A rural Peruvian woman stands in front of police officers who guard the streets of Lima during the ongoing protests demanding immediate elections to resolve the current political crisis. She is part of the delegations from the country’s southern Andes highlands, one of the rural regions neglected by the overwhelming centralism of Lima and its elites. CREDIT: Walter Hupiú/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Feb 20 2023 (IPS)

The current political and social upheaval in Peru is not a temporary problem, but has to do with deeply-rooted inequality and social hierarchies, according to historian José Carlos Agüero.

In this South American country, 59 people have died in the two months since Dina Boluarte was named president, 47 directly due to the crackdown on the protests that began on Dec. 7. The 60-year-old president has stood firmly behind the armed forces and the police despite the death toll caused by their actions.

Peru has been a republic for 200 years, but due to the acute Lima-oriented centralism deep-seated problems of inequality and discrimination especially affect rural Amazonian and indigenous Quechua and Aymara populations.

“What a social upheaval can bring are not solutions, but momentum that can help combat the most deadly effects of this combination of factors that is so dangerous to people, which is what matters to me above all,” Agüero said in an interview with IPS.

In 2021, according to the latest official statistics, urban poverty stood at 22 percent and rural poverty at 40 percent, especially high in the country’s highlands and Amazon rainforest. Regions such as Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Puno – some of the centers of the current wave of protests – had the highest levels of poverty, ranging from 37 to 41 percent.

Lima is home to more than 10 million people, nearly a third of the total population of 33 million. The capital receives a large influx of people from the provinces, who flock to the city seeking opportunities that do not exist in their places of origin.

Agüero, 48, is a historian, essayist and writer who won the National Literature Award for non-fiction in 2018. In his work he reflects on the country and its past. He himself is the son of two members of the Maoist armed group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), who were extrajudicially executed in the 1980s.

In his analysis of the causes of what is currently happening in Peru, he mentions various aspects raised by other historians such as cultural and ethnic aspects in relation to how the groups that hold power in the capital have not paid enough attention to the regional dynamics of the country’s Andes highlands, and have underestimated the region’s tradition of protests.

He also cites the crisis shaking the political system of parties and representation, which sociologists and political scientists have been pointing to for more than two decades, without managing to bring about any solution.

And he refers to – and disagrees with – anthropological interpretations by observers who argue that the country is in the grip of a process of indigenous, especially Aymara, people demanding and gaining respect for their rights.

Agüero’s explanations are based on his studies of history and racism, which he says reflect the burden of failing to dismantle the social hierarchy still in place in Peru in the 21st century.

“Reactions break out against the caste-like hierarchical relations periodically, not just now. Outbreaks are ready to occur at any time,” he said, referring to the social protests that have been ongoing since Boluarte was sworn in as president on Dec. 7, after President Pedro Castillo was impeached by Congress.

Castillo, a 53-year-old rural schoolteacher and trade unionist, became president in July 2021, thanks to strong support in rural Peru, with the backing of a far-left party, which later turned its back on him. His government was characterized by poor management and a rejection of politicians and the traditional elites.

The impeachment and imprisonment of Castillo sparked mass demonstrations, especially in the central and southern Andes, by people demanding that early elections be held this year and calling for a citizen consultation on a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution. Boluarte finally agreed to bring elections forward to October 2023, but Congress shelved the bill.

“Overt racist interactions are not the only aspect we can talk about, but also the constant belittling and snubs, which are perhaps the most powerful driving force behind our relations when it comes to the moment of truth, when it is either kill or be killed, or when you have to decide on the distribution of wealth, or the legitimacy of a protest or a political proposal,” said Agüero.

He said that according to this logic, there are people who will be left out of the national pact because they are seen as less worthy or less equal. “All of that has been put back into play to explain what is happening right now,” he said.

Rocío Quispe, a 64-year-old indigenous Quechua woman, worked hard to build her house in the hills of the Santa María neighborhood in the working-class Ate Vitarte district in eastern Lima, after her family fled the highlands department of Ayacucho, the epicenter of poverty that was hard-hit by the 1980-2000 internal armed conflict. In the photo she sits with her six-year-old granddaughter and the family pet. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Coming from a ‘forgotten people’

Rocío Quispe, a Quechua woman from the central Andean department of Ayacucho, one of the areas hardest hit by the internal armed conflict that ravaged Peru between 1980 and 2000, lives in the Santa María neighborhood in the Ate Vitarte district in the east of Lima, one of the most populous with just over 700,000 inhabitants, mainly of middle to low socioeconomic status.

She is 64 years old and lives with her 27-year-old daughter and six-year-old granddaughter in a house that she has built little by little in the hilly area of ​​Santa María on the outskirts of the capital. She does not have a steady job and does what she can, selling food for instance, to get by. She is one of the millions of people from other parts of Peru who have come to Lima in search of a better future.

“We came because of terrorism, we dropped out of school, we left everything behind. So many people were shot dead there, they would come in your house and kill you. First my sister came, then I came and we have worked here without stealing, without harming anyone,” she told IPS.

She said her aim was to live in peace, free of the fear she faced in her home region.
Her family had fields in the rural community of Soccos, where a massacre of 32 women, men, girls and boys was committed by a police unit called Los Sinchis in 1983.

“Many of us from Ayacucho came to Lima to have a life because we felt abandoned,” Quispe said. In the capital she worked hard to buy a piece of land and help her parents, and when she got pregnant her top priority became her daughter’s education.

