NB Commentary: How ironic on so many levels. Just one year ago, 9 people were killed in a mass shooting in South Carolina. I am sure they half mast the flag at the Capital, of course a US Senator was killed, but at every US Embassy around the world?
I keep fighting this “gay agenda” bs. Battling with folks who believe it’s demonic and part of the New World Order; watching Jaden Smith’s gender fluidity and Kaitlyn Jenner’s transformation into the”Woman of the Year;” attempting to defend people I know and love who are in same sex relationships and have children while others claim it’s genocide.
Meanwhile, we have pedophiles who are behind the scenes raping and molesting children… which turns the focus towards LGBT community and still I am defending the beloved souls, the real deal, the genuine folks who are in same sexed relationships and they ain’t raping or molesting children, entrapping them or even kidnapping them and yet… I feel like a voice in the wilderness. And now this.
How utterly inconsiderate for the US Embassies around the globe to fly this flag. It doesn’t even fly this flag on federal buildings as a matter of course for any reason. What’s the nature of this statement? Screw you, we are on our own territory and we can fly any flag we want on our property we don’t care if you are totally incensed by it.
Typically, the folks who work at these Embassies are a combination of the natives and US diplomats and representatives. For all we know, even they are not in alignment with the Gay Agenda, same sex marriages, etc.
What lives, culture, religion, practices, etc, really do matter to the US and its authorities and political leaders and administrators?
It makes you wonder from this display of total intolerance of anyone’s belief system to do such a thing as wave the LGBT rainbow flag in foreign lands among people who are utterly against that lifestyle. A mark of incredible hubris… is all I can say.
“TODAY IS THE DAY THAT AN AMERICAN CHRISTIAN TERRORIST (KKK) GROUP KILLED NINE SOULS IN A CHURCH IN SOUTH CAROLINA WHO’S FAMILY FORGAVE THE TERRORIST ! REST IN PARADISE (RIP). No flag waved for them on any US Embassy! Love and respect for all citizens of the world!”
Remembering the Charleston 9 June 16, 2015
US Embassy Says Gay Flag Was Flown At All Their Embassies Worldwide
Jamaica AG under fire for voicing disapproval of rainbow flag at US Embassy
The United States Embassy in Jamaica says the rainbow flag being flown at its consulate is also being flown “across the globe” at all its embassies.
A tweet from the US Embassy this afternoon read: “Across the globe US Embassies flying our flag half-mast in memorial & rainbow flag in solidarity w LGBT our citizens.”
The tweet comes hours after a controversial tweet from Attorney General Marlene Malahoo-Forte denouncing the flying of the rainbow flag in Jamaica, following a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday.
“I strongly condemn #OrlandoNightClubShooting but find it disrespectful of Jamaica’s laws to have #RainbowFlag flown here. #MyPersonalView,” Malahoo Forte said in a post on Monday.
ATTORNEY GENERAL MARLENE MALAHOO FORTE (CREDIT: JAMAICA GLEANER FILE PHOTO)
Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte has come under criticism and is being asked to explain herself, after saying that the United States Embassy in Jamaica was disrespecting the island’s laws by flying a rainbow flag, following the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida on Sunday.
The rainbow flag, which is symbol of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, has been flying at half mast next to the US flag at the Embassy in Kingston.
But Malahoo Forte made it clear, in a post on Twitter, that she did not agree with that expression of solidarity.
Stressing that it was her personal opinion, Malahoo Forte tweeted yesterday that while she condemned the gun attack by Omar Mateen, which left 50 people dead and 53 injured, she found it “disrespectful of Jamaica’s laws” to have to the rainbow flag flying there. Buggery remains illegal in Jamaica.
However, the US Embassy replied to Malahoo Forte’s tweet, asking her to explain her “legal reasoning”.
The Attorney General has also been harshly criticized by some on Twitter, while others agreed that she had a valid point.
Guma Oz Dubar (Photo Credit: Charleston County Detention Center) and James Loftis (Photo Credit: Goose Creek Police Department)
It was a typical Saturday night for taxi cab driver Guma Oz Dubar, 46, as he picked up passengers in need of a ride home after a long night of partying. With his friend James Cody Newland, 32, in tow, the two picked up a man named James Edward Loftis from a local South Carolina strip club. Things took a turn for the worst, however, when they dropped Loftis off at his Goose Creek home.
