courage to do. She went up there and did what had to be done, when it needed to be done.

AMY GOODMAN: Karil Parker and Tamika Lewis, speaking outside the jail in Columbia, South Carolina. Bree Newsome and James Tyson were both released Saturday afternoon after supporters posted the requisite $300 of their $3,000 bond each. I’m joined right now in New York by Bree Newsome and Jimmy Tyson.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

BREE NEWSOME: Thank you.

JAMES TYSON: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, well, why don’t we begin at the beginning? Bree, can you talk about why you decided to do what you did and, you know, where you come from, the groups you’re involved with and how you’ve been organizing?

BREE NEWSOME: Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I come from the South, like a lot of people, especially a lot of African Americans. My ancestors came through Charleston, a slave market. And so, the Confederate flag is a symbol of, you know, folks trying to kind of hold us into the place of bondage that we had been before and our struggle the past 150 years of trying to come out of that place. And so, it was—I’m sure I was like a lot of people, sitting at home, looking at the flag flying, I mean, wished I could just take that down, you know, but had no idea if it was possible and how possible it would be. I had even contemplated just on my own just attempting to climb it, knowing full well that I wouldn’t make it up the pole, and just let them arrest me, just to make that statement. I mean, that’s how strongly I felt about it. And so, then, when I ended up connecting with other activists there in North Carolina and found out that, you know, there were people who actually did know how to plan for how we could possibly scale the pole—and, you know, there were many roles to fill in the plan, and one of course included needing someone to actually climb up. And, of course, that was a high risk of arrest, we knew. And so, after some prayer and really thinking about it, I decided to volunteer.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re from Charlotte, North Carolina?

BREE NEWSOME: Yes

AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, it’s more than risking arrest.

BREE NEWSOME: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, there are these Confederate flag rallies—

BREE NEWSOME: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —a lot of guns in South Carolina. Were you fearful? Both people who are not law enforcement and people who are?

BREE NEWSOME: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the retaliation piece was much scarier to me than arrest. You know, I was even thinking about the possibility of being up on the flagpole, and you never know who might walk by, quite frankly. You know, you could get shot. You just really don’t know, especially when you’re up there and harnessed to the pole. I mean, you’re in a highly vulnerable position. And so, I really did have to, you know, pray on it quite a bit.

But part of why it was so important to me to do that was because, to me, that flag also represents just fear. You know, it’s racial intimidation. It’s fear. These are the same things that they would fly when people were marching for integration. They would be flying that flag, because it’s a sign of intimidation, which is undergirded by violence, and has been undergirded by violence ever since the failure of Reconstruction. And so, you know, that’s part of what Tamika was speaking to: To have a black woman climb up there, whether it was me or someone else, to climb up there and take that down was a strong sign of, you know, we refuse to be ruled by this fear.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Jimmy Tyson, how did you get involved?

JAMES TYSON: Well, I guess I was approached about a week beforehand. And a friend came up to me, and he said, "Hey, I’ve got this scouting report. I think we’re going to do something big." And I was like, "Let me take a look at it." And I was like, "Oh, man." I realized real rapidly. I was like, "Oh, man, this is going to be—this is going to be trouble." You know. But I was like so—I was so game for it. I was like, "Yeah, let’s do this. This is ridiculous." I’m so—like Bree was talking to, like I’m so sick of not only the fear and intimidation that white supremacy brings to our culture, you know, but also just that they didn’t—they wouldn’t even take it down for the funeral. They wouldn’t even lower it to half-mast, you know? is my interpretation. So I was like, "That’s completely unacceptable."

And when given an unjust law like that, it’s really important that we stand up for what’s right, you know, especially being a white person, you know, that maybe has their eyes open. And like, I’m not going to—I’m not going to—I’m going to try to do everything I possibly can, you know, to make sure that justice and equality are served in our country, but also, you know, just in my locality. You know? It’s critically important. It’s critically important that white people actually put some skin in the game, you know, because racism—racism is unacceptable. White supremacy is unacceptable. Hate crimes are unacceptable. You know, we can’t live in this culture anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: So, were you going to climb the flagpole also?

JAMES TYSON: No, no. I was willing to, but I think that the messaging behind having a black woman take it, and a white person, you know, take it from her and hold it, is almost speaking to, first of all, you know, we need more black heroes in our culture. But also, simultaneously, white people need to step up. We need to step up, and we actually have to be a part of making the change, because, guess what, white supremacy and racism is perpetuated by white people, right? So, it’s our responsibility, as well, to play a role, as well, in dismantling racism.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you from North Carolina?

