A Short History of “Black Paranoia”

[American Dream]

Reasons to be cheerful:

Big League Politics Promotes Black Neo-Confederate Who Refers To Slavery As A ‘Blessing’ And Defends The Klan



On August 20, 2018, students at the University of North Carolina finally pulled down “Silent Sam” — a monument to Confederate war dead that was erected in 1913.

CONTINUE READING

[American Dream]

https://vimeo.com/289928207

Trouble #15: And You Don’t Stop

By submedia.tv - September 25, 201877

A look at the evolution of hip-hop as it has evolved over the decades and been informed by the realities of capitalism, white supremacy, and beyond.

It’s often said that hip hop is more than just a type of music…. it’s a way of life. A code, a set of practices, an aesthetic and a way of handling yourself. And despite the efforts of industry executives to commodify it and strip it of its subversive potential, hip hop remains a lifestyle firmly rooted in the daily struggles faced by oppressed peoples around the world. It is a weapon, masquerading as culture.

In this month’s episode of Trouble, subMedia explores hip hop as a potent site of revolutionary politics, drawing on the first-hand knowledge and experiences of some of Turtle Island’s baddest grassroots emcees: Ant Loc, Mic Crenshaw, La Marea, Sima Lee, Lee Reed and Mare.

Just a heads up that some of the dialogue in the film is in Spanish, so for English speakers we recommend turning on the subtitles by clicking CC on the video player, and/or downloading the SRT file – particularly if you plan on using a hard copy of the video for screening purposes.

As a bonus, The Stimulator brings us a very special sedition of Burning Cop Car, featuring the music of the emcees we interviewed for Trouble #15. Click here to check it out.

[American Dream]

Asylum, Again: Why We Need to Stop Punishing the Mentally Ill

By Taylor Beck

ONE NIGHT, a man was pounding on a Dunkin’ Donuts window. Dreadlocked and in dirty clothes, he yelled incoherently as I walked home in Brooklyn. Inside, the tired staff kept serving customers, immune to the noise. I thought of the homeless guy, toothless, who lurches into the local bodega and gets cussed out. And of the New York subway cars, routinely cleared out by a filthy man, defecating, urinating, or masturbating in his seat. The delusional woman who once pushed a stranger onto the tracks. And the boy with a knife.

Where I live, the helpless sick often live on the street. This is true across the United States: the “battered bleak of brain,” as Allen Ginsberg called them, are homeless or incarcerated. Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn tells a story common from here to Chicago to Los Angeles.

Fathers are missing from many homes near mine. Most are black, like most of our neighborhood and 37 percent of US prisoners. Today, New York is home to more African Americans than almost any other state. This wasn’t always so: In 1900, 90 percent of black Americans lived in places like Virginia, where I grew up, and Alabama, where my family has lived for centuries. But when six million descendants of slaves left the South, between World War I and 1970, they were trailed by poverty and prejudice: by bias in real estate, schools, and policing. Drained by white flight, Bedford-Stuyvesant was blighted by heroin and crack. The area’s leafy streets became scenes of gang violence. In 1990, Bedford-Stuyvesant saw 120 murders, one every third day. The race riot of 1991 was nearby in Crown Heights. More common than violence, though, were drugs and arrests of young black men. In New York, black men are arrested at eight times higher rates for marijuana possession than whites, The New York Times found. In 2016, Harper’s published an exposé, quoting a Nixon aide: “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did,” John Erlichman told an interviewer years before. “by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” So they did.

One in three black men in the United States will spend time incarcerated, the Bureau of Justice Statistics predicted in 2001. This is old news. What gets less attention is another injustice: the gap in how America treats — or, more often, punishes — the mentally ill. Today in the United States, the three biggest providers of mental health care are not hospitals, but prisons.