39-year-old Loftis claimed the taxi driver and his friend demanded a large amount of cash for the taxi ride and attempted to force their way into his house. That’s when he shot both men in the head and chest. Loftis then dug a shallow grave in his backyard and set the bodies on fire.
“They were essentially just slow-cooked inside the grave site,” said Deputy Solicitor Bryan Alfaro.
Police arrived at the home later that night after Loftis’ wife reported that while she was out of town, her husband had called her to say he “killed ‘them’ and put them in the back yard,” the Washington Post reports. She noticed the smell of bleach from her husband’s attempted crime scene cleanup when she came home. She also explained to police that her husband has a history of mental issues, per an incident report.
The South Carolina man now faces two murder charges for the deaths of the African-American cab driver and his friend, according to Raw Story.
The news publication also reports that Loftis gave authorities varying accounts of what happened the evening of March 5, 2016. He initially told police he invited the two men in but then contradicted his story by saying they barged into his home.
Per Rolling Out, the family and friends of Dubar, the slain taxi driver, say that he would never force anyone to pay a cab fare; he would instead call the police and let them handle it like he’s done in the past.
Stephen Harris, the attorney appointed to defend Loftis, acknowledges that what his client did was “heinous” but he had every right to defend himself under South Carolina’s Stand Your Ground Law.
“He’s a human being,” Harris said. “He freaked out and thought he was going to prison, so he tried to hide the bodies. Nobody knows how you’re going to react when you kill two people.”
According to the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division website, the state’s Protection or Persons and Property Act is essentially a “Stand Your Ground” law that legally authorizes the use of deadly force against an intruder in your home, vehicle or place of business. The law also grants immunity “from criminal prosecution and civil action” to individuals who decide to use lethal force to defend themselves.
Loftis was allegedly traumatized by the attempted home invasion and used evidence of a size 12 shoe print at the door of his home in order to support his claim.
Per Raw Story, circuit Judge Markley Dennis complied to allow Loftis to post $250,000 bond at a court hearing Sunday, stating that his choice of the defense makes him less of a flight risk. Loftis’ lawyer says he will remain under house arrest until his trial.
One of the victim’s daughters said she forgives Loftis for what he did, according to Live5News. Dubar’s wife isn’t willing to forgive just yet, though.
“You took my soulmate from me,” she said to the Post and Courier. “He didn’t deserve to be burned.”
Join us in our effort to change our world with Empowering Narratives. Share this empowering narrative on your social network of choice and ask others to do the same.
The dilemma of slavery continues to dog the United States of America (USA) 137 years after Pres. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation (1862) freeing only the slaves held in the South.
Many historians say emancipation caused more problems than it solved. These learned scholars opine that the Civil War was unnecessary because slave masters would have ended slavery because they would have realized supporting slaves was too great an economic burden and that free labor was more productive. However, slavery was about more than economics and productivity. Slavery was the base of a value system that defined the Southern way of life. It was tied to a Southerner’s sense of personal worth and upon which the house of cards of the Confederacy was built.
For the Southern gentry, it was not simply a question of freeing or not freeing slaves. The proposition was intimately related to a society’s unwillingness to accept as human property it was taught to see as brut animals one owns like a horse or cow. Slavery’s belief system attributed everything good/righteous to white people and everything bad/evil to blacks. Synonymous to the mind-set of English lords, families that owned slaves were bred to believe in their inherent right to be masters just as they bred into slaves the rightness of being owned. People who believed in that system could never accept that the stroke of a pen could rob them of an entitlement to which whites clung so tenaciously for generations and sacrificed tens of thousands of lives to preserve.
The reality is Lincoln’s signature did not undo the mental underpinning that justified slavery and the dehumanizing process of white supremacy that was supported by the socioeconomic, educational, religious and political systems in the US. Incidents such as those that occurred in North and South Carolina recently are endemic to the 15 slave states and find their geneses in the forlorn hope of returning to that erst while existence before emancipation. That hope is nurtured by Article I Section II of the US Constitution and state practices and policies that give rise to unresolved psychological issues left over from slavery.
