Tennessee has many problems and the largest is issues that are about poverty and race. Memphis is largely populated by Black Americans and with that they are a larger sector of poorer ones and the city is often decried for their crime and violence that has nothing and everything to do with Race. As when there is increased poverty there is increased crime and that overlap comes to define the City of Memphis. But you also realize that it is a city of Soul in every sense of the word. There are working class jobs and a strong presence of many factors that are often ignored when discussing Memphis and its place in history. But the crime issue and the now closed down Scorpion Unit of the Police which brought that negative magnifying glass down to examine once again the city and with it the revolving door of crime and policing. There are many better writers who have written on this very subject, Radley Balko, who lives in Nashville is perhaps the most significant of ones who have written about Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct, Judicial Bias and the issues of penalties and laws that are most damaging to those people of color and the poor. The largest tool in the arsenal is Civil Asset Forfeiture. This is where any cash or personal property is seized by the Police as it is believed gained from a criminal venture, all done even prior to conviction or a determination of guilt. It is ripe with abuse and exploitation and here is an excellent explanation on how that occurs, but also below is an article about Memphis and the endless cycle of pain it inflects on the residents and once again those of Color.
But what is also essential to note that none of the profiled individuals had drugs or guns in their vehicles which is often a suspicion or reason for stop and search and an explanation for why the Police were afraid and aggressive. So once again myths debunked. America is a violent nation and the Police are large contributors to that.
In Memphis, Car Seizures Are a Lucrative and Punishing Police Tactic
Vehicle seizures have been used to combat street racing and other crimes, but critics say that even people not convicted of a crime have been left for months without their cars.
The New York Times
By Jessica Jaglois and Mike Baker
March 23, 2023
MEMPHIS — As he drove to work on a summer afternoon in Memphis last year, Ralph Jones saw a woman on the sidewalk flagging him down. Thinking she was in distress or needed a ride, Mr. Jones said, he pulled over.
After a brief conversation in which she tried to lure him to a nearby motel, Mr. Jones said, he drove away but was soon stopped by the police and yanked from his truck. The 70-year-old welder said that with just 86 cents in his pocket, he had neither the intent nor the money to solicit a prostitute, as the officers were claiming.
His protests were to no avail. Mr. Jones was cited, and his truck, along with the expensive tools inside, was seized. The charges were eventually dropped, but the truck and his work equipment remained corralled in a city impound lot for six weeks, when prosecutors finally agreed to return it in exchange for a $750 payment.
“It’s nothing but a racket,” Mr. Jones said.
Police departments around the country have long used asset forfeiture laws to seize property believed to be associated with criminal activity, a tactic intended to deprive lawbreakers of ill-gotten gains, deter future crimes and, along the way, provide a lucrative revenue source for police departments.
But it became a favored law-enforcement tactic in Memphis, where the elite street crime unit involved in the death of Tyre Nichols on Jan. 7, known as the Scorpion unit, was among several law enforcement teams in the city making widespread use of vehicle seizures.
Like Mr. Jones, some of the people affected by the seizures had not been convicted of any crime, and defense lawyers said they disproportionately affected low-income residents, and people of color.
Over the past decade, civil rights advocates in several states have successfully pushed to make it harder for the police to seize property, but Tennessee continues to have some of the most aggressive seizure laws in the country.
While some states now require a criminal conviction before forfeiting property, Tennessee’s process can be much looser, requiring only that the government show, in a civil process, that the property was more likely than not to have been connected to certain types of criminal activity — a less rigorous burden of proof. Tennessee allows local law enforcement agencies to keep the bulk of the proceeds of the assets they seize.
And the process for getting property back in the state can be prohibitive for those who have little money or the ability to hire a lawyer: Those who fail to file a claim and post a $350 bond within 30 days automatically forfeit their property.
“Tennessee’s forfeiture laws are among the nation’s worst,” said Lisa Knepper, a senior director of strategic research at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that has called for changes in state and federal forfeiture laws.
In Memphis, some of the more than 700 vehicles seized last year were taken from people who were ultimately found guilty of serious criminal charges. But other residents reported in interviews that they were compelled to pay large fees to recover their vehicles even when they had not been convicted of any crime.
In 2021, the Memphis Police Chief, Cerelyn Davis, came forward with the city’s plan to combat growing incidents of reckless driving and drag racing with vehicle seizures. This happened at around the same time that the city was launching the Scorpion unit — an acronym for the department’s Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.
No longer would police officers be merely issuing citations to reckless drivers who endangered others, she said, seeming to acknowledge that such seizures might not ultimately stand up in court.
“When we identify individuals that are reckless driving to a point where they put other lives in danger, we want to take your car, too,” she said. “Take the car. Even if the case gets dropped in court. We witnessed it. You did it. You might be inconvenienced for three days without your car. That’s enough.”
Mayor Jim Strickland was also a strong supporter of the seizure policy and even proposed destroying cars used by drag racers and other reckless drivers. “I don’t care if they serve a day in jail,” he said last year. “Let me get their cars, and then once a month we’ll line them all up, maybe at the old fairgrounds, Liberty Park, and just smash them.”
Police officers said it was on suspicion of reckless driving that they first pulled over Mr. Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died after a long and brutal beating by Scorpion officers. Five officers have been charged with murder in the case. Chief Davis subsequently said that she had seen nothing to support the reckless driving allegation. Nichols’s car was taken to the city’s impound lot.
The Scorpion unit was touted for its record of seizing drugs, cash and cars. In just the first few months of its operations, the city reported that the elite unit had seized some 270 vehicles.
Many of the vehicle seizures have revolved around drugs. In those instances, according to several defense lawyers, the agency often seized a vehicle based on a claim that it was being used in a drug-dealing operation — a common basis for such seizures in many cities, intended to deprive drug dealers of their profits and the ability to continue their work.
But even some of those not convicted of a crime said they spent weeks without a car while trying to navigate a complicated court process.
Filing a claim in court requires posting a $350 bond. Sometimes, defense lawyers said, the authorities managing the case may offer to release the car without requiring a court hearing if a person pays a fee that can amount to thousands of dollars.
Shawn Douglas Jr. lost his car in the fall after being stopped at a Memphis gas station by officers who reported finding two clear baggies containing marijuana inside a backpack.
Mr. Douglas was soon in handcuffs, arrested on suspicion of a felony drug infraction, an allegation he denied. His car was sent to impound.
In an interview, Mr. Douglas said one of the arresting officers commented to him about his 2015 Dodge Charger: “He said, ‘That would be a great police vehicle. When we take those vehicles we hope people don’t come get them back so we can do drug busts out of them.’”
Months later, Mr. Douglas’s criminal charges had been dropped, but his car was still in police custody. He was only able to recover it after paying $925, records show; crews towed it out to a dusty lot and handed it over to him, its battery dead. Mr. Douglas had to struggle with battery cables to get it started.
“It cost a lot of money,” Mr. Douglas said. “It puts you back on everything and creates more stress. When you can’t pay bills, you can’t do anything.”
Neither the police department nor the district attorney’s office responded to questions about the forfeiture cases of Mr. Douglas and others interviewed for this article, and they only briefly addressed the city’s forfeiture policy.
In Memphis, as in many cities, revenues from such impound and forfeiture fees are returned to support policing activities, becoming a regular source of revenue.
Memphis has not disclosed how much money it generated for the hundreds of vehicles that were forfeited. The city did report seizing some $1.7 million in cash last year, winning forfeiture of nearly $1.3 million.
This income is most often being generated from the city’s poorest residents, defense lawyers said.
“It’s unfair to a lot of the poorer citizens in Memphis,” said Arthur Horne, who has represented such clients. “It’s a huge tax.”
Vehicle seizures have never been a priority in the city’s overall crime-fighting strategy, Chief Davis said in a brief interview, adding that any money gained from forfeitures was not essential to police operations.
“We haven’t put a high level of priority on asset forfeiture here in Memphis,” she said. “We put more of a priority on violent crime, reducing violent crime.”
“It’s not like we’re out trying to seize vehicles. We have a budget to support the police department.”
Erica R. Williams, the communications director for the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office, says that prosecutors do not receive any share in proceeds from vehicle forfeitures.
“We attempt to handle these cases as quickly as possible in an effort to minimize the difficulty caused by the seizure of a vehicle, while simultaneously seeking to accomplish the spirit of the statute,” she said, which was to “discourage engagement in future offenses.”
Seven states do not give forfeiture revenues to law enforcement. A few states, such as New Mexico, Maine and North Carolina, do not permit civil proceedings and allow forfeiture only after criminal convictions.
A bill pending in Congress proposes a series of new rules that would raise the standards for the government to win forfeiture, give access to lawyers for people trying to recover their property and end profit incentives by sending revenues to the Treasury Department’s general fund.
John Flynn, the president of the National District Attorneys Association, said efforts seeking to limit forfeitures have at times brought together lawmakers on the left and the libertarian right. But he said such efforts could go too far, undermining a law-enforcement tool that he said provides a deterrent to wrongdoers and turns over illegal criminal profits to those trying to fight crime.
“From a prosecutor’s standpoint, any money or vehicles or property gained through illegal conduct should be forfeited,” Mr. Flynn said.
He said safeguards allowed people to present evidence that their property was not acquired through illegal means.
In Memphis, at the city’s crowded impound lot north of town, cars towed in from around the city for various reasons mix with recovered stolen vehicles and cars seized by the police. Tow trucks buzz in regularly, and a fine coat of dust from a nearby limestone supply company settles over everything.
A dozen shoppers were on hand one recent morning looking at a GMC Denali that was up for auction. It looked to be in mint condition on the passenger side, but 20 or so bullet holes dotted the driver’s side door.
Further down the lot, Kyle Lyons was standing next to a pile of belongings that he had retrieved from his 2010 BMW, which had been seized in July by police officers who said they had found heroin in the vehicle. Mr. Lyons, who said he had struggled with addiction, was hoping to get back thousands of dollars worth of Craftsman tools that had been taken along with the car — equipment he needed to work.
Once his car was gone, he said, he had lost nearly everything else.
“Everything I use to make money with was gone,” Mr. Lyons said. “I couldn’t work, couldn’t go out and buy no more. I was homeless for four months.”
He has left Memphis and moved home to Kentucky. His car is still impounded.
I do respect those individuals who elect (at this time they still can sorta) to become Mothers. Many I think believe or feel that they can be good Mothers, whatever that means. Many Women do not certainly elect Motherhood I hope thinking it will be fine, they will fake it till they make it nonsense. I want to believe that Women are aware you cannot have it all. You cannot. You have to make a huge sacrifice the minute you decide to pursue Motherhood. That means your personal happiness, your own health, your financial security can be at risk and your own Marriage may also collapse with the weight of Parenthood. It is not for the faint of heart.
The United States has an appalling mortality rate regarding lives of both Mothers and Children. This also depends on where you live in the United States, your access to Health Care and Health Insurance. According to the March of Dimes that In the United States, about 6.9 million women have little or no access to maternal health care. And again the most single contributing factor is Race.
The CDC breaks down infant mortality and its causes to Five Factors. The NIH explains it as such here. And the current stats are not good as we enter year three of Covid.
This according to the CDC:
The number of women who died of maternal causes in the United States rose to 1,205 in 2021, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics, released Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a sharp increase from years earlier: 658 in 2018, 754 in 2019 and 861 in 2020.
That means the US maternal death rate for 2021 – the year for which the most recent data is available – was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with rates of 20.1 in 2019 and 23.8 in 2020.
The new report also notes significant racial disparities in the nation’s maternal death rate. In 2021, the rate for Black women was 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, which is 2.6 times the rate for White women, at 26.6 per 100,000.
The number is rising and it is not good, particularly for Women of Color. But it is overall not good for any Woman.
According to the Commonwealth Fund, as well as the World Health Organization, The US has the highest maternal death rate of any developed nation. While maternal death rates have been either stable or rising across the United States, they are declining in most countries.
“A high rate of cesarean sections, inadequate prenatal care, and elevated rates of chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease may be factors contributing to the high U.S. maternal mortality rate. Many maternal deaths result from missed or delayed opportunities for treatment,” researchers from the Commonwealth Fund wrote in a report last year.
The Covid-19 pandemic also may have exacerbated existing racial disparities in the maternal death rate among Black women compared with White women, said Dr. Chasity Jennings-Nuñez, a California-based site director with Ob Hospitalist Group and chair of the perinatal/gynecology department at Adventist Health-Glendale, who was not involved in the new report.
“In terms of maternal mortality, it continues to highlight those structural and systemic problems that we saw so clearly during the Covid-19 pandemic,” Jennings-Nuñez said.
“So in terms of issues of racial health inequities, of structural racism and bias, of access to health care, all of those factors that we know have played a role in terms of maternal mortality in the past continue to play a role in maternal mortality,” she said. “Until we begin to address those issues, even without a pandemic, we’re going to continue to see numbers go in the wrong direction.”
So the reality is that we have a rising tide no boats just Moby crashing his tail against the water to insure the waves drown us as we thrash along in the water. And here we are about to make it harder for Women to manage their own reproductive choices. Good idea says the White Man in the Judicial Robe.
I have been noting the deterioration of mental health particularly among children as they come of out the Pandemic. This generation born during the time it began in 2020 and those who were still in K-12 schools are the new generation and they are really fucked up. Do I think it matters if schools were open or closed? No it is larger than that. You cannot Teach and cannot learn in a world and an environment that surrounds you which is in chaos. Sorry you cannot put yourself in a bubble or Island to prevent the world that is outside waiting for you to emerge. Going to school everyday I believe did no more or less than those who remained online. You are kidding yourself if you believe otherwise.
I truly believe any Woman who CHOSE to become pregnant during Covid lockdowns was either incredibly selfish, bored or utterly oblivious. Denial perhaps but there is a type of arrogance that ignorance allows those so unaware of what was happening in hospitals and in medicine overall that I have little or no respect of. Your kids like you Lady are fucked up. Again I point to 946 as my Karen in that room. She is batshit crazy and that is contagious.
I reprint this from the New York Times to understand how serious this issue is. I know I am harsh but I have that luxury and I never wanted Children so that has to be taken into account. I knew early on it was not for me. Not one regret there. But I do support Women’s Reproductive Rights and with that the choice to have a child. I support public health care, public education and tax credits for children and families as well as better wages and work environments for those who care for children, but I do not support stupidity. And those are the Women who think that it is not a massive sacrifice for at least two decades worth of life. Get over yourself you are not special. I am talking to you Karen.
Covid Worsened a Health Crisis Among Pregnant Women
In 2021, deaths of pregnant women soared by 40 percent in the United States, according to new government figures. Here’s how one family coped after the virus threatened a pregnant mother.
By Roni Caryn Rabin The New York Times March 16, 2023
KOKOMO, Ind. — Tammy Cunningham doesn’t remember the birth of her son. She was not quite seven months pregnant when she became acutely ill with Covid-19 in May 2021. By the time she was taken by helicopter to an Indianapolis hospital, she was coughing and gasping for breath.
The baby was not due for another 11 weeks, but Ms. Cunningham’s lungs were failing. The medical team, worried that neither she nor the fetus would survive so long as she was pregnant, asked her fiancé to authorize an emergency C-section.
“I asked, ‘Are they both going to make it?’” recalled Matt Cunningham. “And they said they couldn’t answer that.”
New government data suggest that scenes like this played out with shocking frequency in 2021, the second year of the pandemic.
The National Center for Health Statistics reported on Thursday that 1,205 pregnant women died in 2021, representing a 40 percent increase in maternal deaths compared with 2020, when there were 861 deaths, and a 60 percent increase compared with 2019, when there were 754.
The count includes deaths of women who were pregnant or had been pregnant within the last 42 days, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy. A separate report by the Government Accountability Office has cited Covid as a contributing factor in at least 400 maternal deaths in 2021, accounting for much of the increase.
Even before the pandemic, the United States had the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation. The coronavirus worsened an already dire situation, pushing the rate to 32.9 per 100,000 births in 2021 from 20.1 per 100,000 live births in 2019.
The racial disparities have been particularly acute. The maternal mortality rate among Black women rose to 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021, 2.6 times the rate among white women. From 2020 to 2021, mortality rates doubled among Native American and Alaska Native women who were pregnant or had given birth within the previous year, according to a study published on Thursday in Obstetrics & Gynecology.
The deaths tell only part of the story. For each woman who died of a pregnancy-related complication, there were many others, like Ms. Cunningham, who experienced the kind of severe illness that leads to premature birth and can compromise the long-term health of both mother and child. Lost wages, medical bills and psychological trauma add to the strain.