Like many of her neighbors, Quispe protested in December outside the Barbadillo prison where Castillo was initially detained, accused of staging a coup d’état for trying to dissolve Congress and install an emergency government, ahead of an impeachment vote by legislators.

“Because we are protesting they call us terrorists. But the real terrorists are the people who sell out their homeland, who forget about our people, who from their positions in power accuse us just because we want our children to have a good school, a good education,” she said indignantly.

When she speaks there is strength in her voice: “We are a neglected people from Ayacucho where we grew potatoes, corn, wheat and barley, and for them to call us terrorists makes us very angry. They call us terrorists, they call us stinky ‘serranos’ (hillbillies), cholos (a derogatory term for indigenous or mixed-race people), they call us all sorts of things.”

And she complains that Congress, which she sees as a corrupt center of power, conspired to overthrow Castillo.

“These people who they despise elected a president who was a provincial ‘serrano’ schoolteacher. Maybe he didn’t really know how everything worked, but the lawmakers didn’t leave him alone, until they drove him to desperation,” Quispe said.

The protests continue, although with less intensity. There are roadblocks in regions such as Cuzco, Puno, and Arequipa, while Boluarte began a round of talks with political parties on Feb. 15 to address the crisis.

The measure was seen as a grasping at straws to hold onto the office of president, given the documented reports about a number of killings committed by the security forces during the crackdown, which Boluarte has not condemned.

Historian, essayist and writer José Carlos Agüero is photographed at the presentation of his book Persona (Person), in September 2018 in the north Lima district of Los Olivos. In his critical reflection on the current social outbreak in Peru, he says the elites form a network of privilege that is also racist, neglecting the country’s rural indigenous and mixed-race majority. CREDIT: Courtesy Rossana López

Not one, but many Limas

According to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, in Lima 65 percent of the population consider themselves ‘mestizo’ or mixed-race, 19 percent indigenous, eight percent black and five percent white. Nevertheless, racism is a daily feature of life and has turned many people intensely against those who are protesting in their regions or have come to the capital to make themselves heard.

Why don’t the elites recognize that there are many Limas? Although Agüero said he could not give a definitive answer because there are few studies on the elites in Peru, he said he could talk about their behavior and the way they organized in politics.

He believes that it is not a question of ignorance; it is not that they do not understand. “There are highly educated people who have studied in foreign universities and are part of what we call the elite. They have demographic data, surveys, everything necessary to understand that Lima is a very large metropolis, now made up of several different Limas,” the writer added.

“But they rule like elites in other parts of the world. They maintain the conviction that they are privileged. In Peru, it seems to me that they form a network of privilege in a way that is also racist,” he remarked.

Agüero said that this position isolates them but at the same time puts them in a role of paternalistic control.

“What matters most to me is that the distribution of power, real, economic and symbolic, should stop being a matter of privilege and in the control of an elite network that is also racist. For me that is the issue,” he said.

A family from Sachac, a Quechua farming community in the Andes highlands region of Cuzco in southeastern Peru, where Quechua is still the predominant language and where ancestral customs are preserved. When members of these native families move to the cities, they face different forms of racism, despite the fact that 60 percent of the Peruvian population identifies as ‘mestizo’ or mixed-race and 25 percent as a member of an indigenous people. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Sep 1 2022 (IPS)

Banning the use of the same bathroom, insults and calling people animals are just a few of the daily forms of racism experienced by people in Peru, a multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual country where various forms of discrimination are intertwined.

“In the houses where I have worked, they have always told me: ‘Teresa, this is the service bathroom, the one you have to use,’ as if they were disgusted that I might use their toilets,” Teresa Mestanza, 56, who has worked as a domestic in Lima since she was a teenager, told IPS.

She was born in a coastal town in the northern department of Lambayeque, where her parents moved from the impoverished neighboring region of Cajamarca, the homeland of current President Pedro Castillo, a rural teacher and trade unionist with indigenous features.

With Quechua indigenous roots, she considers herself to be “mestiza” or mixed-race and believes that her employers treat her differently, making her feel inferior because of the color of her skin.

Sixty percent of the population of this South American country of 33 million people describe themselves as “mestizo”, according to the 2017 National Census, the last one carried out in Peru.

For the first time, the census included questions on ethnic self-identification to provide official data on the indigenous and Afro-Peruvian population in order to develop public policies aimed at closing the inequality gap that affects their rights.

A study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) ranks Peru as the country with the third largest indigenous population in the region, after Bolivia and Guatemala.

Teresa Mestanza has experienced discriminatory, if not outright humiliating, treatment because of the color of her skin, as a domestic worker in Lima since she arrived as a teenager from a Quechua community in northern coastal Peru. She defines herself as ‘mestiza’ or mixed-race and believes that this is the reason why some of her employers try to “make me feel less of a person.” CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Before the invasion by the Spaniards, several native peoples lived in what is now Peru, where the Tahuantinsuyo, the great Inca empire, emerged. At present, there are officially 55 different indigenous peoples, 51 from the Amazon rainforest region and four from the Andes highlands, which preserve their own languages, identities, customs and forms of social organization.

According to the census, a quarter of the population self-identified as indigenous: 22 percent Quechua, two percent Aymara and one percent Amazonian indigenous, while four percent self-identified as Afro-descendant or black.