First in South Carolina, Anthony Hill, 30, a black man, was shot in the head then dragged behind a truck for 11 miles, leaving a foot-wide dark stain on the asphalt (6-2-10). Newberry County sheriff’s deputies said the bloody trail led them to the mobile home of Gregory Collins, 19, a white man now charged with murder. The County Sheriff said the two men who were employed by Louis Rich, a chicken processor in Newberry, had spent most of Tuesday together at Collins’ mobile home, where Hill was shot early Wednesday morning. The FBI has been called in to assist in what is obviously a “hate crime.”
These types of gruesome “hate crimes” continue to occur from Texas to West Virginia. Such murders are not the result of wanton violence because the perpetrators are always white men and the victims black. They are reminiscent of ritualistic lynchings that were so popular from the 1890s through the 1940s. They seem to be a result of latent or repressed rage that surfaces uncontrollably when a black man is perceived as challenging the master’s status.
The aforementioned historians would readily reject this hypothesis but when people who have been immersed in the use of dehumanizing hatred which is tied to their sense of worth and power lose status to those that are dehumanized, the affect can be intolerable. Under such circumstances totally despicable acts can result.
The next example relates to children. Breeding slaves meant offsprings were notA 150-year-old photograph discovered in an attic in North Carolinarevived haunting images of the faces of American slavery. The picture shows two young black barefoot slaves, wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel.
children worthy of compassion but they were “pickaninnies.”
The photo, which may have been taken in the early 1860s, is believed to be of a boy named John and an unidentified companion. Will Stapp, a photographic historian and curator for the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution said the picture is “A testament to a dark part of American history. What you are looking at when you see this photo are two boys who were victims of that history.” Found during a moving sale in Charlotte in April, the photo was accompanied by a document detailing the sale of John in 1854 for $1,150.
Keya Morgan, New York collector, who paid $30,000 for the photo album which included the young boys and several family pictures and $20,000 for the sale document proclaimed, “I buy stuff all the time, but this shocked me. A portrait of slave children is rare.” Morgan believes the home in which the photo was found was owned by a deceased descendant of John. “This kid was abused and mistreated and people forgot about him. He doesn’t even exist in history. And to know that there were millions of children who were like him, I’ve never seen another photo like that that speaks so much for children.”
Stapp said the photo was probably taken by Timothy O’Sullivan, an apprentice of Mathew Brady, the famous 19th-century photographer whose portraits of historical figures such as Pres. Abraham Lincoln are legendary. O’Sullivan photographed what is believed to be some of the first slaves liberated after Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (1862).
Harold Holzer, an administrator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an author of several books about Lincoln said, “To me, it’s such a moving and astonishing picture. Abolitionists circulated photos of adult slaves who had been beaten or whipped, the photo of the two boys is more subtle,” only suggesting their horror. Thinking of children who from birth to death, lived the dehumanizing misery of slavery, Ron Soodalter, an author on slavery and member of the board of directors at the Abraham Lincoln Institute in Washington, D.C. said, “The photo depicts the reality of slavery. This picture shows that the institution of slavery didn’t pick or choose. This was a generic horror. It victimized the old, the young.”
The absence of John and millions of slave children like him is no accident of history; they have been deliberately edited out of history by academicians who frame and write it. Controlling that process is jealously guarded by universities; Dr. M. Cookie Newsom, director for diversity education and assessment at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill declares. “Faculty diversification for universities is seen as “affirmative action.” There’s no delicate way of describing the lack of commitment many top research universities demonstrate as they talk about diversifying their faculties.”
When confronted with the dismal statistics, Newsom says university decision-makers offer: 1) There are not enough qualified candidates of color; 2) There is no need to interview them because they are in high demand from other institutions; and 3) They are too expensive. Recalling an instance at UNC where a black female staff candidate was disqualified on the claim she didn’t “fit well” and because she “spoke too loudly,” Newsom proclaimed “Underlying the excuses is an insidious presumption of inferiority. Diversity research has not focused on the inner workings of the tenure process in committees…. that is where most of the biases emerge.”