Pregnancy leaves women uniquely vulnerable to infectious diseases like Covid. The heart, lungs and kidneys are all working harder during pregnancy. The immune system, while not exactly depressed, is retuned to accommodate the fetus.
Abdominal pressure reduces excess lung capacity. Blood clots more easily, a tendency amplified by Covid, raising the risk of dangerous blockages. The infection also appears to damage the placenta, which delivers oxygen and nutrients to the fetus, and may increase the risk of a dangerous complication of pregnancy called pre-eclampsia.
Pregnant women with Covid face a sevenfold risk of dying compared with uninfected pregnant women, according to one large meta-analysis tracking unvaccinated people. The infection also makes it more likely that a woman will give birth prematurely and that the baby will require neonatal intensive care.
Fortunately, the current Omicron variant appears to be less virulent than the Delta variant, which surfaced in the summer of 2021, and more people have acquired immunity to the coronavirus by now. Preliminary figures suggest maternal deaths dropped to roughly prepandemic levels in 2022.
But pregnancy continues to be a factor that makes even young women uniquely vulnerable to severe illness. Ms. Cunningham, now 39, who was slightly overweight when she became pregnant, had just been diagnosed with gestational diabetes when she got sick.
“It’s something I talk to all my patients about,” said Dr. Torri Metz, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the University of Utah. “If they have some of these underlying medical conditions and they’re pregnant, both of which are high-risk categories, they have to be especially careful about putting themselves at risk of exposure to any kind of respiratory virus, because we know that pregnant people get sicker from those viruses.”
Lagging Vaccination
In the summer of 2021, scientists were somewhat unsure of the safety of mRNA vaccines during pregnancy; pregnant women had been excluded from the clinical trials, as they often are. It was not until August 2021 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with unambiguous guidance supporting vaccination for pregnant women.
Most of the pregnant women who died of Covid had not been vaccinated. These days, more than 70 percent of pregnant women have gotten Covid vaccines, but only about 20 percent have received the bivalent boosters.
“We know definitively that vaccination prevents severe disease and hospitalization and prevents poor maternal and infant outcomes,” said Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, chief of the C.D.C.’s infant outcomes monitoring, research and prevention branch. “We have to keep emphasizing that point.”
Ms. Cunningham’s obstetrician had encouraged her to get the shots, but she vacillated. She was “almost there” when she suddenly started having unusually heavy nosebleeds that produced blood clots “the size of golf balls,” she said.
Ms. Cunningham was also feeling short of breath, but she ascribed that to the advancing pregnancy. (Many Covid symptoms can be missed because they resemble those normally occurring in pregnancy.)
A Covid test came back negative, and Ms. Cunningham was happy to return to her job. She had already lost wages after earlier pandemic furloughs at the auto parts plant where she worked. On May 3, 2021, shortly after clocking in, she turned to a friend at the plant and said, “I can’t breathe.”
By the time she arrived at IU Health Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, she was in acute respiratory distress. Doctors diagnosed pneumonia and found patchy shadows in her lungs.
Her oxygen levels continued falling even after she was put on undiluted oxygen, and even after the baby was delivered.
“It was clear her lungs were extremely damaged and unable to work on their own,” said Dr. Omar Rahman, a critical care physician who treated Ms. Cunningham. Already on a ventilator, Ms. Cunningham was connected to a specialized heart-lung bypass machine.
Jennifer McGregor, a friend who visited Ms. Cunningham in the hospital, was shocked at how quickly her condition had deteriorated. “I can’t tell you how many bags were hanging there, and how many tubes were going into her body,” she said.
But over the next 10 days, Ms. Cunningham started to recover. Once she was weaned off the heart-lung machine, she discovered she had missed a major life event while under sedation: She had a son.
He was born 29 weeks and two days into the pregnancy, weighing three pounds.
Premature births declined slightly during the first year of the pandemic. But they rose sharply in 2021, the year of the Delta surge, reaching the highest rate since 2007.
Some 10.5 percent of all births were preterm that year, up from 10.1 percent in 2020, and from 10.2 percent in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
Though the Cunninghams’ baby, Calum, never tested positive for Covid, he was hospitalized in the neonatal intensive care unit at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. He was on a breathing tube, and occasionally stopped breathing for seconds at a time.
Doctors worried that he was not gaining weight quickly enough — “failure to thrive,” they wrote in his chart. They worried about possible vision and hearing loss.
But after 66 days in the NICU, the Cunninghams were able to take Calum home. They learned how to use his feeding tube by practicing on a mannequin, and they prepared for the worst.
“From everything they told us, he was going to have developmental delays and be really behind,” Mr. Cunningham said.
After her discharge from the hospital, Ms. Cunningham was under strict orders to have a caretaker with her at all times and to rest. She didn’t return to work for seven months, after she finally secured her doctors’ approval.
Ms. Cunningham has three teenage daughters, and Mr. Cunningham has another daughter from a previous relationship. Money was tight. Friends dropped off groceries, and the landlord accepted late payments. But the Cunninghams received no government aid: They were even turned down for food stamps.
“We had never asked for assistance in our lives,” Ms. Cunningham said. “We were workers. We used to work seven days a week, eight-hour days, sometimes 12. But when the whole world shut down in 2020, we used up a lot of our savings, and then I got sick. We never got caught up.”
Though she is back to work at the plant, Ms. Cunningham has lingering symptoms, including migraines and short-term memory problems. She forgets doctor’s appointments and what she went to the store for. Recently she left her card in an A.T.M.
Many patients are so traumatized by their stays in intensive care units that they develop so-called post-intensive care syndrome. Ms. Cunningham has flashbacks and nightmares about being back in the hospital.
“I wake up feeling like I’m being smothered at the hospital, or that they’re killing my whole family,” she said. Recently she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Calum, however, has surprised everyone. Within months of coming home from the hospital, he was reaching developmental milestones on time. He started walking soon after his first birthday, and likes to chime in with “What’s up?” and “Uh-oh!”
He has been back to the hospital for viral infections, but his vocabulary and comprehension are superb, his father said. “If you ask if he wants a bath, he’ll take off all his clothes and meet you at the bath,” he said.
Louann Gross, who owns the day care that Calum attends, said he has a hearty appetite — often asking for “thirds” — and more than keeps up with his peers. She added, “I nicknamed him our ‘Superbaby.’”
One bad apple doesn’t spoil the bunch. This is an idiom. In that a bad apple as “someone who creates problems or causes trouble for others; specifically, a member of a group whose behavior negatively affects the remainder of the group.” And it comes from the proverb that actually states, “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.” And that misuse has been applied repeatedly when in cones to Police. So now we have cleared that up, it shows that in fact that the acts of one affect many. Cannot say that one enough as we have repeatedly again seen Police Officers kill and abuse those in custody and those not yet placed in as such. The SCORPION unit that was comprised of many Police Officers in Memphis and were not just the 5 who killed him nor the one who stopped him and has since been fired, it was an entire unit, a Goon Squad. The unit was devised to be a largely traffic force that looked for minor violations including seat belts, running lights, speeding and the like as a deterrent. In other words, “stop and frisk” and the concept of broken windows. And we know already that most of these arbitrary stops enable Police to search the vehicle, seize the vehicle and in turn fine the Driver excessive fees as well as Jail them. Sandra Bland was an example of such. and with that we also know they are highly fraught exchanges. I keep thinking of the band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy when it comes to these squads. The band great, the thugs of Officers not so great. This is from the NY Times today on said SCORPION unit which has now been disbanded. Don’t worry it will be back with no less a dickwad acronym that is all about the men who use tasers and guns as extensions of their manhood.
The idea that there are good Cops is in fact the EXCEPTION not the rule. Sorry, not sorry. But there is something that needs to be understood that in the case of Memphis that despite the fact that the Police and the Victim were/are Black it is less about the color of skin and more the color of the uniform. The Military has similar dogmas and the reality is that many who try to join exclusive units in their respective branch have found themselves abused and often end up dead or seriously disabled in some type of hazing process that has gone on for decades. If they complain or are not able to complete the course, they are assigned dead end jobs. The sexual abuse includes not just Women of the Military but Men. And even the ROTC units in the public schools have come under fire as they too are using their authority and inference of power to assault and victimize many potential recruits. The reality is that we have a Badge obsession like we do a gun one and they have both. And the badge of honor is to keep one’s mouth shut.
When you think of these organizations of defense you think very much a tribal mentality that permeates the core and you become like them rather that try to go against them. Those that have have faced serious repercussions and their careers have been ended as a result. And we all are members of one tribe or another. We use that membership to declare moral superiority, intellect, a coolness or whatever other adjective or moniker you wish in order to add to your identity. The hyphenate world in which we live places us in the need for more apparently. He/She/Her/Him/Mx/Ms and so forth. Fuck it I don’t care anymore frankly as it just again lends to the divisions and more ire than it is worth. And with that I found this editorial today and I share it to see why I am a loner. I cannot handle the endless need to validate or prove worth. I find each conversation fraught with challenges that are exhausting and I spend my days already exhausted from sitting and doing nothing and watching children do nothing. It is not how I saw my life pan out in the least. And again it is why I write, words that no one reads or maybe they do but they don’t care as they are seize on one word, one thought, remove it from context and decide if the rest is worth reading or not. It is all judgement and assessment and none of it productive or good for anyone.
The most salient point the Author makes is the endless cycle of Good vs Bad and the tales of who has it better/worse and does largely the same to defend and support their beliefs. It is called the Horseshoe Effect. Just that theory alone sets off alarm bells. And if this does not resonate with anyone, think book banning. The right are running amok with books about Slavery, Sexuality and other issues of culture. The Left too is doing the same, removing books like To Kill and Mockingbird for Atticus as a White Savior or Huckleberry Finn and other books like Mice and Men that were written in the 1920s and used the word “Nigger” in the text. Even me writing the word is highly fraught as it should not be spoken or written. I am to use the phrase the “N word” Really? I am not using to level a name or affix a negative abusive moniker and am discussing the word in a literary critical context. Nope can’t do that. Then please only Women can use the word, “Bitch.” Gays I am talking to you here!
The N-word euphemism was an organic outcome, as was an increasing consensus that “nigger” itself is forbidden not only in use as a slur but even when referred to. Our spontaneous sense is that profanity consists of the classic four-letter words, while slurs are something separate. However, anthropological reality is that today, slurs have become our profanity: repellent to our senses, rendering even words that sound like them suspicious and eliciting not only censure but also punishment.
For a person who uses the word Fuck all the time I have had my moments where I was scolded and reprimanded usually by white men who are obviously deeply offended by my lack of lady like speech. To that I say, “Fuck yeah Asshole.” I don’t care anymore but in context of a discussion we should be able to use words, even those most repellent to bring about discussion. It is critical in all kinds of theory, race included. We must use words powerfully and we do so in ways to do harm and do well. Again the use of “Bro” or “Boy” or even “Man” taken out of context and broken apart to see evil where there is none is again a part of the process of moral superiority. I was talking about “lunch ladies” regarding School Cafeteria workers which is an old nickname, harmless and I was informed that there are Men now in the kitchens. Really there are? When were you last in a public school lunchroom? There are none and of course the good Liberal scold continued as they cannot be wrong; “Thanks for the reminder that gender enforcement and stereotyping are critical functions of education.” And my response: “Hey it is what I live for.” We are talking about Lunchroom workers and that the term is not pejorative in the least but this is where we are nitpicking, bullying and fighting over words and terms. It will not get better. Why? Its all we have. We have no interests, no hobbies, no work that is meaningful. So we misdirect and channel our anger and frustrations to those on the interwebs. Social media is anything but social nor is it media.
‘Bad Apples’ or Systemic Issues?
By David French Opinion Columnist The New York Times Feb 5, 2023
On Wednesday, the city of Memphis remembered the life of Tyre Nichols, a young man who was beaten by at least five Memphis police officers and died three days later. Stories like this are terrible, they’re relentless, and they renew one of the most contentious debates in the nation: Are there deep and systemic problems with the American police?
How we answer that question isn’t based solely on personal experience or even available data. It often reflects a massive partisan divide, one that reveals how we understand our relationships with the institutions we prize the most — and the least.
Every year Gallup releases a survey that measures public confidence in a variety of American institutions, including the police. In 2022, no institution (aside from the presidency) reflected a greater partisan trust gap than the police. A full 67 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in the police, versus only 28 percent of Democrats.
Why is that gap so large? While I try to avoid simple explanations for complex social phenomena, there is one part of the answer that I believe receives insufficient attention: Our partisanship tends to affect our reasoning, influencing our assessments of institutions regardless of the specifics of any particular case.
Here’s what I mean. The instant that a person or an institution becomes closely identified with one political “tribe,” members of that tribe become reflexively protective and are inclined to write off scandals as “isolated” or the work of “a few bad apples.”
Conversely, the instant an institution is perceived as part of an opposing political tribe, the opposite instinct kicks in: We’re far more likely to see each individual scandal as evidence of systemic malice or corruption, further proof that the other side is just as bad as we already believed.
Before I go further, let me put my own partisan cards on the table. I’m a conservative independent. I left the Republican Party in 2016, not because I abandoned my conservatism but rather because I applied it. A party helmed by Donald Trump no longer reflected either the character or the ideology of the conservatism I believed in, and when push came to shove, I was more conservative than I was Republican.
But my declaration of independence wasn’t just about Trump. In 2007 I deployed, relatively late in life, to Iraq as a U.S. Army judge advocate general, or JAG. Ever since I returned from my deployment, I’ve been gradually shedding my partisanship.
The savagery of the sectarian infighting I saw in Iraq shocked me. I witnessed where mutual hatred leads, and when I came home I saw that the seeds of political violence were being planted here at home — seeds that started to sprout in the riots of summer 2020 and in the Trump insurrection of 2021.
As American polarization deepens, I’ve noticed unmistakable ways in which committed partisans mirror one another, especially at the far edges. There’s even a term for the phenomenon: horseshoe theory, the idea that as left and right grow more extreme they grow more alike. When it comes to the partisan reflex — the defense of “my people” and “my institutions” — extreme partisans behave very much like their polar opposites.
And make no mistake, respect for police officers has long been vital to the very identity of conservative Americans. Men and women in uniform are ours. They’re part of our community, and — as the Blue Lives Matter flags in my suburban Nashville neighborhood demonstrate — we’ve got their backs. (Mostly, anyway. Lately, the Capitol Police and the F.B.I. do not feel that same support.)
There are good reasons for respecting and admiring police officers. A functioning police force is an indispensable element of civil society. Crime can deprive citizens of property, hope and even life. It is necessary to protect people from predation, and a lack of policing creates its own forms of injustice.
But our admiration has darker elements. It causes too many of us — again, particularly in my tribe — to reflexively question, for example, the testimony of our Black friends and neighbors who can tell very different stories about their encounters with police officers. Sometimes citizens don’t really care if other communities routinely experience no-knock raids and other manifestations of aggression as long as they consider their own communities to be safe.
At this point you might be asking: When is the left reflexively defensive? What institutions does it guard as jealously as conservatives guard the police?
Consider academia. Just as there is a massive partisan gap in views of the police, there is a similar gap in views of higher education. According to a 2022 New America Survey, 73 percent of Democrats believe universities have a “positive effect” on the country, while only 37 percent of Republicans have the same view.
Yes, this is in part a consequence of anti-intellectual strains on the right and among right-wing media. And this conservative mistrust of higher education (and secondary education) is causing it to turn its back on free speech and instead resort to punitive legislation, such as Florida’s recently passed “Stop Woke Act,” which a federal court called “positively dystopian” and unconstitutionally “bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints.”
But that’s not the whole story. The nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — of which, full disclosure, I was once president — has tracked over 900 incidents since 2001 where scholars were targeted for termination or other penalties for speech that was protected by the First Amendment or by conventional principles of academic freedom. In 2021 alone there were 111 attempts to penalize professors for their speech, and almost 70 percent of those attacks came from the left.
I spent years litigating campus free speech in court. It was frustrating to file successful case after successful case — often challenging policies that existed in campuses across the country — only to be told time and again that there was no systemic problem with free expression on campus, that these were merely isolated incidents or a product of youthful overenthusiasm, of kids being kids.
No one should pretend for a moment that there is any kind of moral equivalence between university censorship and fatal police violence. The stakes on the streets are infinitely higher than the stakes in the classroom. But there is still a common problem: Our repeated assumptions that those on our team might make mistakes or overstep, but those on the other team are deliberately malevolent.