During the Spanish colonial period, slaves were brought from Africa to do hard labor or work in domestic service. It was not until three decades after independence was declared that the country abolished slavery, in 1854.

Indigenous and Afro-Peruvian populations are historically discriminated against in Peru, in a country with traditionally highly segmented classes. Their needs and demands have not been met by the State despite legal frameworks that seek to guarantee equality and non-discrimination and specific rights for indigenous peoples.

This situation is reflected on a daily level in routine racism, a problem recognized by more than half of the population (52 percent) but assumed as such by only eight percent, according to a national survey conducted by the Ministry of Culture in 2018.

Sofia Carrillo is a journalist, activist and anti-racist feminist and Afro-Peruvian proud of her roots, who has faced racism since childhood and despite this made Forbes Peru’s list of the most influential women in the country this year. CREDIT: Amnesty International

“Racism is hushed up because it hurts less”

A journalist, activist, and radio and television host who was chosen by Forbes Peru magazine as one of the 50 most powerful women in the country this year, Sofia Carrillo is an Afro-Peruvian proud of her roots who has faced many obstacles and “no’s” since childhood.

“It was not seen as possible, for example, for me to be a studious girl because I was of African descent, and black people were not seen as intelligent. And that was represented on television and generated a great sense of rebellion in me,” she told IPS in Lima.

Faced with these messages she had only two options. “Either you believe it or you confront the situation and use it as a possibility to show that it is not true. I shouldn’t have to prove myself more than other people, but in a country as racist and as sexist as this one, that was the challenge I took on and what motivated me throughout all the stages of my life,” she said.

In her home racism was not a taboo subject, and was discussed. But this was not the case in the extended family of cousins and aunts and uncles “because it’s better not to be aware of the situation, so it hurts less; it’s a way to protect yourself,” Carrillo said.

“It is not uncommon for people of African descent to even say that they do not feel affected by racism or discrimination, because we have also been taught this in our families: that it will affect you if you identify it, but if you pretend it does not happen, then it is much easier to deal with,” she said.

Her experience as a black woman has included receiving insults since she was a child and sexual harassment in public spaces, in transportation, on the street, “to be looked at as a sexual object, to be dehumanized,” she said.

She has also had to deal with prejudices about her abilities in the workplace. And although she has never stopped raising her voice in protest, it has affected her.

“Now I can admit that it affected my mental health, it led to periods of deep depression. I did not understand why, what the reasons were, because you also try to hide it, you try to bury it deep inside. But I understood that one way to heal was to talk about my own experiences,” Carrillo said.

Enrique Anpay is 24 years old and finished his university studies in Lima last year, where he experienced episodes of racism that still hurt him to remember. In the picture he is seen carrying one of his grandmother’s lambs in the Quechua farming community of Pomacocha, where he is from, in the central Andean region of Peru. CREDIT: Courtesy of Enrique Anpay

Racism to the point of calling people animals

Enrique Anpay Laupa, 24, studied psychology at a university in Lima, thanks to the government scholarship program Beca 18, which helps high-achieving students living in poverty or extreme poverty.

Originally from the rural community of Pomacocha, made up of some 90 native Quechua families in the central Andes highlands region of Apurimac, he still finds it difficult to talk about the racism he endured during his time in Lima, until he graduated last year.

He spoke to IPS from the town of Andahuaylas, in Apurímac, where he now lives and practices as a psychologist. “In 2017 we were 200 scholarship holders entering the university, more than other years, and we noticed discomfort among the students from Lima,” he said.

“They said that since we arrived the bathrooms were dirtier, things were getting lost, like laptops…I was quite shocked, it was a question of skin color,” he said.

During a group project, a student from the capital even told him “shut up, llama” when he made a comment. (The llama is a domesticated South American camelid native to the Andes region of Peru.)

“I kept silent and no one else said anything either,” Anpay said. Although he preferred not to go into more details, the experience of what he went through kept him from encouraging his younger brother to apply for Beca 18 and to push him to study instead at the public university in Andahuaylas.

Afro-Peruvian women participate in a festive demonstration demanding respect for their rights, on the streets of Lima on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2022. CREDIT: Courtesy of Lupita Sanchez

Racism affects the whole country

Racism is felt as a personal experience but affects whole communities and the entire country.

Carrillo said: “We can see this in the levels of impoverishment: the last census, from 2017, indicates that 16 percent of people who self-identify as ‘white’ and ‘mestizo’ live in poverty as opposed to the Afro-Peruvian population, where poverty stands at around 30 percent, the Amazonian indigenous population (40 percent) and the Andean indigenous population (30 percent).”

A study by the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics on the evolution of poverty between 2010 and 2021 showed that it affected to the greatest extent the population who spoke a native mother tongue, i.e. indigenous people.

The percentage of this segment of the population living in poverty and extreme poverty was 32 percent – eight percentage points higher than the 24 percent recorded for the population whose mother tongue is Spanish.

Carrillo considered it essential to recognize the existence of institutional racism, to understand it as a public problem that affects individuals and peoples who have been historically discriminated against and excluded, who have the right to share all spaces and to fully realize themselves, based on the principles of equality and non-discrimination.

She criticized the authorities for thinking about racism only in terms of punitive actions instead of considering a comprehensive policy based on prevention to stop it from being reproduced and handed down from generation to generation, which would include an anti-racist education that values the contribution made by each of the different peoples in the construction of Peru.

