This week, 8 to 12 April, has marked the 27th annual observance of Holocaust Memorial Week. The week is about remembering not only the six million Jews murdered but also remembering the millions of allies, martyrs and victims who survived Nazi Germany’s reign of brutality.

The enormity of the mass slaughtering of Jews that took place – in ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, brothels filled with sex slaves and killing factories – is still being discovered as documents are unearthed.

New scholarship revealed that, from 1933 to 1945, there were at least 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe. This represents a staggering increase, far exceeding the original guesstimate.

Thank goodness the stories of the millions of allies, martyrs and victims who survived Nazi Germany continue to be told.

On 11 April, City of Cambridge Annual Commemoration of the Holocaust guest speaker was Holocaust survivor Edgar Krása. Krása told his remarkable story of survival. Krása, who ran the Veronique restaurant at Longwood in Brookline, Massachusetts, US, was born in Carlsbad, Czechoslovakia, and moved to Prague in 1933 with his family.

In 1941, Krása was on the first train to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezín, now known as the Czech Republic, to help set up the garrison city into a concentration camp. Under Nazi control, Krása was ordered to set up the kitchen that fed prisoners-of-war, and he worked there until 1944 when he was deported to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, Krása walked in the notorious Death March and survived it by feigning death after being shot.

Missing, however, from the annals of history are the documented stories and struggles of African Americans, straight and ‘queer’. Valaida Snow, captured in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and interned in a concentration camp for nearly two years, is one such story forgotten.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Valaida Snow came from a family of musicians and was famous for playing the trumpet. Named ‘Little Louis’ after Louis Armstrong (who called her the world’s second best jazz trumpet player, besides himself, of course), Snow played concerts throughout the US, Europe and China.

On a return trip to Denmark after headlining at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Snow, the conductor of an all-women’s band, was arrested for allegedly possessing drugs and sent to an Axis internment camp for alien nationals in Wester-Faengle.

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Imagine a World Without Hate (Official Video) (by ADLNational)

Powerful. Imagine if these people were still with us today.

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Join ADL in our Centennial Year as we Imagine a World Without Hate™, one where the hate crimes against Martin Luther King, Anne Frank, Matthew Shepard and others did not take place. Support us in the fight against bigotry and extremism by sharing this inspirational video and taking the pledge to create a world without hate at http://www.adl.org/imagine.

(via Rachel Maddow: Police chief discusses apology for civil rights era shortcomings)

This is just wrong on so many levels. Schools are meant to educate, not incarcerate.

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By Guest Blogger on Dec 13, 2012 at 10:05 am

Our guest blogger is Aisha Moodie-Mills, advisor on LGBT Policy and Racial Justice at the Center for American Progress.

The U.S. Senate held a landmark hearing Wednesday on ending the nation’s school-to-prison pipeline that affirmed that gay and transgender youth also face harsher punishments in schools than other students, which disproportionately pipeline them into the juvenile justice system.

Senator Dick Durbin, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights, which hosted the hearing, acknowledged in his opening statement that harsh school sanctions — such as zero-tolerance policies — do indeed have a disparate impact on LGBT youth, just as they do on racial and ethnic minorities.  He stated for the record that:

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students are more likely to be disciplined [in schools] and arrested than their peers.

This marks the first time LGBT youth have been officially included in federal efforts to end the school-to-prison pipeline.

According to a report this summer by the Center for American Progress:

• Gay and transgender youth, particularly gender nonconforming girls, are up to three times more likely to experience harsh disciplinary treatment by school administrators than their heterosexual counterparts.

• As with racial disparities in school discipline, these higher rates of punishment do not correlate to higher rates of misbehavior among gay and transgender youth.

• LGBT youth make up 13-15 percent of the juvenile justice system, even though they make-up only 5–7 percent of the population overall, and 60 percent of these youth are black or Latino.

• This high rate of contact with the system is due in part to harsh school sanctions often based on their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.

School discipline policies across the United States have been under heightened scrutiny because of the disparate impact they have on youth of color, particularly black boys. Data released this spring from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights revealed that rigid school discipline policies — which lead to suspensions and expulsions of students for even the most minor offenses — perpetuate a school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately criminalizes youth of color.

But hidden among these school discipline data are thousands of gay and transgender youth, particularly those of color, who bear a double burden of disparate impact but are rendered all but invisible because this federal data does not include information on sexual orientation and gender identity.

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Evan Low

At 26, Evan Low became mayor of Campbell, making him the country’s youngest, openly-gay Asian-American elected to public office.

Campbell’s openly gay, Asian-American vice mayor said on Monday he was verbally assaulted by a woman this weekend on his way to a community festival for his race and for his sexual orientation.

Evan Low told NBC Bay Area that a woman came up to him on Saturday about 3 p.m. as he was heading toward the annual Oktoberfest festivities on Campbell Avenue.