I should know. I used to fit that partisan mold. As a conservative, I could clearly see the problems in American universities. After all, it was my tribe that disproportionately faced penalties and discipline. When it came to the police, however, I was skeptical. I knew there were some bad apples. But was there a systemic problem? I was doubtful.
I have since changed my mind, but it took shedding my partisanship and applying my principles to allow me to see more clearly. Fundamental to my worldview is the belief that human beings possess incalculable worth, but that we are also deeply flawed. No person or institution can be completely trusted.
Thus powerful people and powerful institutions must be held accountable. If you combine authority with impunity, then corruption and injustice will be the inevitable result. If I could see this reality clearly in institutions on the left, why couldn’t I see it on the right?
The police, after all, possess immense power in American streets, often wielded at the point of a gun. Yet the law systematically shields them from accountability. Collective bargaining agreements and state statutes provide police officers with greater protections from discipline than almost any other class of civil servant — despite the fact that the consequences of misconduct can be unimaginably worse. A judge-made doctrine called qualified immunity provides powerful protections against liability, even when officers violate citizens’ civil rights. Systemic police corruption and systemic abuse should not have been a surprise.
How do we fight past our partisanship to become truly curious about the truth? For me, the answer started with the first principle of my conservatism: Human beings possess incalculable worth. If that is true, and my neighbors and fellow citizens are crying out about injustice, I should hear their voices and carefully consider their claims.
My initial inability to see the truth is related to the second principle, that human beings are deeply flawed. I had no trouble applying that principle to my opponents. But it also applies to those I generally admire. It applies to police officers. It applies to me.
The lesson I’ve taken has been clear: Any time my tribe or my allies are under fire, before I yield to the temptation of a reflexive defense, I should apply my principles and carefully consider the most uncomfortable of thoughts: My opponents might be right, my allies might be wrong and justice may require that I change my mind. And it may, in all likelihood, require that I do this again and again.
Right after thoughts and prayers, comes the denial about access and availability of guns, followed by a demand for mental health and better treatment and diagnosis prior to the maniac LEGALLY buying the guns and the ammo, the camo/body armor gear and the rest needed to carry out their plan. This plan is loosely defined but often spelled out or ruminated on social media as a type of acknowledgement and of course elegy as I presume that in many of these cases the maniac believes that he will be killed during his onslaught of rage, if they don’t commit suicide first as the Cops come barricading through the door, or sauntering through after about an hour or so of debate and discussion on the maniac and his fire power capabilities.
In the last few active shooting cases few have died at their own hand. Las Vegas and Walmart are the two that chose to kill themselves prior to capture or despite of it. Do we ever really know what prompted the Vegas shooter? Yeah I don’t either. There was the Naval Yard shooter, remember him? Yeah I don’t either. But this was written in 2013 after the attack and there has little changed with regards to stats. But the AK 15 is the weapon of choice and has been used to kill at this point 36 people but the year is not over folks!
As for the remaining shooters, many are taken into custody in a routine traffic stop, in Buffalo, Highland Park, or walking home as in the case of the North Carolina shooter (remember that one? No me either) or the Stoneman Douglas shooter or the Michigan Shooter who was going home to parents who had fled the scene and a manhunt took place to find them, so there you go. Many parents were killed prior to the onslaught and the problem with parental supervision and of course their own role in purchasing the weapon does little to stop the violence. Some parents were notified regarding the mental health of their child and some had contacted authorities regarding their child – Santa Barbara and Colorado Springs shooter are examples of such. Michigan shooter’s parents literally ignored the signs and we know that the Mother of Sandy Hook shooter purchased the gun but was aware of her son’s struggles and it was all too little to late. The Buffalo shooter hid the signs and it appears that the Grandmother of the Uvalde shooter took in her Grandson as he had problems with his Mother as well. Who doesn’t have a problem with their Mother but killing her or anyone else does not solve it in the least. But guns are often used to resolve disputes. This is a list of all the mass shootings in the US in 2022. All of them are mental health issues?
I reprint the article below from The Washington Post about a Mental Health Nurse who tried to end her own life and after release from care she returned the job that led her down her own path to struggle with mental health. I know that this year after being abused by the Neighbor in 946 and the endless bullshit at Ferris High School by a sole Administrator I debated on ending my life. I had survived attempted murder and rape being drugged and left for dead and with that sustained Traumatic Brain Injury which one of the many side effects is Suicide Ideation. I am not sure it was the injury itself that contributed to it but the endless conflict and issues that came thereafter, from the supposed Justice System to the Medical Industrial Complex, but they did little to help resolve my endless spiral downwards into Depression. I left for perhaps the worst place in America to seek help, Nashville Tennessee, but in spite of it I did get out and in some ways better than I arrived. It took a pandemic to finally heal me, irony no lost. But the reality is that I did it with my own methods and plans and since that time I rely on them as I have the last six years in recovering from perhaps the worst thing that happened to me and inevitably led me here today. When I say I want to be alone I do mean it; however, I do not object to some human contact but it must be on my terms – No compromise.
The story of this Nurse is telling it also explains the drain you see on many who work in the Medical Industrial Complex and why frankly it is so fucking shitty. She is not capable of handling the demands and the resources available lack in which to provide assistance. Shocking that in all places the liberal mecca of Seattle does not have it figured out. Been to San Francisco, the bookend of that? Not any better. Read San Francsicko to understand how often Liberal policies do more harm than good with regards to the crisis that lives in their streets. But alas good Liberals like good Conservatives don’t do well with criticism.
I grew up in Seattle where being Liberal was expected and accordingly accommodated with the idea that like a uniform, their is a code, a speech, a manner of being that is conformity in unity. In other words: Being different like everyone else. With that there is little tolerance for dissension among the ranks and you will be ostracized and demonized the same way Liberals are in Nashville. They are tolerated as long as the check clears but like Seattle is a city of shiny keys and they dangle them to attract the migrants and the money and with that you too must conform or you will be an outsider looking in. Nashville is still the Bible Belt it is in Tennessee where the red coats are not just the uniform of the chosen it is a way of living. It is zealotry at its finest and with that many of the laws and rules you are seeing appear in other red states began as a lab experiment there first. It is a nightmare of which I am glad this time I am awake. The South woke me to the real problem in America, sinister poverty and religion, which are the true twins of America’s endless Civil and Cultural wars.
Mental health is too broad and too complicated to say that it is a single issue behind gun violence. We don’t have enough medical care providers to adequately treat and diagnose issues that emerge and we have become a nation dependent upon pharmacopia to fix that what ails you. We are truly fucked here without dinner. I can count the two Therapists I found useful in my time and one Suicide Hotline woman who just last month talked me off the ledge of desperation. Too few and too far in between frankly. And this woman’s story explains why.
Fixing the broken lovelies
As American cities deteriorate, a psychiatric nurse reckons with the high price of compassion
By Eli Saslow The Washington Post November 20, 2022
SEATTLE — She’d been released from the psychiatric ward with advice on the best ways to limit additional trauma and stress, so Naomi Morris, 46, walked back into her nursing job carrying a notebook of reminders. “You are not Atlas,” she’d written. “The city’s suffering does not fall on your shoulders.” She paused in the hallway to do a deep-breathing exercise and then sat down in a conference room with a half-dozen of her co-workers at a nonprofit program that served people who were homeless or formerly homeless.
“So, what all did I miss?” she asked.
“Pretty much more of the same,” one of her co-workers said, as he turned on a projector screen and pulled up a complete list of their clients, 84 of the sickest and most vulnerable people in Seattle. Most of them had been chronically homeless before getting placed into subsidized apartment buildings downtown. Many suffered from severe psychiatric disorders, at least half were addicted to methamphetamine or opioids, several were homicidal and suicidal, and ever since the pandemic began altering the character of American cities, almost every one of them had been getting progressively worse.
“He assaulted his neighbor and started a fire in his room last night,” read a caseworker’s daily report about one of Naomi’s patients, as she took out a pen and began to write notes. “Delusional. Paranoid. Police and fire called to the scene.”
“Spotted walking through traffic wearing bizarre attire,” read another daily report, on her next patient. “Menacing, disheveled, open wounds to face and ear.”
“Using a bucket as a toilet,” read another.
“Lonely. Sent texts asking how to hold a gun in case she decides to shoot herself.”
For the last two and a half years, this was how Naomi and her team of caseworkers, clinicians and addiction specialists at the nonprofit Downtown Emergency Service Center had started each morning: by making a day-by-day accounting of the rising mental health crisis that had overwhelmed and transformed Seattle and so many other places in the country. Just like most major metropolitan areas, from New York to Denver to Los Angeles, the greater King County area had experienced a historic spike in homelessness, suicides, homicides and drug overdoses in the last few years, overwhelming its already under-resourced mental health systems. The average wait time for inpatient psychiatric treatment had risen to a record 44 days. The Seattle Police Department had lost 27 percent of its force in the last two years and was increasingly reluctant to intervene in any situation involving a mental health crisis because of new laws limiting use of force. The government-run crisis team that had once responded within hours to evaluate and detain people who were considered an imminent danger to themselves or to others was now backlogged by weeks or sometimes months.
“So many parts of the system are breaking down,” one King County politician had said, and that meant it was increasingly Naomi alone who responded to each of her patients’ medical emergencies, who tried to administer their monthly antipsychotic medications, who tested their drugs for deadly traces of fentanyl, who treated them for lice, who coaxed them into appropriate clothing, who counseled them through violent delusions, who was herself often threatened and sometimes assaulted, and who occasionally went to conduct routine welfare checks and found her patients dead.
And it had been Naomi again whom King County chose to represent all of its front-line health-care workers in August and September, when she stood alongside local leaders as they declared a citywide mental health emergency and proposed a $1.25 billion tax levy in part to fund five new mental health crisis centers. “We need to fix what’s broken, and I’m part of what’s broken,” she’d said from the lectern in August, and then two months later she’d taken the day off from work, sent a few goodbye messages, and tried to poison herself by overdosing on insulin. She’d spent three days in the hospital and five more in the psych ward processing all of her recent trauma, and now she’d come back to work to find out if what had happened to her and to her city over the last few years was in fact still fixable.
“Attacked his oven and other appliances last night in what he says was self-defense,” went the next daily report, and Naomi closed her eyes and counted her breaths.
“Refusing meds and making disturbing comments about children — concerning given his history.”
“Oh no. Not again,” Naomi said. She’d been visiting that patient in his downtown apartment throughout the pandemic, and when he was taking his antipsychotic medication, he could be charming and polite. But whenever he stopped taking his medication, he acted out in frightening ways around the city. He’d been arrested and briefly jailed for trespassing, use of a weapon, harassment, indecent exposure and at least a half-dozen assaults.
“I don’t want this to turn into the next major incident,” she said. “He’s really talking about kids?”
“Yeah. It’s not headed in a good direction,” her co-worker said.
“Do we have a plan?” she asked, and she looked around the table for a moment even as she realized she already knew the plan, because it was the same for every patient on her list. At least nine people were spiraling into full-fledged crisis, and she was the only nurse on her shift.
“I’ll go see what I can do to help him,” she said.
She’d spent the last decade working as a psychiatric nurse in the most destitute parts of the city because she thought every crisis could be overcome. She’d dealt with mental illness in her own family. She’d bounced through foster care systems and abusive relationships, and she’d been homeless in Seattle herself in the late 1990s before going back to school. Her life had convinced her that anyone was capable of getting better, but lately that belief was being challenged, because each time she went to see a patient she found herself preparing for the worst.
She put up her hair so nobody could yank it. She took out her earrings so they wouldn’t get pulled. She packed a bag of antipsychotic drugs and overdose-reversal medications and then drove downtown to a subsidized apartment building called the Morrison, with 200 units reserved mostly for people with severe and persistent psychiatric disorders. Outside the entrance, six people were huddled together smoking methamphetamine. A middle-aged man in the lobby was banging his head against a trash can. A woman wearing no pants stepped off the elevator, spotted Naomi, and started throwing punches at the air. “You African,” she shouted. “You filthy Nigerian.”
“Good morning, lovelies,” Naomi said, smiling and greeting each person by name. She walked deeper into the lobby and saw the patient she’d come looking for, the man who had been refusing his medication and having delusions about children. He was mumbling to himself, pacing and spooning yogurt into his mouth with his fingers. Naomi walked over and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Okay, my friend. What arm are we doing today?” she asked, hoping to catch him off guard and administer his shot of medication quickly, so there was no time for indecision or debate.
“Huh?” he asked. “Who sent you?”
“Nobody. It’s just time again for your monthly dose,” she said, as she pulled out a vial of the long-acting medication that helped to keep him stable and limit his delusions. “Right arm or left?”
He tucked his arms behind his back. “No way,” he said. “There’s bad stuff in there.”
“It’s the same medication you’ve been taking for years,” she said. “It’s been good for you.”
“You don’t understand. People are trying to kill me!” he shouted, and he slammed his yogurt into a trash can and hurried past her. Naomi put his medication back into her bag, walked into the office of the building’s clinical director and shook her head.
“No luck, huh?” Tim Clark said. He pulled up a file on his computer and showed Naomi the patient’s latest incident report, from a few days earlier: “He said, ‘Someone is poisoning me and wants me to hurt a boy. I don’t hurt children. I don’t want to. But she said that’s the only way she would stop poisoning me.’”
“He’s decompensating,” Naomi said. “It’s probably going to get worse.”
“What the hell do we do?” Clark asked. Before the pandemic, the plan would have been fairly straightforward. Whenever people became an imminent threat to themselves or to others, the staff at the Morrison would call for one of the designated crisis responders (DCRs), the only people in King County with the legal power to evaluate and then commit someone to mandatory mental health treatment. Usually, within a few days, the person in crisis would be evaluated and then probably hospitalized for weeks or often months, until they’d stabilized enough to return to the community. But now hundreds more people were in crisis all across King County, those crises were becoming ever more urgent, and the understaffed DCR teams couldn’t keep up with a record number of requests.
Their average wait time to evaluate someone exhibiting homicidal or suicidal tendencies in King County had tripled during the pandemic, to an average of 277 hours. The staff at the Morrison had been waiting two months for a crisis evaluation on a resident who often ran through the hallways naked and compulsively flooded her apartment with so much water and human waste that it ran down the hallway, into the elevator shaft, and through the ceiling in the main lobby, causing more than $60,000 in damage to the building. They’d been waiting several weeks for crisis response on a resident who kept threatening people with a pocket knife; and on another, who had spent four weeks walking around with a dislocated arm, his condition worsening as he remained too disoriented to accept treatment; and on another, who was hoarding garbage in his apartment and defecating on the floor.
It increasingly felt to Clark like many of his residents were being neglected by the system, left to suffer and unravel in any variety of horrific ways. Thirty residents had died inside the building since the beginning of the pandemic, more than four times the normal rate. Overdoses had doubled, and assaults were up.
“I hate that he keeps talking about kids,” Clark said. “I’d sleep a lot easier if he’d just take his medication. He’s capable of some pretty scary stuff.”
“We can’t force him to take it, but I’ll keep trying,” Naomi said. “I’ll come back every day. I’ll be here tomorrow.”
“But what about between now and then?” Clark asked.
“I’m going to try not to think about it,” she said.
Her therapist had told her she was suffering from post-traumatic stress and work-induced anxiety. Innocuous sounds startled her several times each day. Her hands sometimes shook involuntarily. “Clear evidence of both personal trauma and secondary trauma,” her therapist had called it. She’d suggested that Naomi consider changing jobs, but Naomi wasn’t ready to abandon her patients, so each morning she kept going into work with a list of people who required urgent care.
The next morning, she was back at the Morrison, hoping to try again with the patient who was talking about children. She knocked on his door and called out his name. “I’ve got your medicine,” she said, but he didn’t respond. She took out her notebook, put a question mark next to his name, and moved on to the next patient on her list.
It was a man lying shirtless in his apartment and compulsively rubbing his head. There was a dead mouse in his kitchen and a plate of rotting food in the microwave. “Why are you here? Did I start killing people or something?” the patient asked, genuinely confused, and then he started to cry. “No. You haven’t killed anybody,” Naomi assured him. “You’re doing just fine.” He refused to take his medication, so she picked up some of his trash and left the pills next to his bed.
Next on her list was a man who took off his shirt and kept trying to hug her as she gently pushed him away. Next was a woman who had overdosed two days earlier at a nearby public fountain. Next was a woman who refused to acknowledge that she had cancer and instead believed she was pregnant with 100 snake babies. Next were three more patients, who needed monthly antipsychotic injections, and then finally there was only one name left on her list — a patient suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who was five days overdue for his medication and had started harassing neighbors and punching walls.
