Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
June 1, 2020
Hello All – Concerned Families of Westchester condemns the killing of George Floyd and calls for the arrest and trial of the four police officers responsible for his death. Responding to the dismay and anger expressed by thousands of Americans, we also call for a nationwide investigation of the causes of police violence against African-Americans, an investigation directed towards ending the impunity of police by defunding police departments and transferring much of the responsibility for public safety to nonviolent, community-based strategies.
Recorded on video seen by millions of people around the world, the killing of George Floyd was the result of a needless and sadistic "arrest" by four police officers. Culminating a series of similar killings of African Americans by white police officers, Floyd's murder confirms that in communities of color, the police operate within a tradition and culture of white supremacy to terrorize and humiliate what they view as a dangerous underclass. Police in the United States should not have the authority to decide whether a suspect is guilty or innocent. That is up to the courts. And the police certainly do not have the authority to decide whether someone in custody lives or dies. By continuing to treat "suspects" unequally based on race, the police broadcast to all that people of color cannot expect, nor do they deserve, equal justice. This must stop.
Moreover, the killing of George Floyd comes in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and the breakdown of our economy, underscoring the decline of legitimate authority in the United States. These twin crises have revealed that the real fault lines in our country are structured along the lines of race and class. Indeed, our government builds walls of hate around the USA to prevent people of color from immigrating or seeking refugee, while failing to protect people of color in their ghettos, their prisons, or their nursing homes against the coronavirus. This must change.
Finally, Concerned Families of Westchester supports and applauds the nationwide uprising in response to George Floyd's murder, in Minneapolis and elsewhere. We understand that injustice for African Americans is also an injustice for all Americans. Our protests must continue until justice is restored.
News Note
This morning Andom Ghebreghirgis, a progressive candidate for Congress, withdrew from the Democratic congressional primary contest in the 16th Congressional District and endorsed the other progressive in the race, Jamaal Bowman. CFOW got to know Andom when he spoke to our group and when he joined us for rallies. We liked him very much, especially for his boldness in addressing issues of war and imperialism. We also admire his decision to step aside so that progressives can focus our efforts on one candidate – Jamaal Bowman – in order to defeat Eliot Engel. You can watch Andom's moving concession speech here and read a useful article from The Intercept –"Progressive Jamaal Bowman Hits Israel Hawk Eliot Engel's Defense Industry Backing" – that touches on many of the reasons why we think Eliot Engel poses a danger to the world.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Until shut down by the virus, we have been meeting for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, from 12 to 1 p.m., at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) In this time of coronavirus, we are meeting (by Zoom conference) each Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. If you would like to join our meeting, please send a return email to get the meeting's access code. Our weekly newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. And if you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
These are heavy times. Let's listen to Sweet Honey in the Rock with "Ella's Song" (after Ella Baker, our Teacher in the civil rights movement long ago). I think you will also like their renditions of "On Children"; "Eye on the Prize"; and "Stay on the Battlefield." Fortify.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
The Uprising
(Video) A Class Rebellion: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on How Racism & Racial Terrorism Fueled Nationwide Anger
From Democracy Now! [June 1, 2020]
[FB - Today, Democracy Now! hosted a roundtable about George Floyd, the ensuing protests, and the significance of this for the USA. Speakers also included Cornell West, writer Bakari Sellers, and Women's March activist Tamika Mallory.]
---- In the largest nationwide uprising since the 1960s, protesters shut down cities across the United States over the weekend following the police killing of George Floyd, an African American man in Minneapolis. "These are not just repeats of past events," says scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. "These are the consequences of the failures of this government and the political establishment … to resolve these crises." [See the Program]
An American Uprising
k, The New Yorker [May 31, 2020]
---- "A riot is the language of the unheard." This is how Martin Luther King, Jr., explained matters to Mike Wallace, of CBS News, in 1966. That language is now being heard across the United States with an uprising that began in Minneapolis and has spread to dozens of American cities, where there have been hundreds of arrests, curfews declared, National Guard troops summoned. The proximate cause is the video images of yet another black man killed by an officer of the law, the death of George Perry Floyd outside Cup Foods, on Thirty-eighth Street and Chicago Avenue South. Floyd joins Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice—a lineage that goes back decades in the American story. But before he was a horrific video image, an entry in the history of injustice, George Floyd was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and came to Houston with his mother when he was very young.
Riot or Resistance? How Media Frames Unrest in Minneapolis Will Shape Public's View of Protest
By
[FB – IMO this is a valuable introduction to how the mainstream media covers protests, and how their coverage varies with the issue driving the protests. – Over the past week, the mainstream media has moved from a perspective largely sympathetic to the protesters' demands for justice for George Floyd to one largely sympathetic to the efforts of the police to control the demonstrations, including stigmatizing all conflict as "violence" and raising red herrings like "outside agitators." Check out this useful & timely primer.]