JAMES TYSON: I am. I’m from Charlotte, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re going to talk more about where you come from, but I want to take us—you to take us to that morning. It’s Saturday morning. The funeral for Reverend and State Senator Clementa Pinckney had just taken place. Over 5,000 people were there in Charleston. Were you there, Bree?

BREE NEWSOME: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I did watch the eulogy the night before. In fact, somebody, you know, who knew that I was about to do this, they’re like, "You have to watch this. You have to watch this and, you know, really think on it." And it was just—I was hoping that somehow they would have the dignity to take the flag down before, you know, his casket passed by. But that day just—all the events of that day just further confirmed for me that we had to do this.

AMY GOODMAN: The Alabama governor did, the Republican governor of Alabama—

BREE NEWSOME: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —without ceremony, without saying anything beforehand. The workers came and took the flags down off the Capitol grounds.

BREE NEWSOME: And I feel that’s how it should be done, quite frankly. I don’t think that that symbol deserves the dignity of debate. It doesn’t deserve that. It’s a flag of treason, and it’s a flag of hatred.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to President Obama delivering the eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney at the College of Charleston on Friday.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Removing the flag from this state’s Capitol would not be an act of political correctness. It would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought—the cause of slavery—was wrong. The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people, was wrong. It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds. It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better, because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races striving to form a more perfect union. By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama on Friday giving the eulogy for Reverend Pinckney, who was the pastor of Mother Emanuel, of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where nine parishioners, nine churchgoers, were gunned down on June 17th, as the alleged shooter, Dylann Roof, said he wanted to kill black people, according to survivors. And then we saw the manifesto—it’s believed it was written by him—online as he further explained. Bree Newsome, listening to President Obama there, your thoughts, and as you did on Friday before you started your climb?

BREE NEWSOME: Yeah, just absolutely spot on. And I think that’s why it was so moving to people. I mean, you know, one of the things that was so tough about the immediate aftermath of the massacre was not just the violence itself, but the apparent, like, obfuscation about what had actually just happened, that it was a terrorist attack. You know, there were a lot of things being thrown out. Yes, it’s an issue of gun violence. You know, yes, it’s an issue of, you know, the church being targeted. But it’s specifically a black church. And I think it’s important that we not remove it from the historical context, like really understand what that means. This exists in a long line of terrorist attacks against African Americans in this country. That’s what domestic terrorism looks like in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You tweeted something very interesting more recently now with the black churches that are burning—

BREE NEWSOME: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —since the Charleston massacre, and you made a comparison to the burning of the CVS in Baltimore.

BREE NEWSOME: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve seen like when there was, you know, an uprising in Baltimore and a CVS burned, or a QuikTrip burned in Ferguson, I see tons of outrage of, you know, "How can you do this?" and "It’s horrible that they did that." But then we have like this series—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we see the building at every single angle as it burned.

BREE NEWSOME: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, every single angle, you know. But then all these black churches can burn, and it completely kind of goes under radar. Well, why is that? You know what I mean? But so often these events happen, and we remove them from any kind of context. And so, you know, if—maybe the CVS burning does look like a, you know, really horrible thing, but you’re not considering that this is a business that exists within an oppressed neighborhood where the people own nothing. They don’t really benefit a whole lot from this economic situation. They’ve been protesting for a long time, and they’ve gone unheard. And then you have all these black churches that are historically targeted because they are centers of black organization, and that’s important to understand.

AMY GOODMAN: So, President Obama says, "By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace." So, take us to Saturday, June 27th, about 15 hours after President Obama gave that eulogy.

BREE NEWSOME: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so not everybody that came together to do this action is coming from that Christian perspective. But, for me personally, absolutely 100 percent, I mean, I do believe that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights endowed by our creator, absolutely. And that flag is an affront to that value. And for people who, you know, think that there’s some kind of confusion about that, you can go back and read what was written by the people who created the Confederacy. They make it very clear that they seceded because they disagreed with that precept behind the Constitution. They don’t believe that all people are created equal.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you come up on the Columbia state Capitol grounds. What time was it in the morning?

BREE NEWSOME: It was about 5:30 that we were ready to go. And then we had some folks—

AMY GOODMAN: Were there any guards around the flag?

BREE NEWSOME: Yes, there were guards—yeah, there were guards around in the morning, and so we had some people, you know, looking out to kind of give us the clear. And it was probably about 6:00 by the time we got the clear and we were able to deploy.

AMY GOODMAN: And there were no guards there.

BREE NEWSOME: No, not at the moment that we made it over.

AMY GOODMAN: You hopped the fence?

BREE NEWSOME: Yes, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you have to go inside the fence grounds also?