“Can you come down to the lobby for your shot?” she asked him, over the phone, and to her surprise a few minutes later he was striding off the elevator, smiling at her, flashing a thumbs up. He followed her to a small room in the apartment lobby and rolled up his sleeves as he watched her prepare the shot. She showed him the label on his medication and explained all the likely side effects: drooling, vomiting, restlessness, headaches.
“I don’t like being scared,” he said.
“You’re safe,” she reassured him. “I’m here to help.”
“Just don’t poison me, okay?” he said, and as he watched her put on her gloves, he began to fidget and whisper to himself.
“Go away,” he said. “Shut up. … No, stop that.”
“Are you all right?” Naomi asked. “Do you still want to do this?”
He nodded at her and then clenched his fist and banged his thigh. “Get out of my head, idiot,” he said to himself. “Go away! … I won’t do that. … I refuse.”
“It’s just me here,” Naomi said, gently massaging his arm, as she looked out the doorway to see if anyone else was nearby in case he became more agitated. The lobby was empty. The person who usually sat at the front desk was outside smoking a cigarette. She tried to focus on giving the injection instead of thinking of all the ways during the pandemic that patient interactions had sometimes gone horribly wrong: The 14 times in the last year when she’d been pushed, grabbed, slapped, sexually harassed or verbally assaulted. The nurse in a similar job who had recently torn tendons in her shoulder while fighting off an attempted rape in a patient’s room. The Seattle social worker who had been meeting with a mental health client in her office in 2021 when he stabbed her 12 times, killing her.
And then there was the last time Naomi had been alone with this same patient sitting across from her now, just a few months earlier, when he’d looked at her with wild eyes and started growling and saying something she couldn’t quite understand. “What was that?” she’d asked him. “Are you a martyr?” he’d said, and she was confused. “What?” she’d asked again. “Are you a martyr?” he’d screamed, and then he’d gotten out of his chair, grabbed her shoulders and ripped off her N95 mask. He’d pinned her against the wall and pressed his hands against her face, repeating something about blood and sacrifice until someone in the lobby overheard the assault and pulled him away. “Oh, Naomi. I’m so sorry,” he’d said, a few moments later, once the delusion had passed. “Please don’t call the police. I’m sick. I need to take my medicine.” She’d accepted his apology and given him the shot, because that was her job, and now she’d come back to administer his medication again.
“Try to relax your shoulder,” she told him.
“To all the Gods and all the saints, please forgive me,” he said to himself, as he nodded and stared up at the ceiling. Naomi took a deep breath and raised the needle.
“No!” he shouted. He jumped out of his chair and stared down at her. She raised her hands and backed away. “It’s me. It’s Naomi,” she said.
He banged his fist against his knee. “Someone will pay,” he said, and then he turned around and ran out of the room.
A few nights later, she sat down for tea with her newest colleague on the nonprofit team, a nurse whom she’d started calling “White Jesus.” Josh Potter arrived from Tennessee a few months earlier with long hair, a deeply religious background and a pious selflessness when it came to caring for their patients.
“How are you feeling about this crazy job?” Naomi asked him.
“We get to care for some really broken people,” he said. “It’s about total nonjudgment and seeing the value in every human life.”
“Compassion. Harm reduction,” she said, nodding, because they believed in the same things. She drank her tea and looked at him again.
“But doesn’t it make you exhausted?” she asked
He shrugged. “Some days, but it’s something I believe in. We’re making a difference.”
“That’s how I used to feel,” she said, and then she started to tell him about the ways that both the city and her perspective had begun to shift during the pandemic, after commuters, tourists and even most other social workers stopped going downtown and many of her patients were left increasingly on their own without the adequate medical care or societal guardrails to keep their illnesses in check. She’d put on a mask, suffered through three rounds of covid and continued to visit her patients each day. Her team’s goal was to help people improve and then graduate to less-intensive levels of care, but in the last three years she could only think of a half-dozen patients who had graduated. “No wins and so many brutal losses,” she said, and she told him about the 19-year-old who had been found dead inside her tent, the patient who had jumped out a seventh-story window, and the 56-year-old whom she’d discovered in his apartment a few days after his death.
She had yet to tell her all of her co-workers about what had been happening to her during those months, even as she’d started talking to a therapist about the hardships of her work. She’d taken up crochet. She’d booked a vacation to Belize. She’d rallied her co-workers to fight for better working conditions. And when none of that seemed to alleviate her anxiety, she’d moved out of Seattle to a quiet condo in the suburbs with a view of a lake, where it turned out she still couldn’t get away from her fears, her depression or her rising sense of anger and hopelessness for both her patients and herself, until one morning in early October when she decided to call in sick. She stayed on her couch and watched birds fly over the lake. She ignored a phone call from work. She took out the insulin she used to treat her diabetes and decided in that moment to give herself several times the normal dose, which made her start to feel dreamy and numb. She texted a co-worker to please take care of her cat. She texted her sister goodbye. She took another massive dose of insulin, which made her blood pressure drop as she slipped in and out of consciousness, and the next thing she remembered she was riding in the back of an ambulance with paramedics who explained that her sister had probably saved her life by calling 911.
“Sorry you ended up with a nursing partner who’s such a hot dumpster fire,” she told Josh, and his smile seemed so kind and understanding that she told him what she’d been thinking about over the last several days. The doctors in the psych ward had recommended a partial hospitalization program to help her deal with trauma, which would require her to leave work for at least a few months. Maybe she’d come back after that, or maybe she’d look for a different nursing job where she could see more evidence of healing.
“I have nothing left,” she said. “I need to go away for a while.”
“Get yourself right,” he said. “Take some time.”
“I know it’s what I need, but I’m not sure how I’m going to do it,” she said. “I’m a psychiatric nurse. That’s who I am. We have all these people suffering, and I’m just going to leave them behind?”
“You can’t help anyone by running yourself into the ground,” he said, and she nodded and then thanked him.
“I have a few things I still need to do,” she said.
Early the next morning, she drove back to the Morrison and saw an ambulance and a police car parked outside. “Oh, no,” she said. She hurried to the elevator and took it up to the room of the patient who had been having delusions about children and then knocked on his door.
“Hello? It’s Naomi,” she called out. She waited a few seconds and then knocked again. She leaned into the door to listen, and she heard the sound of shuffling feet and then footsteps coming closer in the hallway behind her. She swung around and braced herself.
“Good morning, Naomi,” said one of the building’s employees, smiling and carrying a cup of coffee.
“Oh, God. You scared me,” Naomi said. She pointed toward the apartment door. “Have you seen him? I noticed the police outside.”
“Oh, that was for someone else — a fight in the elevator,” the employee said. “But I did see him a while ago wandering around upstairs. He needs that shot bad.”
She thanked him and went upstairs to another apartment where her patient sometimes went to use heroin, and where he’d overdosed and been revived by a friend a few months earlier. The door was partway open. She called out, but nobody answered. “God, I hate this,” she said. She reached into her bag to locate her overdose-reversal medication and then peered through the door, half-expecting to find her patient on the floor. She could see four used syringes on the kitchen table and dozens of fast-food wrappers scattered across the ground. A handwritten sign had been taped to the wall: “Home of the forgetful and the forgotten.”
“Anyone here?” she asked, and she was about to step into the room when her cellphone rang. It was one of her co-workers, calling to tell Naomi about another patient who said she was being held captive in her apartment by a man who wanted to hurt her. “Is it real or a delusion?” Naomi asked, and the co-worker said she wasn’t sure. “I’ll go check,” Naomi said, but before she could hang up, the co-worker started telling her about another patient, who was running naked in a public stairwell. The woman’s landlord had notified the county’s designated crisis responders, but they said they wouldn’t be able to come for at least another week.
Naomi hung up and tried to decide which emergency to respond to first, but before she could make up her mind, she heard a door open behind her and saw the patient she’d been searching for step out into the hall. He was shaking his head erratically and mumbling to himself.
“Hey!” she said, trying her best to sound cheerful.
“Get lost,” he told her.
“I just want —”
“Get the hell away from me! I’m on a mission,” he said, as he clapped his hands and rushed by.
“I’m trying to help you,” Naomi called out, but all she could do was watch as he went out the doors and into the city. She stood alone in the hallway.
I finally understand the concept of Assimilation, whereas I once thought it was to move to a new country or place and learn some of the laws, the holidays and other cultural designations, and in turn adapt and adjust to fit in and belong, yet still retain the core beliefs and history of ones own cultural history was enough. The concept of Melting Pot was that we all come from varying backgrounds and in that we merge to find a common identity of American with a slash whoever/whatever else, kinda like Waiter/Actor/Dance hyphenate that we often use to define careers. And with that we have both acknowledgement and respect of one’s differences and yet share some similarity. I could not be more wrong. We want everyone to be WHITE.
Now even with White America there are many differences, Religion, Politics, Class, Education, Regional idiosyncrasies, Work and Family and Sexual Identity and Gender. Those last two are blurred lines that still put those in the LGBQT community and women at the bottom of the mythical ladder of Meritocracy but not the real bottom as that is for the “others” but still down there. With that money or the color green enables anyone to jump the line and climb faster and enable them to be taken more seriously but they will always still be the “other.”
As the Supreme Court looks to eviscerate the concept of Affirmative Action, it was another mythical concept that many States have long circumvented with regards to Employment and Educational attainment and achievement. I am from Washington and they use their Liberal credentials to show that it is not needed if one is “race blind.” I am not sure I see that as valid as Race and Gender are the most visible of qualities and with that it enables the Sexist and Racist to simply do the work around and find other elements in which to discriminate. I grew up in Seattle and with that have ample anecdotes that validate that thinking, Group Think is a powerful tool in which to force conformity. But by acknowledging the checklist of attributes that the collective has is a way of doing the affirmative when it comes to action, actually enacting and following that is another.
When I started to really examine Colorism and its affects on race which began by looking at art in MOMA, I began to listen and see for more clues and relevance in the world in which I live. In the South I heard that references to Brown people quite a bit, and with that it came most from Black residents who saw the influx of Latin and Kurds to the region who were seen as usurpers in the community, taking up housing and jobs that were already in short supply for those who were there “first.” And with that White folks have forced or at least implied that the shade of one’s whiteness matters. And with that we have seen many ways faces of color embrace what it means to be “white-ish” Well folks I gots news for you – that is a waste of time and money as it is never white enough, even white people are segregated and isolated in the never ending hierarchy of what defines white “supremacy.”
The Caste System is the definitive method in which to classify and define roles. It is labeled the System of Meritocracy, where the mythical Horatio Alger informed those in need to jump class all you need to do is “work hard.” And with that the well worn boot straps are in full force. Religion reinforces this concept and with that the base core of Americans, believe that you can rise above. And there are those small cases that have proven it true – largely in Sports and Entertainment. The few other “self made” Men and some Women are few and far between. And again most can cite largely POC who fit that description. If you think Trump, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk (oh wait an Immigrant, Sergey Brin also an Immigrant and they all went to Stanford or Harvard or to some Ivy League institute, the great institutes of White Privilege. So for those who don’t manage to get past those bars, the ability to climb over decreases.
And with that the home grown businesses and industries that have developed are often out of necessity and in which to serve a growing culture of “others”. Take a look at Chobani and that is the exception to the rule and in Idaho no less. But on average White Natives who are less well off and less educated lack the understanding and need for Immigrants and how many built more businesses and grew community that extended beyond their own. True you can go to an Indian run store and the employees/owners have English as Second Language, many if not all speak English and do not discriminate if you choose to shop there. They get it, they really do. Try that in a Hasidic Community and the response is less so. The controversy over their schools in NYC is just a tip of the Iceberg when it comes to social isolation. Which that may largely also contribute to some of the angry Anti Semitic dialog given their clothing, their lack of English and segregation lends to the rage and confusion by those who don’t understand the distinction of both a Religion and Culture, centuries old. But is a fine line to walk to understand why and the history behind it. Or you can simply say live and let live, but White Americans don’t do as they say or do, they mind, they really do, your business and what you are doing with it, personally or professionally.
And that too is a large part of our current division in America – Religion. Just one examination of the Evangelical community and its own divisions is very telling. Fundamentalists exist within that cohort and the Dave Ramsey expose on his business practices regarding employees is another. That cohort veers on both Racism and Anti Semitic rhetoric using the Bible to cover much of it. Amazing that the Book of Myths is the sole book they read and in turn selectively interpret to meet their beliefs to suit their special kind of crazy and again White.
So with the idea of colorism as a means of dividing those who are not white, is another tool in which to hammer the belief that white is right and in turn force assimilation and absorption of “whiteness.” I find this all ironic that white people go out their way to turn their skin brown as being tan is thought of us as being more attractive if not of course richer as you can lounge at the pool or beach in which to acquire said tan. The rise of tanning salons and spray on tans that brought the lounge culture to the masses, skin cancer be dammed, is another way of modeling health and beauty. We go out of our way to ensure none of us are ever too white but our teeth and that too is another industry in which we spend exorbitant amounts in which to have a pearly white grin. Meanwhile basic dental care is largely over looked as the average American cannot afford it. This only again is a tool in which to segregate and discriminate as teeth are clearly visible and with that add another way White people judge. We are clever folks white people. It used to be by handbags and shoes that women used to signal class but the rise of clever fakes and the disposable culture in which we live, anyone can carry a Vuitton or Chanel bag, real or not is irrelevant its very existence in one’s hand gives the clue to those around that you have style/money/class. In other words – WHITE.
While some have expressed their fear of losing Whiteness as the cultural identity of America, by joining White Supremacists, others advocate conspiracy theories such as Q’Anon, or simply vote Republican as they fear “crime” or lessons that make a child ‘feel” bad; the extraneous “bogeyman” who is changing your child’s gender or in the predator in bathroom stall next to you; those who are of another Faith or from another Country that is Communist or Socialist or “dangerous” with drug cartels and human traffickers. FEAR is the most common and most basic of emotions in which crosses all lines, from class to race to gender, we are always afraid of something at some time.
I read this article in the New York Times about why people are voting the way they are and this issue of crime and safety comes up now the most. I know in NYC that was the reason behind the election of Adams who is proving to be both incompetent and ineffectual in ways that few who knew him were not surprised. His play into the boroughs where there are more people of color and in turn largely more affected by crime were and are his largest supporters, so I am not sure how they feel now as their areas of the city are being decimated with massive crime to the point it simply dominates the local news both broadcast and print that would remind one of the John Oliver’s show regarding this very issue and how it is often misleading and in turn over dramatized to the point of extreme; the Subways are such an example. When standing in a line to attend the Ballet a woman was so distracted by a man’s screaming she was concerned for her safety as everyone she knew had been mugged of late. Were they standing in a queue at 3 in the afternoon when it happened? For the record, I of course crossed the street, found the man standing in a parklet screaming into a phone. Okay crime adverted. Again the reality is that few are affected by the reality yet the perception is there hammered into your head like a maniac assaulting innocent tourists.
And when I read this from a nice white lady in the Midwest she reminds me of that New York Manhattanite, which of course appall that Karen she has a doppelganger:
Ms. Whittenberger, a self-employed crafter who sells handmade aprons, said she worries about shootings in nearby Milwaukee — “every night, another killing,” she said. But in her daily routines, she is also noting small changes, both close to home and far from Menomonee Falls, that suggest to her that American life is fraying.
When she shops at her local grocery store, Ms. Whittenberger said, she can smell marijuana on the clothes of fellow customers as she passes them in the aisles. And reports of thefts in California cities, which she sees reported on Fox News, drive her mad with fear and rage.
“Is any place in this country safe?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
She smells Marijuana on their clothes? What happened to social distancing. And how does she know what Marijuana smells like? That is so White!
But wait we got them here too. Also in that article: Tony Smith, who lives in Mount Kisco, a suburb north of New York City, said that he believed Ms. Hochul and Mr. Bragg were too lenient on criminals. He feels particularly uneasy on the New York City subway, which he sometimes rides to get to New York Mets home games in Queens. “I’m a big guy,” Mr. Smith said. “I can fend for myself. But you know what? I’m looking both ways now.”
Well I am a little woman and again most Subway violence began with a hostile encounter first. Try to keep to yourself, earbuds out and be passively aware of your surroundings. If you see something, don’t say ANYTHING, just get the fuck out of there.