---- The general public's opinions about protests and the social movements behind them are formed in large part by what they read or see in the media. This gives journalists a lot of power when it comes to driving the narrative of a demonstration. They can emphasize the disruption protests cause or echo the dog whistles of politicians that label protesters as "thugs." But they can also remind the public that at the heart of the protests is the unjust killing of another black person. This would take the emphasis away from the destruction of the protests and toward the issues of police impunity and the effects of racism in its many forms. The role journalists play can be indispensable if movements are to gain legitimacy and make progress. And that puts a lot of pressure on journalists to get things right. My co-author Summer Harlow and I have studied how local and metropolitan newspapers cover protests. We found that narratives about the Women's March and anti-Trump protests gave voice to protesters and significantly explored their grievances. On the other end of the spectrum, protests about anti-black racism and indigenous people's rights received the least legitimizing coverage, with them more often seen as threatening and violent.
The Only Solution Is to Defund the Police
By Alex S. Vitale, The Nation [May 30, 2020]
---- Many of these reforms have been implemented in Minneapolis. In 2018, the City issued a report outlining all the procedural justice reforms it has embraced, like mindfulness training, Crisis Intervention Training, implicit bias training, body cameras, early warning systems to identify problematic officers, and so on. They have made no difference. In fact, local activist groups like Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and MPD 150 have rejected more training and oversight as a solution and are now calling on Mayor Jacob Frey to cut the police budget by $45 million and shift those resources into "community-led health and safety strategies." … It is time for the federal government, major foundations, and local governments to stop trying to manage problems of poverty and racial discrimination by wasting millions of dollars on pointless and ineffective procedural reforms that merely provide cover for the expanded use of policing. It's time for everyone to quit thinking that jailing one more killer cop will do anything to change the nature of American policing. We must move, instead, to significantly defund the police and redirect resources into community-based initiatives that can produce real safety and security without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system. The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of Police Reform" by Alice Speri, et al., The Intercept [
Annals of the Plague Year
How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus
t, The New Yorker [June 1, 2020]
---- Iceland never imposed a lockdown. Only a few types of businesses—night clubs and hair salons, for example—were ever ordered closed. Hardly anyone in Reykjavík wears a mask. And yet, by mid-May, the tracing team had almost no one left to track. During the previous week, in all of Iceland, only two new coronavirus cases had been confirmed. The country hadn't just managed to flatten the curve; it had, it seemed, virtually eliminated it. …. I asked [the prime minister] why she thought Iceland had done so much better at dealing with COVID-19 than so many other countries. "We were following the news from China very closely," she said. "So we started our preparations long before the first case tested positive here in Iceland. And it was very clear from the beginning that this was something that should be led by experts—by scientific and medical experts." She went on, "And the experts, they were very humble. They were saying, 'We really don't know everything about this virus.' And I think one of the strengths of the process is that we just said, 'Well, we don't know what is going to happen next.' " [Read More]
In a Pandemic, Finding New and Old Ways To Fight New and Old Foes
By Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes [May 26, 2020]
----Workers this spring were forced to find new ways to assert their rights when faced with a deadly foe and employers indifferent to their lives. Sometimes they resorted to the oldest trick in labor's book, the strike, especially wildcat strikes early on in the pandemic, and especially non-union workers. Sometimes they were forced to organize and protest virtually, making the most of social media. And the car caravan was reborn as an appropriately distanced tactic. Of course, the vast majority of workers in the U.S. were shell-shocked: laid off, working shorter hours or longer ones, scared to death when they were forced to come to work, overwhelmed. But here's how some organized, union and non-union, and what they were fighting for. [Protections and hazard pay; demanding shutdown, etc.]
Who Cares? Now, All of Us Must [Domestic Workers]
By Ai-jen Poo, New York Review of Books [May 27, 2020]
---- I came to realize in a series of waves the enormous impact this pandemic would have on the domestic workforce. The first was quite early on, before the travel ban, school closures, and state shutdowns. One of my colleagues at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), of which I am the director, was in one of our regular meetings with house cleaners where we discuss organizational strategies and hear directly from our members. One by one, workers began describing clients' cancelling jobs due to the coronavirus, leaving cleaners with no idea if, or when, those clients might resume their hiring. Shortly after, another colleague told me she'd heard similar reports in a meeting with domestic workers who find work in the gig economy. One worker held her phone up to her computer screen to show everyone on the Zoom call her bank balance: one cent. As we listened to our members, our team quickly realized that the public health crisis had caused an unprecedented wave of job and income loss, with enormous implications for America's workforce, especially its most precarious and vulnerable workers. For the 2.2 million domestic workers in the United States, work—by definition—takes place in someone else's home. "Working from home" is not an option…. That is when it dawned on me that the pandemic had created something that we at the NDWA have sought to create for decades: mass public awareness about the importance of care work. We had not, as a nation, recognized how essential caregivers are—whether family members or professional workers—to the very fabric of our society and the infrastructure of our economy. That is, until now. [Read More]
Basic Needs Under Attack – "'People are going to go hungry': pandemic effects could leave 54m Americans without food" by Nina Lakhani, The Guardian [UK] [May 31, 2020] An 'Avalanche of Evictions' Could Be Bearing Down on America's Renters," by May 27, 2020] [Link]
Featured Essays
Workers Need a 'Newer Deal' to Tackle This Crisis
By Nomi Prins, The Nation [May 29, 2020]
---- Many economists believe that a recession is already underway. So do millions of Americans struggling with bills and job losses. While the ghosts of the 2008 financial crisis that sent inequality soaring to new heights in this country are still with us, it's become abundantly clear that the economic disaster brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has already left the initial shock of that crisis in the dust. While the world has certainly experienced its share of staggering jolts in the past, this cycle of events is likely to prove unparalleled. The swiftness with which the coronavirus has stolen lives and crippled the economy has been both devastating and unprecedented in living memory. Whatever happens from this moment on, a new and defining chapter in the history of the world is being written right now and we are that history.
