What is the rate of incarceration of Indian people in Canada per capita?
An example here would be Minnesota where Indian people make up one third of the prison population while being 3% of the population of the state. However, according to the FBI, the Native American population is the most criminally aggressed against by "outsiders" of all of the diverse American populations. In fact the Mormon candidate who claimed that the Palestinians are culturally inferior in spite of the boot on their neck (and in spite of the example of Dubai and the other affluent states that are Islamic including the state of Alabama that is importing the Iranian medical system to rescue their own) - Romney has just such an example of that prejudice in his own "backside." What is not generally known about Mormonism is that they believe themselves to be a mix of Christianity and American Indian Religions. (But not these current American Indians who they consider to be debouched.) The truth is that a lot of Indian people are becoming Mormons as my great grandfather became a "primitive" Baptist because the Baptists believed in everyone approaching God on their own and each congregation is a separate entity which made it OK for Indian churches to only spoke Cherokee while singing Amazing Grace, to do what they wanted. The point being that those churches still carry the old religion just as the Catholic Churches in Mexico worship on the Aztec sites and the Moranos in Spain practiced their Judaism in the home while praying in the Cathedral. Are the Euros too lazy to learn to speak native languages or even learn the Jewish context of their own bible? Is that the reason that these little corners of churches make perfect places to raise Indigenous familys, relate economically in the community and keep their ancestor's traditions as long as they don't tell anyone in English. But then books and writing always muddy the water and reveal things (and graduate students need thesis material) and there has been a huge bloom of it in the Nation's colleges and Universities and on the internet (sigh). Unfortunately the secret is out not only on Indian people but now the Mormons as well. The Congress has many Mormons but their ambition to be President has required that the Mormon faith become more transparent and already their church has changed to integrate with the "uber kultur." Mormons gave up polygamy. Africans were considered polluted in their book, but are now members, and Mitt Romney's underwear is now being discussed openly. How long before we have native Mormon churches speaking only the tribal languages? That is one answer to the problem of showing too much for the big three world faiths to tolerate. I realize there are over a billion Christians and over a billion of Muslims but how does Judaism with 14 million people worldwide, (and a large majority of them secular), qualify as a major religion, when there are 123 million indigenous Shamanic peoples around the world practicing local faiths as close to each other world wide as the Christian and Islamic groups are to each other? Could it be that down deep both Christianity and Islam suspect a dirty little secret? That they have been trashing grandma for 2000 years because she wouldn't agree with them about their own stories? Separation and individuation? A little group pathology there maybe? So what does it all mean? What does it mean that Obama's mother had African blood that goes all the way back to one of the first African slaves in America? http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/30/news/la-pn-obama-related-to-legendar y-virginia-slave-genealogist-says-20120730 Now Obama is both more American and more African than the other groups who are "Johnny cum latelies" in the immigrant pool. Now it's personal. Obama is not just "African American" on both sides but he is THE African American the first Anglos first stuck it to and began it all for them. But the first slave here wasn't African. Oops! I don't understand how those people could still be selling that same old horse when she broke down 200 years ago, unless it just has to do with happening to land in paradise by accident. Now let's see someone put this on the radio. It'll never happen. Just like it'll never happen that the dominant population will ever admit where they got most of their good ideas. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sally Lerner Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2012 8:34 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] FW: Michelle Alexander Interviewed Something really important to chew on... Sally ________________________________________ From: Portside Moderator [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 10:37 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Michelle Alexander Interviewed Michelle Alexander on the Irrational Race Bias of the Criminal Justice and Prison Systems By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview Wednesday, 01 August 2012 Michelle Alexander wrote a paradigm-shifting exploration of modern racism, the so-called war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex. Mark Karlin: Before we get into the details, is it accurate to characterize your thesis, in a colloquial way, by saying that institutionalized racial casting is alive and even ratcheting up in the United states in 2012? Michelle Alexander: Yes, I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America. For reasons that have stunningly little to do with crime or crime rates, we, as a nation, have chosen to lock up more than two million people behind bars. Millions more are on probation or parole, or branded felons for life and thus locked into a permanent second-class status. The mass incarceration of poor people of color, particularly black men, has emerged as a new caste system, one specifically designed to address the social, economic, and political challenges of our time. It is, in my view, the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. MK: You identify the key societal perpetuation of the stigmatization of the black male as the so-called "criminal justice system." It appears to have become an accepted bureaucratic injustice. MA: Mass incarceration has become normalized in the United States. Poor folks of color are shuttled from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new, high tech prisons and then relegated to a permanent undercaste - stigmatized as undeserving of any moral care or concern. Black men in ghetto communities (and many who live in middle class communities) are targeted by the police at early ages, often before they're old enough to vote. They're routinely stopped, frisked, and searched without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Eventually they're arrested, whether they've committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release, they're ushered into a parallel social universe in which the civil and human rights supposedly won during the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to them. For the rest of their lives, they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon. That's why I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. In many large urban areas, the majority of working age African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. It is viewed as "normal" in ghetto communities to go to prison or jail. One study conducted in Washington, D.C. indicated that 3 out of 4 black men, and nearly all those living in the poorest neighborhoods could expect to find themselves behind bars at some point in their life. Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities. A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades - a penal system unprecedented in world history. It is a system driven almost entirely by race and class. for the rest of this interview, go to http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10629-truthout-interviews-michelle-alexand er-on-the-irrational-race-bias-of-the-criminal-justice-and-prison-systems ___________________________________________ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. Submit via email: [email protected] Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3 Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