The truth is that few American live in the areas of urban tension where crime is the highest, those are often the most economically disadvantaged and have had issues of gun violence for decades. So that is where White people get their fear, the idea that those poor, aka “Black,” are more violent and dangerous. No they are poor and we have done little but increase shakedowns and arrests of Black people versus actually engage and learn why and what can be done to reduce that. Meaning jobs that pay well and offering training for said jobs, affordable housing and health care and of course child care and better schools in which to provide the foundation for all that is better. When I read this editorial about the Asian myth of the scholar I did laugh as that to is another stereotyped founded in Racism, the Model Minority. And yet to push a kid into advanced programs with little more than being Asian again is a disservice to those who could also benefit from said push. And I was told repeatedly by both Black and White School Administrators that my high standards for education were Racist. I see now that meant every color but the whiter ones. I assume with the larger East Asian diaspora in America we could include them but just into the STEM careers. I have taught in districts across this country with large Asian and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans as well, one broom does not cover it. But we can placate and patronize those whom we ignore by acknowleding the taking of the lands of Natives prior to a bloated German production of Hamlet, which screams White and Privilege. Go Woke or Go Broke! Again with all the push to draw more faces of color to the forefront, we are forgetting the most significant group – the audience – still largely what? White.
And with comes the expectations of behavior and accommodation that describes White Audiences. Silence but when appropriate to clap, to laugh, not to loudly and to get up and mind physical body space in the periphery of the invisible hula hoop in which to rise or seat or stand. I did find this amusing and true when it comes to White People. And when you read numerous Black authored Blogs you read how this need to “code switch” in order to get along, be liked, be respected etc is a consistent theme. There is not a statement in this Blog I disagree with, White People do not listen and if they do they do with the background noise that is this somehow about them. If you do appreciate diversity you accept how someone presents themselves to you and allow their character to be revealed in which to ultimately decide how to proceed with this relationship or on what terms you must do so to make it successful. And that means listening. But when it comes right down to it, White People have no clue on how to befriend, work or understand others not like them, aka WHITE.
I tried to understand the Karen and her Cop Spouse the first time they complained and with that went on with my life feeling it was resolved. It was not. The Karen needs full compliance and with that it threatens their mindset. White people are all Karens. They want and expect conformity to their way of living. And when I read this in other Blog on Medium regarding White Karen’ s behaviors I understood immediately and was relieved:
Stop – minding other people’s business; threatening folks; talking when you should listen; screaming at the top of your lungs to get your way; being manipulative; bullying and bossing folks you ladies deem inferior; manipulating people by weaponizing your White tears; refusing to take responsibility for your actions; expecting Blacks and people of color to educate you when you ask and be nice while doing it; pretending to be an ally, lying on us when you’re busted; calling the police because you’re frail and you feel threatened — especially when you start shit, being disrespectful to the authority you expect others to obey, tone policing, concern trolling, wordsmithing, and anything else that annoys the fuck out of people you do.
That was what transpired in my hall that day. She was histrionic and a bully. She is like the same women in the Theater who get in lines and inform the other goers with her facts and when corrected immediately rages off or yells at you when corrected or to shush you, to avoid disruption in actuality she is the only one causing a disruption by yelling . The same with the restaurant staff, the Ramona Singers of the City that have to have their way and if not they will make anyone in their orbit pay for their displeasure. They are the same women who at 20 are sure every man wants to fuck her and with that when the try to they complain. I do believe that is what transpired with much of MeToo and now that is why it is no longer taken seriously. Actual women who were or are assaulted are now lumped into the same women who stood and watched Louis CK masturbate into plant. You could not walk out? Seriously I have no pity nor concern for you vs the women thrown down to the ground by Harvey Weinstein and raped. That is not the same as watching Charlie Rose walk by in a robe and it accidentally opens to see the hanging sword. Again walk out and say, “Mr. Rose you can finish dressing and I will be in the office when you are ready.” Why are words so hard for White People? White women use your words or just shut the fuck up. For those women who need to go on living you do us no favors
If I can have a day without an encounter with a white person that makes me question my sanity and my ability to communicate it is a good day. And yes folks I do have some encounters with POC that are horrific. Who are they? Educators. Almost all in Education behave that way it is profession of Karen’s.
Despite going to Broadway and seeing Take Me Out, it was largely an audience of Gays and Tourists and so it was uneventful. Let’s hope that happens today, like AA I take each day as it comes. White people have real problems, largely each other. Male or female they are all Karen’s deep in their hearts and that is what defines White Privilege – the ability to be an asshole all day, every day and not have to worry about it affecting ones work or life in any fashion as the world rolls over to accommodate and be “nice”. Yeah, fuck that. I could not be more White or am I?
The test results have demonstrated that scholastic achievement in graces K-12 has declined as the result of Covid closures. That of course has led to social adjustments that also has lasted now beyond the closures and that many public schools are finding fewer enrollments, the Magnet schools once opened to lottery and now back to testing for entry and of course the supposed Teacher shortage has led to larger classes and fewer offerings of courses that are often elective or advanced in which to offer options for students that fall on both ends of the academic spectrum.
And with that the butterfly effect falls to colleges that have for years already found many entering Freshmen are behind in basic skill sets are finding that increased with the addition of the “woke” class that are demanding more of Professors yet also not being able to do the work asked of them. And with that many are in fact not Tenured and are what are referred to as Adjunct, making low wages, no benefits or having a permanent office in which to build relationships with either fellow colleagues or students as they are often commuting between campuses to teach. In other words as Colleges expect more in the way of debt and expectations for Students they are also rationing the actual item one comes to college for – the education. And with that a human toll that takes it toll as it does in this story in the Atlantic about an Adjunct Professor. It appears we are all disposable in America when you are not White and/or Male. Folks the Karen’s are all white women who are raging against the machine that is their White Privilege that they can do that, but in reality that is just passing the buck and misdirection of anger but even I find it repugnant and I am a white woman.
But of late as I walk into the schools and deal first with the adults I realize how bad and how in trouble we are there are few to none that actually teach and they cannot continue to in any reasonable manner with the endless blowing of the wind. When Students are whining, parents are whining and the Boards and Politicians are screaming nonsense I would pack up my Backpack and leave. Even I cannot handle much more and I am down to one day a week!
The article below discusses how many incoming College Students are struggling on many levels, from academics to emotions, this only confirms what I have been suspecting for quite some time, the next Generation of Kids born within that last five years and up to age 21 are going to be a troubled lot. The largest cohort I suspect are those currently between the ages of 14-21. We have already seeing the troubles in social settings and work environments that have been having socialization problems, in how to speak to people, establish boundaries and deal with anger. I have found of late that when someone is facing struggles and that you come into their path, they feel that you are responsible for much of it. With that they can absolve responsibility for their own anger/depression/anxiety that the refuse to acknowledge let alone manage or handle. In other words find fault, seek blame and point fingers and never apologize or admit anything.
We have lost the ability to negotiate, communicate, compromise and in turn walk away when all else fails. We bully, we intimidate, we make jokes, innuendos and we deny deny and deny again any responsibility for that we do as they made us do it. And with that children model that behavior and internalize it and they grow into it. The adults you hate today were the same children you hated years ago. Herschel Walker had problems understanding the concept of evolution, he is the epitome of one who has not. Few do and that takes work and few have access and availability to the kind of resources one needs to do so and it explains why in our current state we have the new normal, we have finally reached that point where in this pandemic time we can say this for certain. I do not see any progression and evolution for change and restoration of sanity for at least a decade, but it brings to question what is Sanity? I doubt these kids will see that in any Psych class anytime soon.
The Pandemic Generation Goes to College. It Has Not Been Easy.
Students missed a lot of high school instruction. Now many are behind, especially in math, and getting that degree could be harder.
By Eliza Fawcett The New York Times Nov 2, 2022
Jazeba Ahmad was a junior in high school when Covid-19 hit and her math education faltered. Ms. Ahmad was enrolled in an international baccalaureate math class intended to provide a strong foundation in areas like algebra, geometry, statistics and calculus.
But her high school in Columbus, Ohio, made a rocky transition to remote learning, she said, and soon, math classes passed with little to show for them. By her first year at Columbus State Community College, Ms. Ahmad, 19, found herself floundering in something that should have been mastered — algebra.
“I missed out a lot in those two years,” Ms. Ahmad said. “If I had learned those skills in high school, I feel like I would have been better equipped to do well in that class.”
Colleges are now educating their first waves of students who experienced pandemic learning loss in high school. What they are seeing is sobering, especially because the latest dismal results from the national exam of fourth and eighth graders suggest that they could face year after year of incoming students struggling to catch up. In almost all states, there were significant declines in eighth-grade math, and most states also showed a dip in reading for fourth and eighth graders.
In interviews across the country, undergraduates discussed how their disjointed high school experiences have trailed them in their first years of college; some professors talked about how grades are down, as well as standards. Many students are tentative and anxious.
For many low-income students and students of color, who have historically faced bigger obstacles to earning a degree, classes seem to be that much harder and graduating that much tougher.
As it is, in many states, high school graduation rates fell for the class of 2021. And undergraduate enrollment has declined 4.2 percent since 2020, according to preliminary data published recently by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
The swirl of issues “all demonstrate that we’ve got a crisis,” said Stanley Litow, a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University and a former deputy chancellor of the New York City public schools.
It’s especially bad, he said, for low-income students and students of color. “The population that we’re most interested in doing the most for seems to be moving in the wrong direction,” he said.
Benedict College, a historically Black college in Columbia, S.C., is facing that reality. First-year enrollment there, which typically hovers around 700 students, was halved in the fall of 2020 and rebounded to just under 600 last fall, said the college president, Roslyn Clark Artis. But this term, administrators were stunned to see an enrollment of just 378, which Dr. Artis attributed to students’ concerns about the economy.
Most students were high school sophomores when Covid hit, and they arrived with lower ACT scores than in previous years. The college has seen “significant remediation needs” in math, Dr. Artis said.
“We are now two and a half weeks past midterm, and our grades are telling the tale: students are struggling in math,” she said.
In math departments across the country, professors and administrators say more students need more support. Professors talked of whittling their syllabuses and lowering their expectations.
Lee DeVille, a math professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he “triaged” a class this past spring to focus on fundamentals. It pained him, he said, to cut out some “beautiful mathematics,” but it seemed necessary.
“They came in with a little bit less, and they probably came out with a little bit less,” he said.
At Texas A&M University, some math classes saw higher rates of D’s and F’s, as well as more withdrawals, over the course of the pandemic. The problems have been particularly bad for first-year students, said Paulo Lima-Filho, the executive director of the university’s math learning center, which provides tutoring.
Students of all kinds seemed to lack sharp foundational math skills and rigorous study habits, he said. And some students had flawed understandings of basic concepts, which particularly worried him.
“That gap will propagate through the generation of the cohort,” Dr. Lima-Filho said. “Colleges are going to have to make an extra effort to bridge that gap.”
Nick Sullivan, a sophomore at A&M, took a hybrid calculus course at his high school in Belton, Texas. Students learned primarily from videos, with supplementary in-person instruction, a style that “did not work at all for me,” he said.
Still, Mr. Sullivan had hoped last year that the class would give him an advantage in college calculus. But he found that nearly nothing carried over, he said, and that “I actually thought the wrong things.”
An engaging professor and help from the math center have helped him make up for the lost time, he said, and he is now majoring in nuclear engineering.
In college writing and literature courses, instructors say they have seen fewer issues with student readiness. But many pointed to other concerns, including higher levels of anxiety and a reduced willingness to find support.
At Auburn University’s writing center, first-year students historically made up about 30 percent of those seeking help — “the single biggest constituency that we’ve served,” said Christopher Basgier, the director of university writing.
That has dropped to 20 percent. “It may be that because they spent more time learning from home, they aren’t used to going out and seeking that kind of extra help,” he said.
The big risk for students is taking more time, and perhaps more money, on earning a degree — or not getting one at all.
At Benedict, which serves many low-income, first-generation students, the pandemic has made it even harder to ensure that students graduate on time, Dr. Artis said. The college’s six-year graduation rate in 2021-22 stood at 25 percent, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.
The college has “doubled down” on providing resources to students who are considering withdrawing from classes, she said. And despite the low graduation rates, she said the college is right to push ahead.
“We are committed to populations for whom disenfranchisement is common,” Dr. Artis said. “We’ve always accepted that sort of burden, despite the black eye that everybody seems to give us for our inability to push the kid — whose experience has been anything but traditional — out in a four-year traditional time frame.”
The long tail of the pandemic can also be felt in the mental health of adolescents, for whom rates of anxiety, depression and suicide have increased.
Dr. Artis said that she has observed a shift among students who spent the last years of their high school education primarily online. Those students seem more reserved, she said, less eager to engage in large group activities. The college’s football team is undefeated for the first time in its history, but student attendance at games is down.
“We have had students — for the first time in my 10 years as a college president — say to me, ‘Do we have to attend the parties?’” she said. “There’s almost anxiety associated with coming back into a social setting.”
At the University of Oregon, many students harbored a “level of apathy” toward college, said Amy Hughes-Giard, an assistant vice provost focused on supporting new students.
“They want to connect, but they’re unsure,” she said.
Clutch Anderson was a first-year student at the University of Oregon when Covid-19 torpedoed his college experience. Mr. Anderson, 21, an art and technology major, said he found it difficult to establish routines. During his sophomore year, his classes were remote and he barely left his off-campus apartment. He fell into a depression.
“I had no motivation and couldn’t get anything done in my classes,” he said. Now as a senior, he added, “I’m still trying to get out of that space.”
Ms. Hughes-Giard said the university is trying to instill a sense of belonging, by staging events and creating places to relax. But for the students who are the most behind, she worries that the pandemic’s effects are not going away soon. Even today, they often have other burdens, like working extra jobs to feed themselves and support their families.
“We’re always trying to slim that gap,” she said. “But it feels like we hit the wide open mouth of the river again.”
I have said repeatedly that to many of the insane freaks who descended upon the Capital on January 6th saw Trump as their Father Figure. Now naturally many of the men are too old to be the actual progeny of the 75 year old moron but it is not lost on me that Trump often played the gayest group of my lifetime, the Village People, as a call to arms, literally. The added irony that again many of the older crowd were likely the participants in another debacle of Disco hate that dominated the late 70s as it was seen as integration through music. “The” Blacks, “The”Gays and “The” Women were living large and free dancing to the Bee Gees and equality seemed no longer an illusion but a possibility. And then game the haters of the players and the game gave way to the Disco Sucks Movement. Here is a story behind that rage that led to a near riot at a baseball game. Yes folks the precursor to January 6th has a history of Bigotry by the AWM.
And for many who are White and Aggrieved be they male or female, “The” Donald spoke to them in the same way their Father did, abusively, dismissively and full of mockery about “the” others. All Families have this Patriarch, the Father, Grandfather or a Drunk Uncle who uses family gatherings as opportunity to unleash is loathing of what is wrong with the world – The Pill, Abortion, Blacks, Gays, Women, Jews, Mexicans, Video Games, Heavy Metal, Hippies, Democrats, etc….. They are the reason the world is falling apart and then it is of course preceded by the comment, “Back in my day.” Yes those were the better days and in turn “The”Donald echoed that same belief when he coined the phrase, Make America Great Again.
It does resemble a cult, the fanatical leader who is enigmatic, both charming and yet elusive, the surrounding oneself with family and those whom reflect his vision of the self, and of course isolation that enables the pursuit of ignorance and dismissal of anyone who challenges their beliefs or “their truths.” The cult leader thrives on submission and fealty and anyone who challenges them or is not willing to comply of course is dismissed and degraded. You see this in Scientology as a most classic example of what defines group think. And MAGA is much like that. A grandiose paranoia veils the movement and of course FEAR is the prime motivating factor.
I urge you to read this article in the NY Times about how these devotees see themselves in relation to the world and with that the belief that Trump is going to be their “savior” from “the” others who are going to take what they have. They are the ones who will take Social Security, Health Care, get free education and in turn take their Bibles and Guns leaving them without any safety net or tool in which to protect themselves. Many are less educated, live in dying rural areas and are lowly paid, often ill and heavily religious. That last thing makes one predisposed to lies and untruths more than most as well what do you think religion is? Truth or Myth? They are afraid and alone without anyone actually speaking to them in the language they understand and that is a large failing by Liberals as they speak in multiple syllables and use a tone that is both scolding and patronizing as one does to a child. I see and experience this here watching Liberal New Yorkers act like entitled brats over nothing. They are often the most arrogant motherfuckers I have met, Southerners and Seattle not withstanding are passive aggressive but New Yorkers skip the passive part and hit for the jugular. You see that with Trump and here are the same folks horrified by that behavior yet embracing it. New Yorkers recognize it but on that note they too love it as he is a smokescreen for their most basest of beliefs and fears that they too have, they just cover it better than most. And yes folks there are plenty of Manhattan residents who are MAGA members, they are wealthy, white and very aggrieved.