JAMES TYSON: Oh, yeah, yeah. I helped her over the fence, and then I climbed over. And then I helped her get her gear onto the pole.

BREE NEWSOME: Yeah.

JAMES TYSON: And, you know, basically what I was doing at that point, we knew that we needed to get her high enough above the ground before the guards would come out, that she wouldn’t be able to just be pulled right off. And so that was the primary focus at that point.

BREE NEWSOME: Yeah.

JAMES TYSON: And once she was up, I just started scanning and waiting for the cops, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: How long did it take, Bree?

BREE NEWSOME: To scale all the way to the top?

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.

BREE NEWSOME: I think about 10 minutes.

AMY GOODMAN: And how long did the guard—take for the guards to notice?

BREE NEWSOME: Maybe within five minutes.

JAMES TYSON: Three to five.

BREE NEWSOME: Maybe less than that, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, had you ever climbed a flagpole before?

BREE NEWSOME: No, I had never climbed a flagpole until two days before.

AMY GOODMAN: Was it hard?

BREE NEWSOME: The very first attempt was hard. By the time I was going, and probably helped with adrenaline, it didn’t seem hard.

AMY GOODMAN: So you practiced two days before.

BREE NEWSOME: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: So this is 30 feet high, this flagpole.

BREE NEWSOME: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You made your way to the top. And what did you do then?

BREE NEWSOME: First of all, I was just relieved at how simple it was to just unhook it, because our intention was not to cause property damage. We were really trying to do as little disturbance, beyond, you know, simply removing the flag, as possible, and so I was just so glad to see that all I had to do was just unhook it. From there, it was just, you know, amazing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I’m going to play the clip, as you’re coming down.

BREE NEWSOME: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: The police officers are telling you to get down. This is Bree Newsome on the flagpole, taking down the Confederate flag that has flown on the flagpole, either there, from 2000, or on the top of the state Capitol, from 1961, I think it was.

BREE NEWSOME: You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today!

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what it is you were saying as you were holding the Confederate flag on your way down.

BREE NEWSOME: Well, I was kind of having a bit of a back-and-forth with the police officer, who was basically just scolding me for having broken the law and, you know, for having done the wrong thing. And, you know, in the long history of social justice, freedom fighters were always blamed for stirring the trouble up, because, you know, the problem’s not there until we acknowledge it. And, you know, I was just having the conversation with him that, yeah, you know, I came prepared to be arrested. I mainly just wanted to let them know that there wasn’t going to be any escalation. I didn’t want to escalate the situation at all.

AMY GOODMAN: Had they taken you by now?

JAMES TYSON: No, they actually—I told them—I told them that I was not—first, I said, "I’m not going to leave until Bree is safely off the pole. The safest way to get her off the pole is to allow her to descend via her own volition." And so, it wasn’t until after she was down that I was actually placed in cuffs. They had enough respect to allow me to help her.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you say as you were coming down? What was the prayer that you cited?

BREE NEWSOME: Well, there was one point at which the officer told me that, you know, I was doing the wrong thing. And so, you know, I quoted from Isaiah: "What kind of fast have I chosen? Is it not to break the yoke of oppression?" So, I felt in no way that I was doing the wrong thing. Yes, I broke the law, but laws can also be unjust. And I feel that the law that protects that symbol of hate is an unjust law. The fact that, you know, the people who are elected in office who want to take it down are obligated by law to debate over whether or not they can take it down is unjust. And so, I was just being very clear about that. And I was also just praying a prayer of protection over myself. Fortunately, the police were very professional with me. But, you know, that was something else to consider, that there was some danger.

AMY GOODMAN: You said, as we try to make it out, as you came down, in the film, "You come against me with hatred"?

BREE NEWSOME: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you repeat what you said?

BREE NEWSOME: Yes. I said, "You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God." And that was—in one of those nights where I was pondering, "Have I completely lost my mind in doing this?" I read the story of David and Goliath. And David says to Goliath, you know, "You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, and I come against you in the name of the lord." And that, for me, as a black woman in America, I mean, that’s what that moment—that’s what that moment felt like, because I come from a historically completely disempowered place. And so, I think that’s why it was so powerful to a lot of people, especially to black women, to see me up there holding that flag in that way.

AMY GOODMAN: You said, "I come against you in the name of God."

BREE NEWSOME: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And then?

BREE NEWSOME: "This flag comes down today."

AMY GOODMAN: And how did that feel to say that?

BREE NEWSOME: Amazing. Just amazing on a personal level at that point, and then, just in the aftermath, to see what it meant to so many people, because I think a moment like that, it’s not just about that Confederate flag, it’s really about like every person who has been oppressed, you know, kind of like taking a stand against any kind of symbol of oppression.