Students protest in Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, against budget cuts in education. Black students, generally the poorest, suffer the most from the deterioration of schools, the reduction of scholarships, the shrinking of school meal programs and the loss of opportunities to study. CREDIT: CPERS- Fotos Públicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 8 2022 (IPS)

The battle against racism and inequality will be a long one in Brazil, because a prejudice against the intellectual capacity of blacks is a problem rooted in the national culture, and even in the minds of Afro-Brazilians themselves, as well as highlighted in the country’s official history.

The basic idea spread is that Brazil is the creation of its Portuguese colonizers, especially with regard to everything that requires brains, lamented Luciana da Cruz Brito, professor of history at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB).

Few recognize Machado de Assis, considered the greatest Brazilian writer, and Mario de Andrade, another great writer and leader of the modernist movement of a century ago, as black.

“Most believe that the Rebouças were white, whose last name is on a Rio de Janeiro tunnel and avenues in São Paulo and Porto Alegre, which pay homage to them,” Brito told IPS by telephone from Cachoeira, a city of 33,000 inhabitants in the state of Bahia, where the UFRB’s Center for Arts, Humanities and Literature is located.

The brothers André and Antonio Rebouças were the first black engineers in Brazil, responsible for the construction of several ports, railroads and highways. The former was also prominent in the Paraguayan War or the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870, which united Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay) and in the movement for the abolition of slavery.

Brazil was the last Western country to put an end to slavery, by a law signed by Princess Isabel de Bourbon e Bragança, daughter of Emperor Pedro II, on May 13, 1888. The Brazilian monarchy would fall 18 months later, to a military coup that proclaimed the country a republic.

Highlighting the step taken by the princess as a decisive and even unique measure is part of the whitening of the history of Latin America’s largest and most populous country.

This official history seeks to conceal or downplay the role of abolitionists and of the black movement, which celebrates Black Consciousness Day every Nov. 20, the date of the assassination of the hero of the black struggles, Zumbi, in 1695.

Ignoring black history

White historiography, in which indigenous and black people are not counted as full subjects, is a great barrier to the struggle against racism, and to reducing Brazil’s notorious inequality, Brito said, recalling the conclusions of another black woman historian, Beatriz Nascimento, who was shot dead in Rio de Janeiro in 1995, at the age of 52.

From abolition to the first decades of the 20th century, the Brazilian elite deployed a campaign of “white supremacy, which considered blacks an obstacle to the vision of European nationhood and the mixing of races a sabotage to Europeanization,” she said.

The whitening policy included the promotion of European immigration to replace slave labor in the coffee harvest and other agricultural and industrial activities.

Black participation in the most productive agricultural sectors, in industrialization and the emergence of a national bourgeoisie, with the rise of artisans to entrepreneurs, was ignored, and this strengthened their exclusion, wrote Joel Rufino dos Santos, a historian and writer who died in 2015, in his book “El Saber del negro” (The Knowledge of Blacks).

But the whitewashing of history, with the systematic erasure of black knowledge and talent in the construction of the nation, is “a perverse and effective policy” in neutralizing anti-racism efforts and will therefore prolong the problem, said Brito.

Brazil’s history ignores blacks even though they make up 56 percent of the population. Among other forms of discrimination, it limits their participation to brute, dehumanized labor, destroys self-esteem and hinders the progress of people of African descent by spreading the belief that blacks are intellectually less capable. CREDIT: Courtesy of Luciana Brito

Epistemicide

“It destroys self-esteem and instills in the minds of black students the message that they are not capable of learning, of being creative. It’s a barrier to learning, children go to school out of obligation, not to learn,” she said.

It is “epistemicide,” said Natalia Alves, a history teacher who volunteers at Educafro (Education and Citizenship of Afrodescendants and the Destitute), a non-governmental network of educational centers that facilitate the inclusion of the poor, especially blacks, in universities, through scholarships and preparatory courses.

Epistemicide is the systematic destruction of rival forms of knowledge, or the suppression or death of forms of knowledge of peoples considered marginal by the colonial or dominant culture.

Blacks are treated as “abject objects” and the fact that the first universities were founded in Africa is ignored, as is the fact that the arrival of enslaved Africans contributed to Brazil’s agricultural development and to the gold mining boom that enriched the current state of Minas Gerais, she told IPS by e-mail from Rio de Janeiro.

The gold boom in southern Minas Gerais, which began at the end of the 17th century and peaked in the following century, owes a great deal to people from Africa. This golden period saw the birth of historic cities such as Ouro Preto, initially Vila Rica and today a tourist center whose ancient churches give a central place to sculptures of Antonio Francisco Lisboa alias Aleijadinho, a black man.

The Portuguese colonizers did not know much about mining and metallurgy, so they brought slaves with knowledge of these activities from the Gold Coast, an extensive area along the coasts of present-day Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo, Laurentino Gomes wrote in the second volume of his trilogy “Slavery”.

Gomes is a journalist who became a highly successful writer of books on Brazilian history.

Brazil’s official history erases the intellectual contributions of people of African descent to the construction of the country, condemning them to precarious jobs and marginalization in Brazilian society, according to Natalia Alves, a volunteer history teacher at Educafro, a non-governmental network of centers that facilitate access to university for black and poor people. CREDIT: Courtesy of Natalia Alves

Black protagonists made invisible

There are many examples of the intellectual, technical or artistic protagonism of Afro-descendants who are largely invisible or neglected. This is the case of important black women writers, such as Carolina Maria de Jesus, who recounted her life in a favela or shantytown in the 1960s, and Conceição Evaristo, both now belatedly recognized, according to Alves.