That should be the motto of the Department of Education as that is what defines most public education today, poor children living in poverty and the steps and tools they will need to crawl, walk or build their way out are not provided in today’s public schools.
I posted in the First Year the Hardest about the young transplant from the Philippines here on a Visa to teach for the next three years and the reality is that she is now stuck in job she will hate, in a place she is forced to live in a community that does not care about her and in debt with her family living literally an ocean away. You may call it Indentured Servitude but I call it a Hostage Situation. Slavery may be a bit extreme but there are a few to close parallels to not.
I struggle every day and debate if I am to walk into the schools this day or any other day. I am so bloody fortunate as I looked at the photos from my night at the Met Opera Gala and think, “Bitch you are the definitive of white privilege.” And with that I was also there and no I am not even close but close enough. I thought not once, not twice but three times about my life and ending it before it was not an option. That is how angry and afraid I was last year. I truly hated the children, the other Teachers and basically anyone forced or willing to walk through the doors. The rage was permeable and very much there, you could feel it in the air. I was so relieved on Friday to work only two hours, validate my belief that even the “best” school in Jersey City is hardly that was enough. The district ranks in the bottom 50% in the state and with that another election for a Board that has true political strife. I did not want to ruin that perfection from Friday, but today, Monday, I am even debating leaving the apartment. So I spent the morning again changing theater and opera tickets doing what I call the roulette wheel as the season progresses. It is early but I feel I needed to push myself with regards to Opera, the standard classics are always pleasing but if I have learned anything is that I need to step up and into unfamiliar waters. And with that, I have so far had only a few duds but at least I tried. Money is not wasted when you come out with a perspective and sense of self in regards to one’s taste and standards. It is why I do not read critics until AFTER I have gone. Either way it will not change my opinion but it enables me again to have perspective.
But when it comes to our public schools I have now taught in many across the country, in both liberal bastions and conservative ones. I have lived in Texas but never taught or subbed there, I wish I had for one reason, perspective. I am trying to figure out when or why I liked Teaching and again it fell to meeting interesting kids. They were not smart, nor stupid, they were just kids and they were really interesting as they at a stage when a sense of self was just emerging, testing boundaries on themselves and others and were seeking not just knowledge but a purpose of being. We should all retain those things in all stages of life. I am not seeing that nor have in a few years and I did not realize I probably was doing what I accuse others of – selective memory or knowledge. The truth is I ignored the rest and focused on those kids who did matter. I recall even telling another Teacher that is what I did and he said he agreed as he was struggling to connect. I told him that it is a numbers game and with that only a small percent will care about you, about the subject you teach and the reality of what they are doing in school and where they will take it, so focus on them. I did not say fuck the rest but I said the others will be lucky and find one who does the same for them but you cannot do it all and it is crazy to think otherwise. Now it is fuck them all. I don’t even care about one let alone more than one. Not that I haven’t had a moment where I have had a positive encounter but they fade fast and with that gone as soon as the period ends, not the day, by the next period, that is how fast that glow lasts.
From curriculum restrictions to book bannings, a lack of sex education and refusal to permit Teachers to discuss any “controversial” issue with a Student there is going to be a generation of ignorant and angry young people heading out in a few years to your community. The rise in Suicides and Mass Homicides will naturally rise as a result as we are seeing a lot of angry angry disconnected men already. Now younger men with even fewer role models or mentors will find themselves at the proverbial brick wall. When that asshole from the NY Times, David Brooks, is writing about young boys and the issues they face, we got a problem or two. A few years ago it was about Young Black Men and numerous schools were trying ways to reach out and ensure they graduate and have some grasp on a future course. I guess we can just lump them in a bigger picture now and hope they will find there way out of that hole that is already deeper on their end given the color of their skin and the economic reality of their status. Yes folks the one equalizer here is poverty and that rung on the ladder is worn out so again who kicks harder will always have one leg up. Which may explain why largely Black men play sports as they have that edge. Well as I read about Herschel Walker today I question how sharp that edge really is. And let’s face it, families are buying sports as they did buying their kids way into colleges. It is the have versus the have nots and that has been the way for a long time now.
And here is where I get frank about Race. Nashville “woke” me in ways that perhaps I needed or perhaps I did not. I still debate how horrific those schools were and if they did anything but damage me that has brought me here, just hating kids. I had always found that if I dug hard enough the bits of treasures would emerge, Teaching is just that – Archaeology and Anthropology – with a touch of Sociology to see the big picture. The courses and subjects you teach are to come from what you find as you study the culture you are in. And then came Nashville with the Racism, the Misogyny and Classism built in the structure, baked into the earth that even a Book on the system seems to prove what any history book could not, that the very schools that were to improve ones life were anything but. They were built to suppress and oppress and to segregate and divide and nothing will change it. The local NPR station there did an amazing podcast on a school in Nashville, The Promise, and from that explained how even a school five blocks away from another could be one a world away when it comes to the Students, the Teachers, the Admins and the resources one needs to make a school a part of a community that builds and leads versus one that does none of that. And when I encountered a Teacher here who had the audacity to tell me I am wrong about my experience and knowledge about Nashville and the systemic failure of their schools, I informed him that it was not just me and pointed to those. Do you think he gave a flying fuck, no, he is another white man who simply just doesn’t give a flying fuck about the world outside his bubble. But the arrogance to tell someone they are wrong is again so fucking wrong it can never be right.
And from that darkness I came into the light of supposedly a model state with model schools and into a city that was anything but. Only a couple of weeks ago Jersey City’s schools were released from State Control. Clearly that did nothing to help these dilapidated schools and their poor curriculum with no International Baccalaureate Programs, no Bi-lingual ones (given the cultural diversity here this is particularly shocking) and the simple lack of any outstanding programs that include the Arts or even Athletics should be telling enough. And it tells me they are much bigger dumpsters than Nashville’s, okay no, they are still huge but they faked it better with large high schools that had some type of focus on jobs and voc tech programs at least. But they had little to nothing, and I mean NOTHING else. I can at least say Seattle had an IB school, a Bilingual World school, at one point a Native American School, a Home School Program, and within some schools standard classes taught in Spanish as bilingual ed, as well as offering Running Start, a way to get kids into college classrooms earlier. I have not seen anything remotely close since leaving Seattle. It is my understanding they are eliminating much of those programs under the guise of selectivity and elitism.. okay but the Teachers that did teach the acclaimed Jazz and Music programs at two schools have since retired taking that with them apparently as well. So it all falls to sports now. Yikes.
The Seattle School District this year began with a Teacher’s Strike and it seems not different than the one in 2015, and with that the same issues and problems are not new just how one sees them is. Seattle now has Charters and dropping enrollments that many cities are facing and with the loss of students it means a loss of funds so cuts are made. Jersey City had no funding or was funding on a dime which is why 30 years ago the State took over the schools, apparently several Superintendents later, the last one in the gig for 18 months quitting during the pandemic never seemed to get a hold of them. Gosh now the current Supe in the gig for her year or so of effort has control and a new Board in which to manage the change. With that came the Billion dollar budget. It was a you have got to be fucking kidding me moment. And that they are addressing Teacher retention and Substitute hiring is top priority. Start with a Survey of the ones you have you may learn something.
And that brings me back to Nashville and the lessons I learned there. It is all for naught. I read Dad Gone Wild blog on the schools all the time and with that the endless violence and lack of leadership, the ever changing winds regarding curriculum and the added bullshit of religion is there as always. I read another piece about one school that is a “magnet” school, Pearl-Cohn, which is a meaningless term as it is supposed to draw kids from all over the city to enroll as they specialize in the arts. Yeah sure. I spent one day there and did not last the day. I spent two of the final hours literally being shoved in a hall closet masking as an office/waiting space after being attacked and harassed so badly I wanted to leave. That same shit you read about by the new Teacher in Arizona it was that only from high school kids with much more threatening posture. This school has had so much violence and threats of it that it was the subject of one article in the alt newspaper there. But last week another student arrived armed, and last year another, and another and another. And then again we have the Teacher and the raping of students there. The Admin who forced me to sit there waited until school was dismissed and with that informed me that I as a person of “privilege” did not understand her school and the students and with that said I could go. I asked her how as there is no longer bus service to and from the school and with the last bus leaving with Students does she know how I am to get home or where the nearest stop is. She suggested I call Uber and I suggested she pay for it. She no longer works for the district and has left to less privileged pastures elsewhere I assume. The Superintendent has since been fired, sued, and lost has gone on. Meanwhile his deputy is now a Superintendent and holding religious themed assembly’s in his new district. PRAISE BE.
So with that there are numerous stories that plagued Nashville schools the time I was there, most always unfortunately under leadership that were Black Men. And yes White Men as well and Black Women as in the Pearl Cohn case or in this case. The stories and allegations were horrific, disturbing and almost always sexual in nature and tone. This only perpetuates stereotypes and with that it brings those allegations that are serious often to be ignored. There is this story, or this oneor this one. I lost count of the stories and the cover upsand the excuses but the Board like many, just revolve in and out with little to say on any of it. Every single school I have highlighted I have been in and either left or had a run in with an Admin over the safety issue. The two alt schools were so bad that the Police refused to stay in them. And with that one finds oneself trying desperately to understand the why of it all. Poverty, religion, systemic racism are all contributory to the problems so by the time the rest of America got woke to George Floyd I had been sleepless in Seattle, Nashville and now New Jersey for a long time. When a white person points out problems and the reality of the situation it becomes about race, almost all supervisors in public education are Black or in significant positions of authority and power you can do nothing for fear of being called the “R” word, so you don’t. This is why Teachers are quitting, and particularly Black Educators; As you saw in that story the woman is not American and not white and most of her students are not either but she is literally hamstrung. Sorry, but when does color give you an excuse to bring and do harm to children? And why do we all allow this to continue? Or why are children of color ignored to the point they are permitted to act in such ways and no one wants to understand why and in turn try to fix that? And with that no one of any color goes into education and is a racist that is INSANE. So we lower standards, expectations and turn a blind eye. Then what? The trauma I saw and experienced truly affected me in a way to this day I cannot fully heal. So even empathy and compassion is often viewed through this tinted lens, meaning it is worthless and therefore I am.
And that is neither an excuse nor an explanation, I have weathered many school shootings, even those closest to me in Seattle, where a Substitute was featured and derided. Something tells me she was telling the truth but again we are ignored in the best of times. Again we have no keys, nor rosters with names, no emergency plans nor any information on what to do where to go, where to hang our coat or take a piss. We have little to nothing. So after a while you do look to the exit doors and wait to find a way to leave and leave it and the school all behind.
And that is what I feel in the public schools, that we are so desperate for Teachers of color and of diverse backgrounds we only see the surface. The joke is those who can do, those who can’t Teach. I add those who can’t teach become Administrators and with that they are often unaccountable, suffer from a lack of direction or are funded by largely white non-profits that have a desire to shut public education. Funny how the white person sees it but as not on the receiving end of cash we are not valued for what we see. I recall the horrific Supe in Seattle also a Woman of Color fired for accounting issues; another for her lack of support of Black Students. She too a woman of color and a Lesbian. And later more Superintendents and other Administrators who were prosecuted for testing fraud and the like. Almost all were women and all people of color. And with that we continue to march to the doors of schools over masks, vaccines and books. And those marchers? Largely the white families. Poverty makes strange bedfellows and yet it has always been my largest cohort of students that I most cared for, those of color and young girls. I failed in all counts as now I cannot be in a room for a minute without thinking how to get out. Uvalde changed that as when I read of the dead, I thought I could see my obit now: Two Teachers 10 Students killed and a Substitute also dead. Yeah not even my name matters, nothing matters any more.
We have 99 problems and no one is doing fuck all anything about it. And people wonder why I loathe social media and the odd time to do converse I often block the responses as frankly they are not looking for them, they are like me just venting. Its why this blog exists. I used to think it was to work on my craft of writing and nah fuck that too. And also why comments are vetted. They too are just spam. Isn’t that all this truly is?
When this card is tossed it is usually in a singular direction to one race – that would be the one often thrown in the direction of the Majority, which in this country is White. I have been in and out of schools for most of my adult working life, now 30 years and had that card tossed at me a few times. No time did it ever stick but affect me personally and professionally yes. The first time was when I was a new Teacher at Ingraham High in Seattle, Washington with its Principal a Black Woman named Gloria Izard Baldwin. (She is dead and hence her name) I had Student Taught there with great relationships and a good review and when I was hired that following October (as it was late in the start of the year when they finalized the position and had been staffed by a retired Teacher the first few weeks) which is not uncommon as that is often the shuffling of decks that schools do for often budget reasons tied to enrollment. So I took over a class roster of three different grades and subjects; 9th Grade World History, 10th Grade LA and 11th Grade U.S. History. Three preps and three different types/classes of kids. It is well known that 9th and 10th grades are the hardest and the 11thr and 12th grade less so. But that I had three different types of curriculum, two in History and one in Language Arts is challenging for the most veteran of Teachers, for a first year near impossible. Also by that time there is a great deal of shuffling of classes with some of the larger problems, late enrollments and other reasons that in these unfilled classes the cohort is mixed with most of the students possessing a problem of one type or another – academically or behaviorally – and this was no different. And all taking over from a Sub who gave them nothing to do for six weeks. And in a school known for problems in academics and discipline. But I did not feel daunted. I decided right then and there during that time to marry as I needed a fall back as I suspected early on that Education was not my calling and with that went ahead with amazing support from my Husband who I will say really rallied for me that first demanding year. He was only the other one, the other was Dave McNeely a SPED Teacher who knew I was being put into an impossible situation and he was just there to remind me that I had this. Then we had a new department head in English whom I reported to and a veteran in Social Studies who I also reported to. In that department I had a Teacher there, Freddy Yudin who also was very supportive and knew that again I was put into a very very challenging spot. And with that I carried forward and I fell in love with the kids and I was tough as hell on them but they saw I was tough on myself as well and they had my back which was unheard of at that school but it was not enough.
Late very late into the school year I heard from Gloria that a note was found in the lunchroom that it said Miss X is a Racist. She called me into her office and had written my performance evaluation with that on it and said I was not recommended to be hired the next year as a result. I asked to see said note and she said it was tossed as it was offensive and it was brought to her by a Lunchroom Worker. I asked to speak to the worker, she refused and insisted I sign the document, I refused. With that I contacted the Union and my Husband who immediately contacted a Lawyer. I would find myself again using an outside attorney with regards to the Seattle School District again years later when a similar accusation was levied and subsequently withdrawn. And I was not the first nor the only to have to do so in the district during my tenure there. Many many Teachers are often found on the back end of a complaint and some frankly are legitimate but most often they are vague, usually based on heresay or rumor or a Student afraid of getting into trouble so they deflect. I have known many cases like this to make the national news and there were two at Garfield High School in my time there that made national news as they were so troubling and Teachers had to hire outside Attorneys to fight to get their jobs back. The story behind the Curriculum at Center School that led a Teacher there to lose his job at that school was another and it was the subject of a Board decision that enabled him to finally get his job back. But there are districts all over this country and I suspect now more than ever with hotlines to call and the rest over curriculum issues and books that will lead to more of this.
Gloria Baldwin and I came to terms that without the note and tangible investigations into this allegation it was a pointless waste of time and I would sign a favorable review and leave on my own choice. It was later when I heard “rumors” of another Teacher behind the supposed note, Toni Ciardullo, may have led to this I was happy to leave the school. And it was Freddy Yudin who stuck up for me in the den of hate, the Teacher’s Lounge, when another asshole verbally assaulted me and demanded I be as funny as he had heard, when he tried to kick a chair out from under me as a joke. I will never forget that and it was then after only one year of Teaching I was done. I never completed a full year at a school after that, using my Husband as an excuse I would quit mid year or start so late that the year was already over and at that point had no skin in the game. And I finally left Seattle with my husband to Texas and got into rehabbing houses as a way of doing something more interesting than setting foot into the lions den.