One recent morning my neighbor walked in behind me at our local cafe. A fortysomething father, with a teenage daughter bound for boarding school, he and his wife are friends of mine — stoop-chat, neighbor-dinner friends. As we stirred our coffees, I showed him the cover of Kanye West’s new album: the words “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome” handwritten across a photo of Wyoming mountains. “Good to see,” he said. “In our community, it’s not possible; you can’t have any mental weakness.” On the sidewalk outside, he paused a moment. Then he added, “I remember the first time I had a panic attack. The EMTs kept asking me was I on drugs. I’ve never taken drugs in my life!”

The fact is that mental illness in our country is criminalized, if you happen to be poor or black — if you are the homeless man on the subway, rambling about God or the CIA; or the shouting black youth, gunned down by police; or the white fireman in a hotel elevator, manic and naked, but otherwise harmless. We no longer have a place for such people, not since the 1960s. That’s when we quit housing the mentally ill in hospitals, allegedly to spare them bedlam. We’ve come full circle: in colonial times, the insane were housed with criminals, until reformers pushed for something more humane. Now, our prisons are packed once again with the mentally ill.

What’s wrong with us? This question drives Alisa Roth’s new book, Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness. One in five Americans has a mental illness; and one in 25 a “serious” condition like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Yet 50 percent of the mentally ill go untreated — half of them because they can’t afford it. Access to treatment is varied: black and Latino people are far less likely to seek help or get treated than whites. And when they do see doctors, minorities are more likely to be misdiagnosed. In black men especially, mental illness is often taboo or misunderstood: see Kanye West. Bipolar disorder was similarly stigmatized in jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone, and Charles Mingus. The place where the poor are likely to get treated, if anywhere, is prison. Roth gets inside these places, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Rikers Island in New York, and tells us what she sees. With an eye not toward shaming but toward progress, she gestures at solutions.

¤

The medical journal JAMA published an article in 2015 with a provocative subtitle: “Bring back the asylum.” Its authors argued that moving away from long-term mental hospitals had created a national crisis. The severely mentally ill are not treated “in the community,” as was intended in 1963, when Kennedy signed his policy of deinstitutionalization into law. Instead, they’re often treated as criminals, when they blunder into trouble with police. As the authors point out, even if forensic psychiatry were well funded, jails and prisons are ill equipped to serve as clinics. These prisons are more akin to torture chambers than curative asylums, with inmates essentially warehoused in cages. Meals are erratic, and sleep is restricted. Hardly a recipe for peace of mind.

Mental hospitals, on the other hand, are not the nefarious places portrayed in movies and novels. Roth points out the irony of laws meant to keep the mentally ill safe by limiting forced hospitalization. For a poor family, these laws make it very difficult to get a psychotic relative treated. They are in fact far more likely to get him arrested. A mental hospitalization, in any case, is rarely the long-term sentence it once was. Today, the average stay is one week — just long enough to stabilize patients who may be paranoid, agitated, or suicidal.

On the day I got committed, I was a 27-year-old grad student. As many manic patients do, I fought the decision. Every bit as manipulative as I was well spoken, I argued at intake with a young psych resident, drawing on my neuroscience degree. I desperately wanted to be at my college roommate’s wedding that weekend. Ignoring the fact that I’d been a sleepless wreck for weeks, with darting eyes and stuttered speech, I belligerently debated with the staff, my eyes rolling, fists pounding, hands shaking. Nobody asked if I was on drugs; they could see that I was sick. And scared. “Involuntary hospitalization” may sound like a violation of rights, but it is often the easiest path to recovery. “Intake” is done by a psychiatrist, with experience and access to a patient’s medical history. It beats the hell out of the alternative facing many poor black men: a judge without medical expertise, often lacking context for the prisoner’s illness, decides within minutes of first meeting him if he is competent to be tried in a court of law.

On Rikers Island today, there are 4,500 mentally ill inmates, out of 10,000. Seven hundred have a “serious” illness, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Twenty-five percent of the United States’s incarcerated need mental health care. Forty percent of female prisoners do. At the country’s biggest women’s prison, in Oklahoma, a full 90 percent of prisoners are mentally ill. As one state legislator told Alisa Roth: “Basically, in Oklahoma, we’re just warehousing people in prison, and we’re not trying to rehabilitate anybody because of budget constraints.”