In addition, the teaching of the history of African and indigenous cultures in primary and secondary schools, as required by a 2008 law, is not implemented as it should be, and the media “reinforce stigmas” by reporting on police massacres in the favelas, which occur frequently in Rio de Janeiro, she said. Poverty ends up becoming the culprit.

The advances achieved by Afro-descendants and the poor include university entrance quotas started by the State University of Rio de Janeiro in 2000 and made mandatory nationwide by a 2012 law.

This type of affirmative action, aimed at reducing inequalities, is effective, according to data and studies.

In the United States, where affirmative action measures began to be adopted in the 1970s, blacks have reached the presidency – Barack Obama (2009-2017) – and the position of secretary of state – Colin Powell (2001-2005) and Condoleezza Rice (2005-2009) – in addition to achieving prominence in film, music and sports.

“The civil rights movement exposed U.S. racism to the world in the 1950s and 1960s, then quotas produced that number of prominent blacks, even though they are a minority,” just 13 percent of the U.S. population, stressed Brito, who specialized in the study of slavery in Brazil and the United States.

In Brazil, Afro-descendants (including blacks and people of mixed-race) make up 56 percent of the country’s population of 214 million, according to the official census. But they are still a minority (38 percent) in the universities and have the worst indicators in poverty, unemployment and murders, totally disproportionate to their share of the population.

However, the country adopted university quotas for blacks and the poor four decades after the United States. The results should emerge in a few more decades, the professor hopes.

But “what does a black body raised to the power structure actually change, if it does not change the structure of racism, which continues to provoke violence and where recent murders of young black men sparked the massive ‘Black Lives Matter (#Blacklivesmatter)’ protests?” asked Alves.

The 50 percent quotas in public universities for high school students from public schools, where the majority are black, do not take into account the reality of areas such as the Recôncavo region of Bahia, where 80 percent of the population is black, said Professor Brito.

In addition, the budget cuts imposed on them by the current far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro have reduced scholarships and resources, mainly to the detriment of poor students, she stressed.

Asian Americans affected by anti-Asian sentiment and hate crimes have provided support to each other. Left to right from top: Dr Boyung Lee, Dr Russell Jeung, Cynthia Choi, and Dr Bryant Lin. Credit: Myleen Hollero

By SeiMi Chu
California, Apr 28 2022 (IPS)

Dr Boyung Lee, a widow and the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty at Iliff School of Theology, would use a short break in her working day to walk around her neighborhood. The fresh air helped her deal with her grief and work-related stress.

In May 2020, however, this small but significant daily ritual ended abruptly.

Lee was walking when she noticed a dirty white truck but did not think much of it. She carried on walking, then heard something. The noise continued, and when she looked back, she noticed the driver inside the truck was shouting at her.

Listening carefully, Lee realized that he was jeering at her – including using one of the common taunts directed at the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: “Go back to your country.”

Slightly shaken by this hostile confrontation, Lee continued walking. However, the driver followed her. Thankfully, Lee acted swiftly and ran into the opening of her neighbor’s apartment building, so the driver could not follow her.

The incident made her feel unsafe. She was even nervous about grocery shopping. The verbal attack turned a Korean American independent feminist into a dependent person.

Dr Boyung Lee was targeted by a truck driver on this street on S Elati Street near W Bates Avenue in Englewood, Colorado.

Lee now covered herself with masks and hats to prevent others from noticing that she was an Asian.

She started to feel safe when her peers offered to go with her on her walks. However, outside of that, Lee was afraid. It took Lee over a year to feel comfortable going out to work by herself.

Angered because her experience had turned her into a dependent person, Lee thought about how she could educate the public about the beauty of Asian culture.

By teaming up with a few Asian colleagues, she brought in Asian American artists. She hosted lectures and workshops to educate the community about the intersection of Asian culture and art. Through this experience, Lee felt empowered and returned to being the independent feminist she once was.

Lee is not alone in her experiences of Asian hate abuse. Many in the AAPI community faced harassment, discrimination, and abuse.

When a Pacific Islander spoke Chamorro at a mall in Dallas, Texas, a passerby coughed on her and jeered: “You and your people are the reason why we have corona. Go sail a boat back to your island.”

A mother tried to enroll her daughter in a gymnastics class in Tustin, California. However, the owner refused because the mother’s name was ‘Asian’. These were two of the numerous incidents reported by Stop AAPI Hate, a support group that works to end racism.

Dr Boyung Lee ran into the opening of this apartment building when the truck driver followed her. Targeted because she is an Asian American, the incident resulted in a loss of independence until she became involved in hosting lectures and workshops about Asian culture and art. Credit: Supplied

From March 19, 2020, when the pandemic emerged, until December 31, 2021, there were over 10,000 incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate, of which 4,632 happened in 2020 and 6,273 in 2021. Based on the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism’s data, there was a 339% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021 compared with the previous year.

The increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans stems from the virus’s origin. COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan province, China. Due to its origin, hostile rhetoric was used to connote the coronavirus, such as “Kung Flu”, “Chinese virus”, and the “Wuhan virus.” Racializing the virus led to an uptick in anti-Asian racism, prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes. Common verbal harassment included: “Go back to China” and “Take your virus, you Chinks!”