“She pointed her finger at me in the shape of a gun and said, “Bang (expletive), die. Go back to China, you will die,” Low said. The expletive was a derogatory word for a gay man.

Low said the loud hatred lasted five minutes.

“I thought it was a joke because it was so random that this woman was screaming at the top of her lungs,” Low said in a phone interview. “It was so strange and out of the blue, but after a while I came to find out it was not a joke.”

Campbell Police Capt. Dave Carmichael said police have identified a suspect, but no one has been arrested. It’s a misdemeanor to use words in public to provoke violence.

“It’s unfortunate that people would choose to behave in that way,” Carmichael said.
 
Low is especially keen on hate crime issues, and it pains him that people still act this way. Low has been profiled by several media outlets about his youth - he became mayor at age 26, and because he was also Campbell’s first Chinese-American, openly gay mayor. During the day, he works for state Assemblyman Paul Fong.

He has worked hard to educate people about hate crimes and to combat this type of prejudice. Still, these types of verbal attacks do take place, even in the liberal Bay Area.

“We need to acknowledge that this happens and we all need to have respect for humanity,” Low said.

Still, this unpleasant incident did have a silver lining. Lots of people stood by Low when they saw what happened.
 
“Without even knowing I was mayor, several bystanders came to my defense, jeering back at her, telling her to stop and one person even spit on her car,” Low said.

(via Rachel Maddow: Scott Browns racial politics crosses line)

In which Rachel Maddow calls out Scott Brown’s campaign operatives for their racist attacks on Elizabeth Warren.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: MHP’s guide for ‘how white people can talk about Trayvon Martin’

03/27/2012

Melissa Harris-Perry talks with Margaret Cho about body image, gender, racism and activism.

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An attorney for the family of Trayvon Martin, the teenager shot to death last month by a neighborhood watch captain in an Orlando, Fla., suburb, said police withheld the shooter’s violent past from the slain youth’s family.

Police initially told Martin’s family that George Zimmerman, 28, admitted to shooting Martin, 17, on Feb. 26, after he called 911 and reported a suspicious person, said the attorney, Benjamin Crump. Zimmerman said the shooting was in self-defense, police said.

Zimmerman, who is white, has not been charged in the death of Martin, who was black. Police in Sanford, where the shooting occurred, told Martin’s family that Zimmerman had a “squeaky-clean” record and that’s why they had not arrested him, according to Tracy Martin, the teen’s father.

Crump said public records show that Zimmerman was arrested in Orange County in 2005 on charges of resisting arrest with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer.

“They just lied to the family,” Crump said. “They just couldn’t see why [Zimmerman] would do anything wrong or be violent. But not only do you know the guy killed this kid, because he admitted to it, you knew that he has a propensity for violence because of his past record.”

The Orange County Clerk of Courts website shows a man named George Zimmerman, 28, was charged in July 2005 with resisting arrest with violence and battery on an officer. The charges appear to have been dropped.

An email to Sanford Chief Bill Lee was not immediately returned on Friday evening. A phone number for Zimmerman has been disconnected. He could not be reached for comment.

In an interview with HuffPost on Thursday, Tracy Martin said that when he asked police why Zimmerman hadn’t been charged, officers told him “they respected [Zimmerman’s] background, that he studied criminal justice for four years and that he was squeaky clean.” He continued: “My question to them was, did they run my child’s background check? They said yes. I asked them what they came up with, and they said nothing. So I asked if Zimmerman had a clean record, did that give him the right to shoot and kill an unarmed kid?”

Crump has asked law enforcement officials to turn over the 911 tapes recorded the night Martin was killed. He has since filed a public records lawsuit to get the recordings.

The teenager was on his way back from a convenience store during halftime of the NBA All-Star game when Zimmerman began following him in his car, police said.

Chief Lee on Thursday said that Zimmerman called 911 and reported a suspicious person. “For some reason he felt that Trayvon, the way that he was walking or appeared, seemed suspicious to him,” Lee told HuffPost. “He called this in and at one part of this initial call [the dispatcher] recommends him not to follow Trayvon. A police officer is on the way at that point.”

Lee said Zimmerman instead followed Martin. A confrontation ensued, and soon after he shot the teen, the chief said.

   

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

“Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood,” he said.

Controversy ahead

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

“The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this,” Nosek said, referring to the new study. “It’s not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists.”

Brains and bias

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step. The researchers turned to two studies of citizens in the United Kingdom, one that has followed babies since their births in March 1958, and another that did the same for babies born in April 1970. The children in the studies had their intelligence assessed at age 10 or 11; as adults ages 30 or 33, their levels of social conservatism and racism were measured.

In the first study, verbal and nonverbal intelligence was measured using tests that asked people to find similarities and differences between words, shapes and symbols. The second study measured cognitive abilities in four ways, including number recall, shape-drawing tasks, defining words and identifying patterns and similarities among words. Average IQ is set at 100.