Public Education is a shit hole and I never in my 30 years have ever met many capable Teachers, even fewer Administrators. It is a miracle kids are educated. I doubt today they are even coming close and as a Sub I don’t have to do more than sit back and watch how bad it is but it is no less distressing as it was 30 years ago when I first walked into Ingraham. There is something about my directness and my utter disregard for authority (meaning you have to earn my respect I am polite but not an idiot) and convention that rankles people and despite my amazing flexibility, intellect and high rate of connectivity to the most diverse type of people, I make people particularly in Authority positions deeply uncomfortable. I threaten them by just being. When I worked retail I was highly successful making a lot of money, and that was a target on my back. When I worked in banking I was just a bitch and had no time for any of the politics I saw. And when the Bank went under shortly after I left, as I knew it would given the fraudulent loans being made, I laughed. If one thing I do know what to do is read the cards. The same with Pay n’Save Drugs and many other business I worked for in my lifetime that no longer exist, they were unbelievably mismanaged and run by incompetents, so it does not shock me I was loathed. I can see that shit coming and with that I just do what is now called “quiet quitting.” I should have trademarked it. And I suspect I feel and felt the same way as most of my peers I just never had a reason to shut the fuck up and play the game. But in my private life I thrived, traveling, meeting amazing people, having amazing love affairs and built a life that allowed me to be independent. I fucked up a lot and with that I don’t care as that is what is one does to learn. Then came the assault, the night I was drugged and left for dead and with that I re-evaluated it all. I ran again to Nashville then once again to Jersey City. The best thing that came was the pandemic as it enabled me to do so on my own and without the buzzing of others bullshit in my head. Independence is the best FU you can have and few have it and it pisses most people off. I get it. I really do. But for a long time I carried it as a weight and as a woman I was sure that I was a bad person and tried hard to be something I was not… I was too generous, too forgiving and too damn nice. I can be some of the above but not all of the above and hence the new mantra – no compromises. You are who you are and you must be your authentic self that is unless someone else find that self offensive and then you are cancelled. God we are fucked up.
And with my skill set being largely that of an observer, as a way of protecting myself, I started my own way of having a mental Hoover file so that I could make sure I knew exactly who I was up against and if I needed to work around them. I can assure you if I was back in the grind I would have that running full time and be literally recording now every fucking conversation I had to ensure I was not misunderstanding them in the least and then transcribe it, follow it up with an email actually quoting them to leave a paper trail to protect myself. This is America folks, fueled by fear and self loathing.
It was how I felt for years about myself as I would just leave – jobs, relationships, cities and places as I would not deal with conflict or with those who hurt me. I tried to be a better person and be liked, be loved and then get rejected again and again and with that you turn inward. I finally realized I had been compromising too much and too often and without good mentors or even a therapist, I would continue the pattern until again I was nearly killed and even that took time. And with that I have made Jersey City my forever home. And even after the debacle with rent last year I renewed my lease, made my peace and am busy staying put. I would like to move when I want to and I do not feel compelled to do so. So I have come a long way baby.
With the hotbed subject of Race this is critical and I feel the same way about the issues surrounding LGBQT ones as well. I was listening to a podcast this morning where Marc Maron and his guest, Nathaniel Carmichael, were discussing comedy and when an individual seizes on it perhaps at first to press a button or to explore a reaction and then to go and on on and not be over it, say in comparison to Dave Chappelle and his obsession with Trans people you wonder if it is something else. Is it extrinsic, such as Religion or is in fact denial and not taking it as an Intrinsic issue of one’s own. Is Chappelle Transphobic? A Religious kook? One internal the other external. Well, we have seen nothing about Faith in his past comedy so it appears he is or that he feels confused or angered about this subject but why is he so obsessed. Had he been duped by a trans woman and had a relationship with them and is now misdirecting that anger? Or just resentment? Again it is when you go on and on and blame the “cancel culture” (another new card being tossed) and not the self for the endless conflict you created, you do wonder.
And that brings me to Racism. It is LEARNED folks, LEARNED. It is reinforced in subtle ways and passive aggressive ways. It is manifested over time and through stereotypes and archetypes that one uses to confirm an intrinsic belief. Extrinsic factors are those that through laws, through mass communication and social media reinforce and repeat them to you enough that they too are internalized. And now that encounter with someone cutting in front of you in a line is doing so for deeper more sinister reasons. We all have biases and prejudices and those are taught early through those we closest to and whom we admire. Then you seek out more ways to affirm them and that becomes a part of your identity and belief system. And you can learn in the same way to change them but that takes more effort and more willingness to do so. It happens organically and over time and again with effort for it will not happen without that heavy lifting to examine where it came from, how it became that way and who you are in response to it. And so anyone of any Race, Gender, Religion and Culture can be a Racist, Misogynist, or be “phobic” over anyone or any group. It is mutually inclusive.
I have printed an article below about the largest EEOC case in California in history taking place and it is regarding race, that of Latinos and their treatment of Black workers. With that I want to point out that the GOP have tapped into that resentment of the “other” when it comes to recruiting new members to the party of Trump. I read this in the New York Times yesterday about Latino Republican Candidates and their attitude towards Immigrants of which they are a part. And this also crosses other races as Asians are another growing block of the GOP with regards to this and other economic issues that the GOP promote. Much of this has to do with the other Unicorn of American Mythology, The American Dream that sits next to the Meritocracy one on the shelf of Dumb Bullshit R US.
Until I moved to Nashville I did not get this at all. I did not think it existed across race and I was wrong. Poverty is such a feature of life there that the idea of the rung on this ladder is wide enough to hold many is not a belief at all. They are sure that they have worked harder and done more and anyone sharing any of it is not possible, they are taking it or even worse stepping on them to get over them. I heard many a Black person share with me confusion and rage over Latino folks and the Kurds that are the largest segment of Immigrants in the region. While on the surface it appears Racist it is FEAR and that is the seed that plants in the mind of one when he/she hears about a new person in the community, what makes them different is the easiest measure outside of race or gender or religion. What one sees matters first and then the rest comes from others. What is external becomes internal and to change that is not easy.
First impressions are lasting ones and funny we are the receiving end of that. I know as it takes time to get to know me but I have never been given the leisure of that. So with that Fuck Off is my first impression and that is the card I toss, and I really hate games so it ends it very quickly. I prefer to hold all my cards and close to the chest.
In California’s largest race bias cases, Latino workers are accused of abusing Black colleagues
By Margot Roosevelt LA TIMES Aug. 22, 2022
Nearly every day, the onetime Ontario warehouse employee said, he was stunned to hear racist slurs from Latino co-workers.
“They said it in English — they said it in Spanish all the time,” recalled Leon Simmons, a Black father of four with a deep voice and gentle manner.“When they look you right in the eye and call you the N-word to your face, that’s dehumanizing.”
Thirty-two miles away at a Moreno Valley warehouse, it was the same story. Another Black laborer, Benjamin Watkins, describedhow a Latina co-worker called to him: “‘Hey, monkey! Yeah, you!’ and waved a banana in her hand. A group of women burst out laughing.”
In America’s long history, harassment and discrimination against Black workers has usually involved white perpetrators — and that remains the case today. But with the rapid growth of the Latino population, now at 19% in the U.S. and 39% in California, Latinos form the majority in many low-wage workplaces. And instances of anti-Black bias and colorism among them is drawing new scrutiny, even as activists in the two communities forge alliances over criminal justice and economic development.
Latinos certainly are targets of job discrimination as well and continue to struggle for equity in the workplace. But the two largest racial bias cases brought by the federal government in California in the last decade alleged widespread abuse of hundreds of Black employees at warehouses in the Inland Empire, the state’s booming distribution hub for trade between the U.S. and Asia.
In interviews, Black employees said a torrent of racist insults and discriminatory treatment was mainly inflicted by Latino co-workers and supervisors who composed roughly three-quarters of the workforces at the sprawling facilities in Ontario and Moreno Valley.
“Mayate,” a type of beetle and Spanish slang for the N-word, was a common taunt, according to interviews and court filings.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuits alleged that supervisors at the global medical supplier Cardinal Health and at Ryder Integrated Logistics, a subsidiary of the trucking giant — along with their staffing firms — routinely ignored harassment in Spanish and English at their Inland Empire warehouses. They gave Black employees the hardest manual jobs, denied them training and promotions and failed to take action despite dozens of complaints, according to court filings and interviews.
Many of the Black workers were hired through temp agencies. When they complained, managers — both white and Latino — retaliated by disciplining them or abruptly firing them, according to the EEOC. Others felt forced to quit because of “intolerable working conditions created by the hostile work environment,” the lawsuits alleged.
Cardinal, Ryder and their temp firms denied the accusations. But as scores of Black employees came forward and the EEOC interviewed witnesses, the companies settled the cases last year rather than face jury trials.
“We are seeing an increase in larger race harassment cases,” said Anna Park, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Los Angeles district office. “The nature of them has gotten uglier. There’s a more blatant display of hatred with the N-word, with imagery, with nooses. All the violence you’re seeing in the news, it is manifesting in the employment context.”
In a state as diverse as California, offenders span all races and ethnicities, she said.
“Two decades ago discrimination was viewed as a Black-white paradigm,” Park said. “The feeling was minorities can’t be discriminating. But it could be Asians discriminating, it could be Latinos discriminating. Regardless of what color you are, you don’t get a free pass.”
The warehouse operators and their staffing firms — including a Glendale temp agency, AppleOne, which supplied workers to Cardinal — must offer extensive harassment training in English and Spanish and submit to stringent monitoring for verbal abuse, bias and retaliation.
The Los Angeles Times contacted more than two dozen current and former Latino workers from Cardinal and Ryder. None agreed to an interview.
Nationwide, EEOC records show prejudice can afflict any race or ethnicity, but Black victims predominate.
Over the last decade, the agency has won settlements in 171 race discrimination suits involving Black workers, 59 cases involving Latino victims, 12 involving Asian victims and six involving white victims.
Though the agency tracks the race and ethnicity of victims, it does not compile official statistics on offenders. Nor are there databases of private cases categorized by perpetrators’ race. This makes it hard to gauge the extent of anti-Black hostility from Latino workers.
But court filings, victims’ allegations and employer records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Angeles and San Francisco offices involved discrimination by Latinos, about a third involved white offenders and a third were unspecific.
Since at least 2016, the EEOC alleged, Black workers were subjected to the N-word by co-workers and managers “many times per day…including ‘n— bitch’, ‘lazy ass n— ain’t did no work all day,’ and ‘Look at those n—looking like monkeys, working like slaves like they should be.’”
The first worker to file a complaint described being called anti-Black slurs in English and Spanish, facing prejudice from a Latina supervisor and being deliberately run over with a cart by a Latino co-worker.
Photos taken by Black workers showed a women’s restroom defaced with graffiti: “N— stink up the aisles” and “Black pipo stink.” A men’s restroom was defaced with “n—killer.”
In a court filing, Cardinal acknowledged “derogatory graffiti,” but said it was promptly removed. A spokesman declined to address other worker allegations, citing the EEOC’s post-settlementstatement: “Cardinal Health and AppleOne have put in place measures aimed at preventing discrimination and harassment.”
AppleOne, which placed 1,000 workers at Cardinal over two years, said in a statement it “did not control the workplace” but has implemented “improvements” to its policies ordered by the EEOC.
On a sunny morning in Rialto, Simmons, wearing a dashiki revealing forearm tattoos of a mermaid and a panther, was perplexed that the abuse at Cardinal Health had come from Latino colleagues. He choked up as he described his ordeal.
Growing up in Compton, Simmons had Mexican American friends. And over decades at other jobs — forklift driver, custodian, security guard — “Hispanics, whether they liked you or not, they kept it to themselves,” he said. As for the few white workers at Cardinal Health, “Never no problem with them,” he said.
AppleOne hired him to drive a cherry picker at Cardinal for $14 an hour, but he found Black workers were largely kept off the vehicles. Those jobs were given to less experienced Latino workers, even when licensed Black workers were first in line, he said.
Instead, Simmons, in his mid-50s, was given a harder floor picker job for $12 an hour, on his feet loading boxes headed for Kaiser Permanente hospitals. Temperatures inside the warehouse often rose past 90 degrees, he said.
It was six days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day, including mandatory overtime. He saw Latino workers clocking out after eight to 10 hours, but when Black workers asked to leave after 14 hours, they were often threatened with termination, Simmons said
A Latino supervisor “would make me clean up the trash while everybody else was sent home.”
After three months of complaining, Simmons was allowed to drive a cherry picker, but his pay remained at $12 an hour, he said, lower than that of non-Black drivers.
He grew angry and despondent: “They’d write stuff on the bathroom walls — ‘gorillas, go back to Africa.’ The Black workers would cross it out. Two days later, it would be right back.”
Simmons complained to AppleOne and Cardinal managers, he said. “But nobody investigated. Nobody cared.” His Latina supervisor said, “If you’re up here complaining, the orders are not getting picked.”
Cardinal officials testified they received complaints about racial slurs, including graffiti with the N-word, but some emails documenting complaints and their responses were erased due to an auto deletion policy, even after EEOC charges were filed.
Black workers who complained “started disappearing one by one,” Simmons said. “We’d find out they were fired.” After 11 months, he too was told “your assignment is over.” No reason was given, he said.
By then, Simmons had started going to a psychologist. During visits, “I’d start shaking and crying,” he said. He was put on antidepressants.
Simmons got another job as a security guard but had to quit. The racism at Cardinal, he said, “messed me up. Something popped in my head. I was still having night terrors — waking up screaming.”
Today, diagnosed with PTSD, Simmons is on disability.
Anti-Black prejudice in Latino-dominated workplaces comes as no surprise to scholars of race relations. Tensions between Latinos and Black Americans have ebbed and flowed in Southern California over decades. Researchers point to a shared legacy of slavery in the U.S. and Latin America. An estimated 15 times more enslaved Africans were taken to Spanish and Portuguese colonies than to North America.
Latino attitudes toward Black Americans can be “tied not only to racism but to colorism,” said Pew Research Center analyst Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, an issue that also arises among other races. “It goes back to colonial history’s caste system. White Spaniards were at the top. Blacks and Indigenous at the bottom. And racial mixtures in between.”
In a 2021 survey, Pew asked U.S. Latinos how they identify themselves on a spectrum of skin color from light to dark, and how skin color shapes their daily lives. Four in 10 of those with darker skin said they experienced discrimination or unfair treatment by another Latino — the same portion who reported discrimination by a non-Latino. Nearly half said they heard racist comments from friends and family about other Latinos.
“Some Latinos identify as white, or are seen as white,” Gonzalez-Barrera said. “Latinos are a complex community — not one community but many.”
For a forthcoming book, “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality,” Tanya Kateri Hernandez, a Fordham University law professor, combed through legal records, interviewed U.S. civil rights leaders and attorneys and traced the history of Latino workplace discrimination against Black people, including Afro-Latinos, highlighting scores of court cases.
“Anti-Blackness is a global phenomenon,” said Hernandez, who is Afro-Latina. “It’s an uncomfortable truth, but belief in racial hierarchy is common in Latino communities like it is in others.”
Her scholarship focuses on the issue, she said, because “opening our eyes to ways Latinos are implicated is a huge step in trying to eradicate racism.”
Manuel Pastor, director of USC’s Dornsife Equity Research Institute, suggested that tensions can flare between Latinos and Black Americans partly because they compete against each other in low-wage labor markets more than against white or Asian workers.
But, Pastor said, the extent of workplace bias is debatable given “so many instances of Latino and Black workers in relationships of respect.”
At unionized workplaces, labor leaders are working to bring Black and brown employees together to push for better treatment, he said. Many warehouses like Cardinal’s and Ryder’s are nonunion sites with large temp workforces, where employees lack advocates in the event of abuses.
In the Inland Empire, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center is organizing across racial and ethnic lines to push for labor law enforcement. In Los Angeles, nonprofits such as the Community Coalition have built Black and Latino alliances to address racial disparities. The Los Angeles Black Worker Center joined with the majority-Latino Clean Carwash Worker Center to support each other’s economic justice campaigns.
“The fate of Black people and the fate of immigrant people are linked in the fight against exclusion and exploitation,” said Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, a Black Worker Center co-founder. “As we look at schools, jobs, housing, the last thing our communities need is to be divided and fighting each other.”
EEOC’s lawsuit against Ryder and Kimco Staffing was similar to that against Cardinal Health and AppleOne. At Ryder’s warehouse, where assemblers packed and shipped medical supplies, Black employees were subjected daily to such slurs as the N-word, “Aunt Jemima,” “negra fea” (ugly Black woman), “cochina,” (pig) and ”cucaracha,” (cockroach), according to the lawsuit.
Black workers described restroom graffiti of a person hanging by a noose, according to the EEOC, and a Latina supervisor who would pull Black workers off the production line to “clean the cracks in the floor.”
In the wake of the suit, a Ryder investigation found that several Ryder and Kimco employees had used anti-Black epithets and that managers failed to report or document complaints, Ryder acknowledged in a court filing. But the companies denied any widespread issues with discrimination, harassment or retaliation.
A Ryder spokeswoman declined to answer questions, instead citing its statement last year blaming Kimco, which had placed 2,500 workers at the facility over three years.