The most recent report released by Stop AAPI Hate found that 63% of the hate incidents involved verbal harassment, 16.2% involved physical assault, 11.5% involved civil rights violations, and 8.6% involved online harassment. Most occurred in public spaces, such as public streets and public transits.

Asian Americans were blamed for “bringing the virus” to America.

Dr Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, worked with Cynthia Choi, Co-Executive Director of Chinese Affirmative Action, with other leaders, spearheaded the mission to fight anti-Asian racism. Jeung wanted to provide Asian American communities with resources, so this harassment would not happen again.

Along with Choi and Manjusha Kulkarni, Director of the AAPI Equity Alliance, Jeung founded Stop AAPI Hate to find solutions to the underlying causes of discrimination and hate. He formed a research team of San Francisco State University students to collect data to create the reports published on the Stop AAPI website. Jeung and his students discovered that hate crimes against Asian Americans occurred most frequently in California.

Jeung also noticed Asian Americans were taking a stance against racism.

Asian Americans used their social media platforms and utilized hashtags, such as #Racismisavirus, to ensure their posts would go viral. Another trend Jeung witnessed was that Asian Americans elected officials who would speak up against xenophobia.

As a result, Asian Americans turned out in their numbers to vote in 2020. As Jeung explained, Asian Americans voted for candidates who would support their beliefs and promised to fight against xenophobia.

Chinese Affirmative Action, a support community-based civil rights organization to protect the rights of Chinese and Asian Americans, and Stop AAPI Hate, collected first-hand accounts of people who self-reported what was happening and what was said to them.

The two organizations have been working on advancing racial equity by dealing with racial tensions between the Asian communities and other communities. These reports helped them understand the nature of the violent attacks. So far, over 3,700 cases have been reported to these organizations. They also work with the media to share the information.

“Certainly, in my lifetime, we have not witnessed this level of hate directed at our communities,” Choi lamented.

Dr Bryant Lin, a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Asian Health Research and Education, led a project that researched people’s perception of the relationship between COVID-19 and discrimination. They surveyed nearly 2,000 people across the country.

Lin explained the results of his study. “Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and other Asian Pacific Islanders showed up to 3.9 times increased odds of self-reported racial discrimination due to COVID-19 and experienced nearly up to 5.4 times increased odds of concern for physical assault due to COVID-19.”

Although Asians are very diverse and heterogeneous – there are six major subgroups in the United States – they are treated as a monolithic group. Lin revealed that East Asians tended to experience more discrimination than South and Southeast Asians. The highest rates of self-reported discrimination were from Chinese Americans.

“Our study also found that people were very concerned about physical attacks, and people were also considering buying firearms,” Lin said. He added they were likely to do a further study on how perceptions changed.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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A group of domestic workers gather at their union headquarters in Rio de Janeiro for a class on the law that sets out the rights and obligations of domestic work in Brazil. Learning about the law helps these women defend their rights and combat the vulnerability many of them of them face in the solitude of their employers’ homes. CREDIT: Courtesy of STDRJ

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 20 2022 (IPS)

The Theater of the Oppressed helped her become aware of the triple discrimination suffered by black women in Brazil and the means to confront it, such as the Rio de Janeiro Domestic Workers Union, which she has chaired since 2018.

Maria Izabel Monteiro, 55, came to work in Rio de Janeiro when she was still a teenager, from Campos dos Goitacazes, a city of half a million inhabitants located 280 kilometers away. She has had jobs in commerce and industry, but for most of her life she has worked in other people’s homes.

She began by taking care of a sick elderly woman in Ipanema, an affluent neighborhood next to the beach of the same name. She replaced a white nurse who ate breakfast with the family. But she, the new black caregiver, did not have a place at her employers’ table.

Monteiro believes that all the prejudices of Brazilian society are concentrated in their most acute form against domestic workers, especially if they are black women. They suffer triple discrimination, for being poor black women.

This reality is often addressed by the group Marias do Brasil, created by domestic workers, which adopted the techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed, a method created by Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal (1931-2009), which turns spectators into actors to act out everyday situations and raise awareness.

“It’s pedagogical theater, not therapeutic,” said the trade unionist and actress, who works miracles to juggle her weekly shift at the union, the theater and her work as a domestic.

Monteiro lives in Duque de Caxias, a town of 930,000 near Rio de Janeiro, from where she spoke to IPS. It takes her about an hour by train and subway to get to the house where she works and to the union headquarters, near the city center, and transportation costs her about 10 dollars a day.

Sometimes she and the union directors sleep in the organization’s office to save time and the cost of transportation.

The union has 2,000 registered members, although a smaller number are active. Even though the members are women, the name of the union still uses the masculine form of the word “domesticos” rather than the feminine “domesticas” because it was founded in 1989 before gender-inclusive language came into use in Portuguese. However, the women are thinking of changing the name, as similar unions have done in other parts of the country.

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento suffers frequent acts of discrimination for being a black woman who lives in a poor neighborhood, the Rocinha favela, which sits on a hill between two of Rio de Janeiro’s wealthiest neighborhoods. CREDIT: Courtesy of RG Nascimento

Racist and anti-poor violence

Roseli Gomes do Nascimento, 60, frequently suffers acts of racism and anti-poor discrimination living in Rocinha, the largest favela or shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, which sits on a hill between two wealthy neighborhoods: São Conrado and Gávea.