Life as a prisoner is, as Roth puts it, psychotogenic: it exacerbates psychosis in someone prone to it, and can trigger suicidal thoughts. For the most part, Roth is quick to note, prisons do not actively abuse prisoners. Rather, they are understaffed, underfunded, and untrained to treat them. The result: Passive neglect, and solitary confinement as a form of expedient discipline. Solitude, of course, stokes mental illness, like kindling on a flame.

¤

One summer night, another neighbor told me about her father. Walking under sycamores past the brownstones, bodegas, and bars, she told a familiar story. She described mood swings and charismatic highs; rage and booze. She said that she only lately realized that her father, despite a career more stable than his personal life, probably suffers from untreated mental illness. In communities like ours, her family’s story is hardly rare.

What her family and mine have in common is a legacy of mental illness. She and I also both went to Ivy League schools, lived in Japan and France, and studied foreign languages. But our similarities end there. I’m white, she’s black. I grew up well off in the leafy suburbs of Richmond, Virginia; she in the housing projects of Queens. Her male relatives, involved with drugs, were in and out of prison. A nephew stayed with her once when he finished his sentence. Idle and surly, he seemed depressed.

¤

Mental illness does not often make people violent. Police, however, do shoot mentally ill people nearly every day. One in four police shootings in 2015 and 2016, Roth writes, struck mentally ill people. Some precincts report much higher rates. Of those killed by San Francisco police in 2016, a full 60 percent were mentally ill. A SWAT team in Atlanta in 2012 responded to a call about a suicidal 16-year-old boy by surrounding his home. Decked out in riot gear, a sniper on a nearby roof assassinated him. Last year, US police added 230 sick people to the body count of mentally ill Americans killed by cops.

Those most likely to be victimized by police, according to criminologists, are men with bipolar disorder who are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Substance abuse, common in bipolar people, seems to put them at somewhat higher risk of committing crimes. This summer, a study by Seattle researchers found that 50 percent of those shot by police were hospitalized or incarcerated in the two years prior to being shot; those shot by cops were 22 times more likely to have an impulsivity or conduct disorder than car crash survivors. One 2018 report found that mania or psychosis combined with substance abuse increased the chances of a run in with the law by 7.47 times (as compared to the mentally healthy without addiction). Manic men are more likely to act in an aggressive manner that attracts police attention. As Kanye West raps on his latest album, “This the kind of high that don’t come down, this the kind of high that gets you gunned down.”

Families often call 911 when a relative is having a mental crisis. Instead of an ambulance, police show up, in part because mental health calls are not high priority from a medical perspective. The tools of law enforcement then perpetuate, as Roth puts it, the notion that people with mental illness are dangerous.

This is not to say that the mentally ill are never violent. Mass shootings are often committed by people with brain disorders: the United States’s first, in 1970 at the University of Texas, Austin, was by a 25-year-old man whose autopsy revealed a brain tumor. The shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 were depressed; one died with a drug like Prozac in his blood. Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook in Connecticut had autism. The “Batman shooter” at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, was a PhD student in neuroscience who had attempted suicide multiple times since age 13. He told his therapist he was having homicidal fantasies before he shot up a theater. (Ruling: Not insane; Guilty. Currently serving 12 consecutive life sentences.) If someone had helped these sick people in time, many lives would have been saved.

¤

Black Southern history runs deep in Bed-Stuy. In the 1930s, during the Great Migration, many black families moved up here from the South, bringing accents, jazz, and soul food. In 1838, one of America’s first free black towns was founded in the area by a freedman from Virginia. Caribbean immigrants came, along with Harlem families. Meanwhile, white people like me — Irish, Germans, Italians — moved away. And Bed-Stuy became poor and rough. The area’s crime, immortalized by local rappers like Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls, sometimes involved guns. More often, it involved petty drugs, policed with prejudice. The cocaine snorted by white bankers was never punished like crack among the black urban poor. Then, as crime declined a decade ago, white young people like me started moving in, drawn by the historic homes, eclectic culture, and rising rents elsewhere. But Bed-Stuy remains among the largest majority-black neighborhoods in the United States. At the cafe where I once worked, our regulars had relatives in Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, or Louisiana. We’d talk about towns we knew in common, and music. No place in New York feels more Southern to me than Bed-Stuy, or more like home.