“The claims in this particular case arose out of unfortunate events between employees of a former staffing vendor,” it said. “While Ryder management was not involved… we are taking responsibility because the alleged conduct occurred on our premises.”
Kimco did not respond to requests for comment.
Watkins, a soft-spoken, bespectacled 33-year-old, said he often heard slurs in English and Spanish during four years at Ryder. “Hispanic workers had their own production lines, the Black workers had to be on a different line,” he said — a setup described to the EEOC by dozens of others.
A former Ryder supervisor, Royce Yamaguchi, who is of Asian and Caucasian descent, said 90% of assembly leads were Latino and would pick Latino workers to be on their lines, often excluding Black workers. Spanish was the dominant language in the warehouse and Latinos were favored for promotions, he said. Black workers were rarely given jobs that could lead to advancement, Yamaguchi said, and some complained to him about being called “monkey,” and “boy” by Latino colleagues.
In videotaped testimony, Watkins said Latino supervisors often wouldn’t let the Black workers get water or take bathroom breaks. “They’d say, ‘You’re big and Black, you can keep working,’” he recalled.
Watkins sought to move from temporary to permanent status. “My supervisors had me training the new employees and then I would see the new Hispanic temps be promoted to permanent,” he said. “They didn’t even consider me.”
Finally, he quit. The treatment, he said, “made me feel … like I wasn’t a human being.
Athertwo-story home on a Moreno Valley cul-de-sac, Regina McCorkle described how, at the end of each Ryder shift, employees would be placed on the following day’s schedule. But the next morning she and other Black assembly workers would often find themselves dropped from the list.
Excluded workers would line up on standby. “You couldn’t clock in,” the 40-year-old mother of seven said. “If there were five Hispanics waiting and 10 Blacks, they’d pick the Hispanics first.”
McCorkle complained to six Ryder and Kimco managers — all Latinos — about bias and slurs, she said. One dismissed the behavior as just part of the “culture.”
In an interview, the former Ryder Integrated Logistics employee reveals the hardship she faced.
After about a year, Ryder promoted McCorkle to a quality auditor job. But name-calling escalated. Latinos “seemed insulted that a Black woman was checking their work,” she said.
Within days of complaining yet again, McCorkle was fired for what Ryder said were “performance problems.” “No one ever told me about a mistake,” she said.
McCorkle was the first to file an EEOC charge. And within a month of EEOC’s lawsuit, 115 other Black workers came forward with similar allegations.
One was Leilani Turner, a 52-year-old former homecare nurse. In Ryder’s parking lot, she and other Black workers found their vehicles vandalized, she said.
“There would be milkshake all over our cars,” Turner said. “Our tires were flat. There would be urine on our tires.”
Turner asked managers for security camera footage. “They’d say, ‘Oh, it’s the angle of the camera, we can’t catch your car.’”
Finally, she got permission to park in another part of the lot, far from the workers’ entrance.
When Turner was promoted from assembler to shipping clerk, she said, managers neglected to give her the written manual that Latinos got to memorize inventory codes.
“They set you up to fail,” she said.
At five warehouses where Turner has worked over the years, “80% of workers were Hispanics, with a small portion of Caucasians and Black people,” she said. “The Hispanics stick together — they make sure their people get ahead.”
Was there white prejudice? Yes, but not from co-workers, she said, but from top managers who failed to respond.
“You shuffle me off like it’s no big deal,” Turner said. “You’re Caucasian, you don’t care.”
Federal and state officials often hold companies and their temp agencies to be “joint employers.” Executives can’t evade penalties by blaming their staffing firms, said the EEOC’s Park. “You don’t get to stick your head in the sand. You’re on the hook because you control the work.”
Staffing firms are also at issue in a sweeping lawsuit that California’s civil rights agency filed in February against Tesla on behalf of thousands of Black workers. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing cited a decade of complaints of discrimination and harassment at the electric-vehicle maker’sFremont factory,
Racist slurs in English and Spanish were aimed daily at Black employees by co-workers and supervisors, and Black workers were given the most difficult physical jobs, the lawsuit alleges. Tesla hired most workers through 14 temp agencies “to avoid responsibility,” it asserted, and declined to investigate complaints from those workers.
Tesla called the suit “misguided,” saying the company “strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment.”
In a separate case, a federal judge in San Francisco in April ordered Tesla to pay a Black elevator operator $15 million after a jury found his Mexican American supervisor had taunted him with graffiti depicting a large-lipped figure with a bone in his hair, while co-workers frequently called him N-words and other epithets in English and Spanish.
Lawsuits also target hiring policies. In the last three years, two large Latino-owned businesses, a Fresno ice cream maker and a San Jose cheese manufacturer with factories in California and eight other states, paid settlements after EEOC investigations alleging they refused to employ non-Latinos.
Six million Americans identify as Afro-Latino, 12% of the adult Latino population, and they are more likely than non-Black Latinos to experience discrimination, according to a Pew study this year.
While other Black workers at Cardinal and Ryder said they understood just a few Spanish slurs — and in some cases, none — Barry Bryant, 41, son of a Puerto Rican father and an African American mother, took in much more as he worked at Cardinal Health.
“Their nickname for me was ‘pinche mayate,’ f—ing June bug,” he said. “The first time I heard it, I almost snapped.” Supervisors would call to him, “Hey negrito,” Black boy. “I’d say, ‘Dude, my name is Barry.’” Latinas two feet from his workstation chatted in Spanish about Black people “saying, ‘Why is their hair so funky and nasty? They smell because they’re Black,’” he said. “It was just vile.”
Like Simmons, Bryant had been hired by AppleOne to drive a cherry picker. But despite having three certificates for the job, he was relegated to manual labor on the loading dock.
He asked a Latino supervisor when he would get to drive. “He laughed and said, ‘Trust me, never,’” Bryant recalled.
After Bryant filed written grievances with Cardinal and AppleOne over N-word harassment and noose graffiti, a Latina HR official responded, “Man, are you actually doing work or just busy about the gossip?” he said.
Days after Bryant’s last complaint, the HR official told him as he arrived at work that AppleOne assignments, including his, were ended. And then she waved in four non-Black Latinas he had just seen at the AppleOne office, he said.
Recounting his experience, Bryant wiped his eyes. “Cardinal made me feel worthless,” he said.
Today, Bryant is on disability with kidney disease, cared for by his Mexican American girlfriend, a postal worker.
As for the EEOC settlement, “It would be nice financially if something did fall my way,” he said. But mainly he hopes his former co-workers and managers will be “be retrained and taught how to be human beings more than anything.”
I will be gone for the next few days attending the Newport Jazz Festival and with that I rarely read or follow news as it is harder and harder to find an actual physical copy of a New York Times and with that I simply just headline read to see if there is an issue of import I should read when I get back to the hotel and can sit on my Ipad to do so. But with that I am also better off as I often want to discuss what I have read and since few if any people actually read anything, let alone newspapers, it enables me to find less to talk about and less inclined to talk at all. I wrote about the strange encounters with the couples in Saratoga Springs, which only confirmed what I had long known, MAGA people are white, educated, professionals and they are afraid of “others” taking what they have earned and in turn be “given” what they were not. So this is about self interest and self preservation and with that it is seeded in two factors – Racism and Elitism. So as they drive off in their Mercedes which they are paying for via credit that also discriminates, they will never have to worry about the traffic stop and being found dead by the side of the road. I can assure you I used to drive a Mercedes, was stopped in Arizona and the State Police Officer, a woman, threatened to shoot my dog who was barking and afraid as stepped out of the vehicle to make it so there was no risk to Emma. Emma was not outside of the car she was fine in the back seat just doing what dogs do but this woman wanted me to be complacent and afraid, it worked. I sat down on the road and begged her to not do this leading the other Officer to intervene and proceed with the infraction portion of the ticket. Which I never paid and never heard a thing from the Arizona State Police again. Nor ever will ever go back there. They can fuck themselves. But my encounters with Police to this day are still highly charged and in turn things I go out of my way to avoid. Even if I saw a crime committed I am not engaging or getting involved, I fear the Police more. They too can go fuck themselves.
So with that I leave you with this article from the Guardian with regards to the majority of Police Shootings and how they end up with the stats that show 1 out of 3 end up dead in such a similar encounter and that they were fleeing from the scene. I cannot understand that mentality as I could not nor would not in any encounter as I could not outrun a cop, let alone a gun and I have never felt compelled to do so. Lay prone in the street, fall down on hands and knees begging yes, but run no. That said, it does not excuse the slime bag Police from shooting and killing these individuals. I have again no respect for this profession as again I point to Uvalde or to the Highland Park shooter stopped in traffic, the Buffalo shooter or in fact Parkland who was also stopped by Police in a parking lot. Bitch please had these boys been not white, the outcome would have been very different.
‘Hunted’: one in three people killed by US police were fleeing, data reveals
In many cases, the encounters started as traffic stops or there were no allegations of violence or serious crimes
Nearly one third of people killed by US police since 2015 were running away, driving off or attempting to flee when the officer fatally shot or used lethal force against them, data rev
In the past seven years, police in America have killed more than 2,500 people who were fleeing, and those numbers have slightly increased in recent years, amounting to an average of roughly one killing a day of someone running or trying to escape, according to Mapping Police Violence, a research group that tracks lethal force cases.
In many cases, the encounters started as traffic stops, or there were no allegations of violence or serious crimes prompting police contact. Some were shot in the back while running and others were passengers in fleeing cars.
Two recent cases have sparked national outrage and protests. In Akron, Ohio, on 27 June, officers fired dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker, who was unarmed and running when he was killed. And last week, an officer in San Bernardino, California, exited an unmarked car and immediately fired at Robert Adams as he ran in the opposite direction.
Despite a decades-long push to hold officers accountable for killing civilians, prosecution remains exceedingly rare, the data shows. Of the 2,500 people killed while fleeing since 2015, only 50 or 2% have resulted in criminal charges. The majority of those charges were either dismissed or resulted in acquittals. Only nine officers were convicted, representing 0.35% of cases.
The data, advocates and experts say, highlights how the US legal system allows officers to kill with impunity and how reform efforts have not addressed fundamental flaws in police departments.
“In 2014 and 2015, at the beginning of this national conversation about racism in policing, the idea was, ‘There are bad apples in police departments, and if we just charged or fired those particularly bad officers, we could save lives and stop police violence,’” said Samuel Sinyangwe, data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence, but “this data shows that this is much bigger than any individual officer.”
‘Hunted down’
US police kill more people in days than many countries do in years, with roughly 1,100 fatalities a year since 2013. The numbers haven’t changed since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, and they haven’t budged since George Floyd’s murder inspired international protests in 2020.
People in Newark, New Jersey, march demanding justice for Jayland Walker in July 2022. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images
The law has for years allowed police to kill civilians in a wide variety of circumstances. In 1985, the US supreme court ruled that officers can only use lethal force against a fleeing person if they reasonably believed that person was an imminent threat. But the court later said that an officer’s state of mind and fear in the moment was relevant to determining whether the shooting was warranted. That means a killing could be considered justified if the officer claimed he feared the person was armed or saw them gesturing toward their waistband – even if it turned out the victim was unarmed and the threat was nonexistent.
As a result, very few police officers get charged. Adante Pointer, a civil rights lawyer, said it was not hard for officers to prevail when the case boiled down to what was going through the minds of the officer and victim in the moment: “The only person left to tell the story is the cop.”
In 2022 through mid-July, officers have killed 633 people, including 202 who were fleeing. In 2021, 368 victims were fleeing (32% of all killings); in 2020, 380 were fleeing (33%); and in 2019, 325 were fleeing (30%), according to Mapping Police Violence. The data is based on media reports of people who were trying to escape when they were killed, and it is considered incomplete. In roughly 10% to 20% of all cases each year, the circumstances surrounding the shootings are unclear.
Black Americans are disproportionately affected, making up 32% of individuals killed by police while fleeing, but only accounting for 13% of the US population. Black victims were even more overrepresented in cases involving people fleeing on foot, making up 35% to 54% of those fatalities
“If a person is running away, there is no reason to chase them, hunt them down like an animal and shoot and kill them,” said Paula McGowan, whose son, Ronell Foster, was killed while fleeing in Vallejo, California, in February 2018. The officer, Ryan McMahon, said he was trying to stop Foster, a 33-year-old father of two, because he was riding his bike without a light. Within roughly one minute of trying to stop him, the officer engaged in a struggle and shot Foster in the back of the head. Officials later claimed that the unarmed man had grabbed his flashlight and presented it “in a threatening manner”.
“These officers are too amped up and ready to shoot,” said McGowan, who for years advocated that the officer be fired and prosecuted. Instead, the officer went on to shoot another Black man, Willie McCoy, one year later; he was one of six officers who fatally shot the 20-year-old who had been sleeping in his car. The officer was terminated in 2020 – not for killing McCoy or Foster, but because the department said he put other officers in danger during the shooting of McCoy.
The city paid Foster’s family $5.7m in a civil settlement in 2020, but did not admit wrongdoing. A lawyer for McMahon previously said the officer was attempting to “simply talk to Mr Foster” when he fled, adding that McMahon “believed his actions were reasonable under the circumstances”.Vallejo police did not respond to a request for comment.
“Not only do these officers get away with it, they get to move on to bigger and better jobs while we’re left shattered and are still trying to pick up the pieces,” said Miguel Minjares, whose niece, 16-year-old Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon, was killed by Fremont, California, police.
Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon was killed by Fremont police in March 2017. Photograph: courtesy of Miguel Minjares
In March 2017, undercover officers fired at a car that was fleeing, striking Mondragon, who was a passenger and pregnant at the time. The officers faced no criminal consequences. One sergeant went on to work as a sniper for the department, though has since retired, and another involved in the operation continued working as a training officer, records show.
“You shoot into a moving car, which you shouldn’t have done, and you weren’t even close to hitting the person you were trying to target. And now you’re a sniper?” said Minjares. “When I hear sniper, I think of precision. It boggles my mind. It shows the entitlement of officers and the police department, they just put people where they want them, it doesn’t matter what they did. It’s confusing and it’s heart wrenching.”
In June, five years after the killing, the family won $21m in a civil trial, but it’s unclear if Fremont has changed any of its policies or practices.
A Fremont spokesperson declined to comment on the Mondragon case and did not respond to questions about its policies.
The push to prevent the killings
In the rare cases when prosecutors do file criminal charges against police who killed fleeing people, the process often takes years and typically concludes with victory for the officer, either with judges or prosecutors themselves dismissing the charges or jury acquittals.
Robert Adams, 23, was fatally shot by police as he ran away Photograph: Courtesy of family
In one Florida case where an officer was investigating a shoplifting and fatally shot a man fleeing in a van, prosecutors filed charges and then dropped the case a week later, saying that after a review of evidence, it “became apparent it would be incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction”. In a Hawaii case where officers killed a 16-year-old in a car, a judge last year rejected all charges and prevented the case from going to trial.
For the nine fleeing cases where officers were found guilty or signed a plea deal, the conviction and sentence were much lighter than typical homicides. A Georgia officer who killed an unarmed man fleeing on foot was acquitted of manslaughter in 2019, for example, but found guilty of violating his oath and given one year in prison. A San Diego sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty earlier this year to voluntary manslaughter after he killed a fleeing man, but he avoided state prison, instead getting one year in jail. And a Tennessee deputy, found guilty of criminally negligent homicide after shooting at a fleeing car and killing the passenger, a 20-year-old woman, was sentenced to community service.
Not only do these officers get away with it, they get to move on to bigger and better jobs while we’re left shattered and are still trying to pick up the pieces.
Miguel Minjares
With the criminal system deeming nearly all of these killings lawful, advocates have argued that cities should reduce the unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly, such as ending traffic stops for minor violations and removing police from mental health calls. There’s also been a growing effort to ban officers from shooting at moving cars.
California passed a major law in 2019 meant to restrict use of deadly force to cases when it was “necessary” to defend human life, not just “reasonable”, and stating that an officer can only kill a fleeing person if they believe that person is going to imminently harm someone. The new law also dictated that prosecutors must consider the officer’s actions leading up to the killing, which police groups had arguedwere irrelevant under the previous standards.
But after its passage, police departments across the state refused to comply and update their policies, said Adrienna Wong, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of southern California, which backed the bill. That’s only now starting to change after years of legal disputes.
“I think we’re going to start to see prosecutors consider all the elements of the new law, but I’m frankly not holding my breath based on the track record of prosecutors in the state. We never thought this law was going to be a full solution.”
Off the Rack Publishing 