Loving Hong Kong
By Wilfred Chan, The Nation [May 23, 2020]
---- Twenty-three years after the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong, the Chinese government has announced that it is imposing a long-dreaded "national security" law on the territory, effectively criminalizing dissent. Just as stunning as the content of the law is how it will be passed: Instead of moving through Hong Kong's legislature—which is already rigged in favor of the city's unpopular pro-Beijing establishment—the law will be enacted unilaterally by China's top lawmaking body, the National People's Congress Standing Committee. It's a declaration of both the law's incontestability and Beijing's total authority over Hong Kong and its people. Something profound has been lost. It is not democracy, because Hong Kong was never democratic. It is not autonomy, because Hong Kong never enjoyed self-determination. It is certainly not the will to resist; as I write this, activists are already planning a full calendar of mass protests, determined to fight until the bitter end. What is lost is the feeling that Hong Kong's future could be an open question. China's apparent answer marks the beginning of a new disorientation.
"1948" Palestinians Believe The Moment Has Arrived: One Democratic State
By Steve France, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs [July-July 2020]
---- Zionists have long enjoyed the disunity of the Palestinians, which they have stoked and highlighted over the decades. One of their greatest successes has been to isolate Palestinian citizens of Israel from other Palestinians, while concealing the oppression of "Israeli Arabs" under Israel's settler-colonial regime. That isolation is waning, however, key leaders of resistance to the Israeli policies say. With the demise of Oslo's long-moribund two-state solution, soon to be formally interred by Israel's U.S.-endorsed annexation plan for the West Bank, the situation for the Palestinians may have "returned to its [pre-1948] existential roots," when all faced the same threat of exile or subjugation. That was the response, in February, of more than 80 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). To be "disappeared" and dispossessed has been the reality of the '48 Palestinians for 72 years, living as a despised non-Jewish minority in the Jewish State. Perhaps this experience accounts for the strength of their political vision in this moment. They, along with Israeli Jews of conscience, are calling for "One Democratic State" (ODS) for all the people, and they are beginning to be heard. However, ODS is still not a movement, according to Awad Abdelfattah, coordinator of the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC), one of several groups sharing the ODS vision. His ODSC colleague, Dr. Jeff Halper, an American-Israeli Jew and founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, agreed. The two were interviewed online in April by Mike Spath, director of the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace in Fort Wayne, IN. Israeli Annexation Explained: What Is Netanyahu Planning for the West Bank and What Does It Mean?" Haaretz [Israel] [May 30, 2020] [Link]
Our History
(Video) 10 year anniversary of Israeli Attack on the Mavi Marmara/Gaza Freedom Flotilla
---- Today is the 10th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the boat Mavi Marmara, which sought to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza by bringing civilian relief supplies. 10 people were killed by Israelis and many more were wounded. This is an excellent presentation of the events and significance of that day, with some of the passengers on the Mavi Marmara and with Norman Finkelstein, one of our most astute observers/educators re: Israel/Palestine.
Remembering Larry Kramer, Who Had the Courage to Act on His Fear
n, The New Yorker May 28, 2020
---- The AIDS activist, who has died at the age of eighty-four, had a vision both catastrophic and hopeful. … That was the way ACT UP began. In March, 1987, a scheduled talk by the writer Nora Ephron at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in New York was cancelled, and Larry was asked to step in. He called everyone whose number he had and asked them to come, promising that he had something very important to say. … The ACT UP slogan was, "Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!" Assorted direct-action and art-activist efforts had been congealing in the city around that time. But that night they all came together, in fear and fury, around Larry's vision, at once catastrophic and hopeful. He could imagine the worst like no one else. But he also believed that the worst could be staved off with action. In the 1993 speech, he said, "Despite the dreadful words I just said, I am a person of optimism and a person of hope." [Read More] For more about Larry Kramer, here is the Democracy Now! program memorializing him and his work: "'Fight Back!': ACT UP Members & Tony Kushner Remember Trailblazing AIDS Activist Larry Kramer" [May 28, 2020].