A taxi driver, for example, once refused to take her from São Conrado to Copacabana, a middle-class neighborhood known for its famous beach. “He said he didn’t drive that route, but he clearly expressed his prejudice that the poor can’t afford to use cabs,” Gomes told IPS, to illustrate the aporophobia – rejection of the poor – with which she lives on a daily basis.

Being followed around by security guards in shops or being denied entry to the buildings where her employers live, until someone talks to the doormen, are other forms of hostility and prejudice faced by Gomes, who currently works as a nanny taking care of a child three days a week.

Her neighbors in Rocinha, whose population is estimated at 70,000 to 150,000, are victims of constant racist violence, “but few complain to the police,” lamented Gomes, who is now determined to speak out against the discrimination she suffers.

Racism has been a crime under Brazilian law for more than 70 years, but the law is almost never enforced.

However, several scandals involving black people tortured and killed apparently because of their skin color, and anti-racist campaigns, have made more people question the impunity surrounding racism.

The Theater of the Oppressed, a method that turns ordinary people into actors to dramatize and comprehend their own situations, helped Maria Izabel Monteiro become a social activist and president of the Domestic Workers Union of Rio de Janeiro. CREDIT: Courtesy of MI Monteiro

Unfair labor relations

Monteiro says labor relations are the greatest reflection of the oppression of black women, a lingering legacy of slavery, which was not abolished in Brazil until 1888.

The Consolidation of Labor Laws, approved in 1942 and containing many of the rights still in force today in Brazil, excluded domestic and rural workers, the very sectors where female labor is abundant.

Women account for 92 percent of domestic workers in Brazil, and black women account for two thirds. A total of 6.3 million people were employed in domestic work in 2019, prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to official data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

More than two thirds of female domestic workers are informally employed, which facilitated massive layoffs during the pandemic. They lost 1.5 million jobs, according to Hildete Pereira de Melo, a specialist in gender and economics and professor at the Fluminense Federal University, located in a city near Rio.

As a result, the overall unemployment rate in late 2021 stood at 11.1 percent, compared to 16.8 percent for women and 19.8 percent for black women, according to the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies.

In 1972, a new law recognized some labor rights for women, which were consolidated and expanded by the constitution adopted in 1988. But the real breakthrough only occurred in 2013, with the approval of a constitutional amendment that established rights for domestic workers such as minimum wage, Christmas bonus, vacation days, maximum working day of eight hours and maternity leave.

In other words, they were granted almost the entire list of rights in effect under the labor legislation at the time.

But part of these conquests were lost in 2017, when Congress made labor laws more flexible, for example making it possible to pay domestic workers strictly according to the hours worked, under a new “intermittent work” contract treating them as casual workers, effectively cutting their pay, although it did maintain their rights, Monteiro said.

The Domestic Workers’ Union of Rio de Janeiro organizes talks with specialists and debates on labor rights issues with interested women. On this occasion, they were given orientation on the specific regulations for domestic work. CREDIT: Courtesy of STDRJ

Harassment and violence

Her union assists many women workers, most frequently helping them report rights violations. “But the first part of the complaint is emotional, not labor-related. We offer psychological support, and that’s where my experience in the theater has helped me out,” she said.

Harassment is the most frequent problem reported. Employers pressure domestics to get them to resign, instead of firing them, to avoid paying greater social benefits.

“Things disappear and suspicion is raised about the domestic worker, money is left lying around in visible places, as a trap to accuse them of theft, doubts are cast on what the employees say, with insistent questions such as ‘are you sure?’” Monteiro described.

The domestics feel unprotected, “they are on their own, facing their employers,” generally the husband and wife, and sometimes other family members, she said. For this reason, the union provides a lawyer and seeks a direct dialogue with the employers.

Black women occupy the last rung in terms of remuneration for work, in a ranking in which white men are first, followed by white women and black men. Black men earn more than black women, even though the latter have more schooling on average in Brazil, said researcher Pereira de Melo.

In other words, “the reward for education is higher for men than for women – inequity that rests on policies that Brazilian society should discuss,” she said.

In addition, black women account for 65.9 percent of the victims of obstetric violence and 68.8 percent of all women murdered by men, according to the Patricia Galvão Institute, dedicated to feminist-oriented communication.

This is much higher than the black proportion of the Brazilian population, which is 56 percent of the 214 million inhabitants of this South American country.

Black women comprised 66 percent of the 3,737 women murdered in 2019, according to the Atlas of Violence drawn up by the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety, a non-governmental organization of researchers, police and representatives of the justice system.

Alex residents queued for hours to buy basic foodstuff after shops were looted. The unrest has caused a humanitarian crisis, as has not been seen since the dawn of democracy in South Africa. Credit: Dan Ingham

By Kevin Humphrey
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, Jul 23 2021 (IPS)

Twenty-seven years after South Africa’s first democratic elections, the country finds itself reflecting on the catalysts of a week of looting and destruction of property resulting in more than 200 deaths and US$ 1.3 billion in damage.

President Cyril Ramaphosa described the week-long riots earlier this month as a failed insurrection.

Immediately before the violence, former President Jacob Zuma had handed himself over to prison authorities to begin serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court for refusing to appear before the State Capture Commission. The commission is investigating widespread corruption in the country.

While there is an apparent link between the jailing of the former president and the looting – most analysts agree that several factors led to what has been described as a perfect storm. Of these many explanations, analysts have highlighted this is a country left ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, which contributed to an increase in unemployment, endemic poverty that has persisted since 1994, the ruling African National Congress’ (ANC) inability to unite its factions and entrenched racial and ethnic divides.