The place my neighbors are from is where I’m from, too. The food, the warm voices, sweet tea, and folksy pace of life make us nostalgic for the South. Other traditions we’re glad to leave behind. As one advocate told Alisa Roth about Southern prisons, “What I believe is that in the decades to come, mental illness will be the new Jim Crow.”

Southern states treat their mentally ill worse than anywhere else. Alabama, where my family has lived for two centuries, is no exception. Fond of guns and capital punishment, the state executes more people per capita than any other. It has high rates of mental illness, but spends less on mental health care than nearly any other state. Alabama ranks 46 out of 50 states in unmet mental illness need, according to a yearly survey by the advocacy group Mental Health America. Alabamians often get defensive if outsiders bring up racism — lynching, George Wallace, and civil rights groups like Southern Poverty Law Center and Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery. They insist that Alabama has changed, and that prejudice is a thing of the past. But given the rate of incarcerated black people in Alabama, it’s clear that racism thrives in Dixie. One of Alabama’s most powerful politicians, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, wants the death penalty for drug dealers, and backs the laws that fill our prisons with black fathers. Even ignoring race, the state’s treatment of the mentally ill is as bigoted as any prejudice.

Alabama executed a mentally ill man this year, as it has done at least three times in recent years. This year’s victim, Michael Eggers, a white man, was on anti-psychotic medications, and his brother was institutionalized with schizophrenia. The Equal Justice Initiative reports that

Mr. Eggers believed that the Mexican Mafia and other outlaw groups, law enforcement agencies, and the government were conspiring to persecute him — following him from California as he fled to eight different states to evade them; checking into the psych ward to torment him when he was involuntarily committed for emergency psychiatric care; and even killing his father in retaliation for the killing of his former employer in Walker County, Alabama, in 2000.

Eggers’s original run-in with law enforcement came from a sting operation, when he was tricked into buying marijuana.

Continues: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/asy ... tally-ill/

[American Dream]

VA official proudly displays KKK Grand Wizard portrait in his D.C. office, ‘I thought it was very nice’



An official with the U.S. Veterans Administration proudly displayed a lit formal portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Ku Klux Klan's first Grand Wizard, despite protestations from people who worked for him. ‘I thought it was very nice,’ he said of the official showcased art, which he is sad to have been forced to take down.

David J. Thomas Sr. is the deputy executive director of the VA’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization.

Thomas says he removed this painting from his office after discovering the guy on the big horse, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a slave trading Confederate general who became the first leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.



The painting is titled 'No Surrender,' by artist Don Stivers, and a signature shows it was painted in 1999.

“Thomas’s staff includes 14 managers, nine of whom are black,” reports Lisa Rein at the Washington Post.

She reports that it was only removed after “offended employees began signing a petition to present to VA Secretary Robert Wilkie.

David J. Thomas Sr. is deputy executive director of VA’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, which certifies veteran-owned businesses seeking government contracts. His senior staff is mostly African American.

Thomas said he took down the painting Monday after a Washington Post reporter explained that its subject, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Confederate general and slave trader who became the KKK’s first figure­head in 1868. He said he was unaware of Forrest’s affiliation with the hate group, which formed after the Civil War to maintain white control over newly freed blacks through violence and intimidation.

A basic Google search of Forrest’s name returns various biographies detailing his role in the Confederacy and the white-supremacist strains of its aftermath.

“It was just a beautiful print that I had purchased, and I thought it was very nice,” Thomas said. He said he knew of Forrest only “as a Southern general in the Civil War” and kept the portrait in his basement before decorating a new and larger office at VA’s administrative headquarters a few months ago.

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/23/va-of ... ays-k.html