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as “Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,” and “Schools should teach children to obey authority.” Attitudes toward other races were captured by measuring agreement with statements such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races.” (These questions measured overt prejudiced attitudes, but most people, no matter how egalitarian, do hold unconscious racial biases; Hodson’s work can’t speak to this “underground” racism.)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

“This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice,” said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

A study of averages

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren’t implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said.

“There are multiple examples of very bright conservatives and not-so-bright liberals, and many examples of very principled conservatives and very intolerant liberals,” Hodson said.

Nosek gave another example to illustrate the dangers of taking the findings too literally.

“We can say definitively men are taller than women on average,” he said. “But you can’t say if you take a random man and you take a random woman that the man is going to be taller. There’s plenty of overlap.”

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

“Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,” Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. “Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice.”

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link.

Simple viewpoints

Hodson and Busseri’s explanation of their findings is reasonable, Nosek said, but it is correlational. That means the researchers didn’t conclusively prove that the low intelligence caused the later prejudice. To do that, you’d have to somehow randomly assign otherwise identical people to be smart or dumb, liberal or conservative. Those sorts of studies obviously aren’t possible.

The researchers controlled for factors such as education and socioeconomic status, making their case stronger, Nosek said. But there are other possible explanations that fit the data. For example, Nosek said, a study of left-wing liberals with stereotypically naïve views like “every kid is a genius in his or her own way,” might find that people who hold these attitudes are also less bright. In other words, it might not be a particular ideology that is linked to stupidity, but extremist views in general.

“My speculation is that it’s not as simple as their model presents it,” Nosek said. “I think that lower cognitive capacity can lead to multiple simple ways to represent the world, and one of those can be embodied in a right-wing ideology where ‘People I don’t know are threats’ and ‘The world is a dangerous place’. … Another simple way would be to just assume everybody is wonderful.”

Prejudice is of particular interest because understanding the roots of racism and bias could help eliminate them, Hodson said. For example, he said, many anti-prejudice programs encourage participants to see things from another group’s point of view. That mental exercise may be too taxing for people of low IQ.

“There may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others, particularly foreigners,” Hodson said. “Much of the present research literature suggests that our prejudices are primarily emotional in origin rather than cognitive. These two pieces of information suggest that it might be particularly fruitful for researchers to consider strategies to change feelings toward outgroups,” rather than thoughts.

Why Black Gay and Transgender Americans Need More Than Marriage Equality

SOURCE: Lambda Legal/Leslie Von Pless

While some states and the federal government continue to expand protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, more than half of all states still deny them basic civil rights. Such systemic inequities render people of color who are also gay and transgender among the most vulnerable in our society.

By Aisha C. Moodie-Mills | January 19, 2012

Download this report (pdf)

Download the introduction and summary (pdf)

Read the full report in your web browser (Scribd)

Liberty and justice for all is not yet a reality in America. Despite the election of our nation’s first African American president, black Americans continue to trail behind their white counterparts in education, employment, and overall health and wellbeing. And while some states and the federal government continue to expand protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, more than half of all states still deny them basic civil rights. Such systemic inequities render people of color who are also gay and transgender among the most vulnerable in our society.

Black gay and transgender Americans in particular experience stark social, economic, and health disparities compared to the general population and their straight black and white gay counterparts. According to the data we currently have, families headed by black same-sex couples are more likely to raise their children in poverty, black lesbians are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases, and black gay and transgender youth are more likely to end up homeless and living on the streets.

These issues, along with the others laid out in this report, can and should be addressed through a policy agenda that seeks to understand and tackle the structural barriers—discriminatory systems, conditions, and institutions around socioeconomic status, race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity—that perpetuate negative economic, health, and other life outcomes among this population. The strength of our society depends on the resilience, health, and wellbeing of all Americans, especially marginalized groups such as black gay and transgender people. They too deserve to be counted and to have their needs met, so we must work to bridge these gaps.

Doing so will require fresh thinking about the root causes of these problems as well as the political will needed to employ new strategies to address them. As this report highlights, the quality of life of many black gay and transgender people remained relatively unchanged over the last decade despite the significant gains the gay and transgender movement achieved. This suggests that some of the gay headline policy priorities that garnered the most research, analysis, and advocacy—such as marriage equality—underserve this population when taken alone even though they are important for overall progress. This also applies to broad racial justice priorities that overlook gay and transgender people within their constituencies.

In short, black gay and transgender people fall through the cracks when lumped under either a gay or black umbrella. Such categorical thinking ignores the fact that black gay and transgender people are at once both gay and transgender and black. As a result they experience complex vulnerabilities that stem from the combination of racial bias and discrimination due to their sexual orientation and/ or gender identity. So advocacy agendas that prioritize the eradication of one bias over the other do not fully respond to the needs of the population—nor will they eliminate the inequities discussed in this report.

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