Newsom’s conclusions are drawn from research and statistics that show, while peer research institutions have documented plans to retain and advance minority faculty, the outcomes reflect nothing more than lip service. “If you are an African-American, American Indian or Latino with a Ph.D., your odds of ever receiving tenure at a Research I (school) are between slim and none.” Between 2001 and 2007, black professors consistently represented just 3 percent or less of tenured or tenure-track faculty year after year at Harvard University, Ohio State University, University of Florida, University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley, University of Illinois, University of Texas, Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“It’s racial discrimination,” she said unapologetically. “We know what’s wrong; there is inherent bias in committees and negative perceptions based on race. “Institutional racism’ is just the door blocking entrance, once inside scholars find other superficial barriers for junior faculty, including overburdening service work, undervalued qualifications, and the lack of mentorship and support from senior faculty,” Newsom reiterated.
Myths, misconceptions, deliberate distortion and outright lies taught about black people during slavery are still a part of white folklore regarding African Americans and continue to be taught. These socioeconomic, educational, religious and political processes serve the same purpose now they did during slavery; they are the base of an American value system that defined a way of life — white supremacy. This value system is no longer tied to just southerners’ sense of personal worth and power; it is as American as the “Tea Party Movement.” For a white man, there is no worst position or condition to be in than to be beneath a black man, because he is educated to see a black as totally worthless.
The continuing dilemma of slavery is the shared value it holds for whites, so much so, they support each other as though status in the US is a zero sum game. The US Constitution still values slave descendants as 3/5 of white men. That is why the status of slave descendants can not be allowed to change. Whites are educated to believe they deserve a status above blacks and the failure to achieve it can trigger the kind of response displayed by the young man in South Carolina. White supremacy is a psychological disease left over from slavery that affects most white Americans and black people suffer its effects as institutional racism and acts of violence.
A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.
The dragging of Hill’s body sheds light onto how much the death and destruction perpetrated upon African-Americans in this country hundreds of years ago still resides in this country’s DNA.
The murders in Charleston South Carolina have ripped the scab of US history off and laid bare the festering sores and oozing puss of the consciousness and psychopathology of white supremacy for the entire world to see. That dastardly act exposed the real America. With that act one of the symbols of white supremacy, the Confederate battle flag that flies over the capital of South Carolina has come under increased scrutiny. The rebel flag has long been a bone of contention and conflict between Africans in America and whites. For Black people, the flag represents one aspect of racial oppression, slavery, terrorism, murder and injustice. I say one aspect because on many occasions US terrorists like the Klu Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils also used the American flag as their rallying symbol! From an accurate historical perspective, the Confederate battle flag is not the flag flown by the original Confederate States of America, the first seven states that separated from the Union: South Carolina (the first state to secede), Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia. Later, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia withdrew from the Union and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy had several flags during its brief existence. The flag known as the rebel flag or the Confederate battle flag was not one of the series of Confederate flags adopted by the Confederate States of America. That battle flag was originally the flag of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia! The rebel flag that flies over the South Carolina State capital was not an official symbol of the Confederate States of America! It became the symbol Southern resistance to the anti-apartheid movement also called “integration” during the twentieth century. In recent years especially during the “Civil Rights” movement, that flag came to represent a consciousness of racial apartheid and animus, political subjugation, socio-economic caste and psychological terror. South Carolina US Senator Strom Thurman popularized that flag when he ran as a presidential candidate in 1948 as a Dixiecrat. During this time the Democrats controlled the South.
It wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Southern whites abandoned the Democratic Party in mass and switched Republican. So in actuality the rebel flag is a modern symbol of white supremacy. Now in light of the Charleston killings, defenders of that ethos are trying to obfuscate and revise American history. They are attempting to deflect the truth about the real meaning of the rebel flag. Since the killings I have read and seen articles and posts on YouTube claiming the War Between the States was not about slavery, that it was about “states rights”, tariffs and finance, that the rebel flag is merely a symbol of family history, tradition and regional pride! There were posts about Blacks owning slaves and African chiefs selling other Africans into slavery; anything to take the onus off of whites to prevent us from seeing not only the individual atrocities like Charleston South Carolina but the systemic holocausts white supremacy has wrought not only here in this country but around the world! If there was ever any doubt about whether slavery was the central issue in the War Between the States, I’ve included a picture of a one hundred dollar bill from the Confederate States of America. Look at the images on the paper. This piece of evidence alone will reveal just how integral the institution of slavery was to the Confederate States of America and its economy. Yes there were issues of “states’ rights”, there were conflicting regional cultural practices and interests, differences in economic philosophy but never forget the fact both the North and South were united on racism and warmongering. Both the North and the South profited from slavery, it’s just the North’s economy was more diverse and did not depend mainly on agriculture as did the South. The Northern financial elites had a major grip on the flow of capital and more access to money than their Southern counterparts. If you look at Western and modern world history you find Europeans love war. There is rarely a year that goes by they are not fighting, killing and plundering somewhere, even today. So from my perspective the issues of tariffs, the fugitive slave act, the expansion of slavery into the territories were just excuses for them to do what they love to do best, kill and maim each other and people of color. Bloody Kansas between1853-1861 is an example where whites used violence to decide whether Kansas would be a “free” state or a “slave” State. Many define Bleeding Kansas as a precursor to the War Between the States. If that logic is correct then the War Between the States was about slavery! Remember slavery was enshrined in the original US Constitution. The original document that bound the former British colonies together was The Articles of Confederation. It said nothing about slavery from a policy standpoint and left it to the individual states to deal with the issue as they saw fit. But delegates to a convention called in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation conspired to created a totally new document that would enshrine their class as the ruling elite in the more centralized government they created! Since many of the delegates were slaveholders or profited from slavery in some form or other, slavery became a key issue in the new document called the Constitution of the Untied States of America.
“A final major issue involving slavery confronted the delegates. Southern states wanted other states to return escaped slaves. The Articles of Confederation had not guaranteed this. But when Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, it a clause promising that slaves who escaped to the Northwest Territories would be returned to their owners. The delegates placed a similar fugitive slave clause in the Constitution. This was part of a deal with New England states. In exchange for the fugitive slave clause, the New England states got concessions on shipping and trade. These compromises on slavery had serious effects on the nation. The fugitive slave clause (enforced through legislation passed in 1793 and 1850) allowed escaped slaves to be chased into the North and caught. It also resulted in the illegal kidnapping and return to slavery of thousands of free blacks. The three-fifths compromise increased the South’s representation in Congress and the Electoral College. In 12 of the first 16 presidential elections, a Southern slave owner won. Extending the slave trade past 1800 brought many slaves to America. South Carolina alone imported 40,000 slaves between 1803 and 1808 (when Congress overwhelmingly voted to end the trade). So many slaves entered that slavery spilled into the Louisiana territory and took root.” The Constitution and Slavery http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/the-constitution-and-sla… Slavery (both European and African) was the driving force in both the colonial and US economies. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the US Constitution making it the law of the land! The roots of what we see/saw in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Ferguson Missouri, Baltimore Maryland and Charleston South Carolina recently go back to colonial America when the European monopoly trading companies and their administrators decided to augment their white slave labor force (indentured servants) with Africans. The profit motive “the top priority is the bottom line” of capitalism forged a brutal system that exploited the white bondsmen and African captives using them both as cheap labor. That tradition continued after the Revolutionary War and up until the War Between the States. White and Black resistance to the colonial administrators abuses (Beacon’s Rebellion and others) forced the colonial governors to make concessions to the poor whites/indentured servants so they would not side with Native Americans and Africans against the elites. They used divide and rule to undermine Black and White unity. They “freed” the indentured servants, allowed them to call themselves “white” then gave them a modicum of “rights”, privileges and mobility they denied Native Americans and Africans. Those divide and rule tactics have allowed the ruling elites to still remain in power and control from colonial times, through the transition to the United States to the present. This is why incidents like Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston happen! Don’t fall for the okey doke. The rebel flag is not the central issue. It is only a piece of material. The real issue is the consciousness and values behind it! As vile as what that flag represents is, taking it down is only a symbolic concession as long as the consciousness of white supremacy, white skin privilege and domination remain.
decacsinc 
Recent Comments