The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has planned hearings on the matter. It says it considers the “events which led up to violent incidents in different provinces, along with the resultant consequences, are complex and multifaceted.”

The SAHRC also stated that it had noted tensions that have erupted within and between particular communities – from Phoenix in Durban, KwaZulu Natal, where communities took up arms against looters, to Alexandra, popularly known as Alex, in Johannesburg, Gauteng.

Alex is an area where tensions and dissatisfaction go back for many years. The area, which has been inhabited since before the infamous 1913 Land Act, which removed land ownership from all black people in the country, was a major site of resistance during apartheid. Its post-apartheid history has been one of many unfulfilled promises, botched service delivery and allegedly corrupt practices in the Alexandra Renewal Project.

Writing for GroundUp, Masego Mafata says activists in Alex say nothing has changed after a protest in the area in 2019.

“As Alexandra is seized by mass looting and protests this week, a report from the Public Protector and the SAHRC following the devastating 2019 protests has revealed persistent failures by the City of Johannesburg and the Gauteng Provincial government. While the recent protests are reportedly linked to the incarceration of former president Jacob Zuma, the joint report suggests that Alexandra’s community is a tinderbox for public unrest.”

Economic hardships and income inequalities, exacerbated by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, are seen as a leading cause of dissatisfaction around the country.

In the recently published International Journal for Equity in Health, Chijioke O Nwosu and Adeola Oyenubi say, “nationwide lockdowns have resulted in income loss for individuals and firms, with vulnerable populations (low earners, those in informal and precarious employment, etc.) more likely to be adversely affected.”

The Congress of South African Trade Unions’ spokesperson Sizwe Pamla also pointed to multiple reasons for the rioting and looting.

“While the current events were triggered by political restlessness and frustration following the arrest of Former President Jacob Zuma, it is clear now that criminal elements have opportunistically hijacked this issue and are using it to loot,” says Pamla.

“This is also a reminder that the problem of unemployment and poverty is real in South Africa. COSATU has been arguing for a long-time that unemployment is a ticking time bomb that will explode in the face of policymakers and decision-makers.”

For individuals like Georgio da Silva, the owner of a car repair workshop in Jeppestown, Johannesburg, xenophobia also appears strongly in the mix of contributing factors. He and others in the area have experience in defending themselves and their businesses against xenophobic attacks.

Georgio da Silva, a car repair shop owner, saved his business in an area vulnerable to xenophobic attacks.

Immediately after Zuma reported to Estcourt prison and violent attacks began, Da Silva told IPS he managed to shut down his workshop but had their property damaged. Later he realised that xenophobia was only one of the motivating factors.

It is imperative that the complex mix of factors contributing to this ‘perfect storm’ of anarchy and insurrection be examined to prevent future occurrences – the political tensions within the ruling party also have to be factored in.

The bitter factional battle going on within the ANC resulted in Ramaphosa’s display of weak leadership. Barely having recovered from a week of violence, South Africans were left confused as even members of his cabinet could not agree on the unrest’s cause.

Police Minister Bheki Cele says he did not get intelligence reports regarding the unrest from the State Security Agency’s Minister Ayanda Dlodlo, which she disputes.

Defence and Military Veterans Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula contradicted Ramaphosa by saying the unrest was not part of a failed insurrection. She had since backtracked from this statement.

Political analyst, author, director of research at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection and emeritus professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Susan Booysen, told IPS the “signature of factionalism in the ANC is printed all over the recent unrest in the country. While not being completely a root cause of the unrest, factionalism can be seen as the basic trigger that, once pulled, set the series of events in motion. Clearly, a faction of the ruling party was prepared to take part in instigating this kind of behaviour as a way of ‘getting its own back’ in the over politicised atmosphere that currently holds sway in the country.”

Professor Steven Friedman, Research Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Politics Department at the University of Johannesburg says his “reading of the violence is that factional politics was important but not necessarily in the obvious way.”

While the violence was caused in reaction to the jailing of Zuma, which gave it a factional slant, he doubted the ferocity of violence in KZN  if it had simply been about supporting him as head of an ANC faction.

“My view is that people in political and economic networks, which are part of the faction which supports Zuma became convinced that the balance of power had shifted and that their networks were now in danger of being closed down. This would have ended their political and economic influence, and so they reacted by triggering the violence to protect their networks,” Friedman says.

What needs doing in the wake of this catastrophe is that South Africa deals with the glaring issues that have made this situation possible. These include appalling economic inequalities and a society racked with endemic violence that is the legacy of apartheid and colonialism. The country has democratic foundations, including a widely-lauded Constitution necessary to build a better society.

South Africans do have the capacity to face these challenges and build a country that delivers on its full potential as a thriving nation where there are equal opportunities for all.

–        Kevin Humphrey was an activist during the anti-apartheid struggle and is a freelance writer and editor.

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Anti-muslim hatred has been particularly targeted at women. Credit: UN Photo/Tobin Jones

By Andy Hazel
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2017 (IPS)

The rise in anti-muslim attitudes around the world prompted a special UN meeting Tuesday, just days before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump whose controversial policies have drawn on anti-Muslim sentiments.

As if to illustrate just how easily noble intentions are misinterpreted, co-opted and misused, the event’s hashtag #No2Hatred was quickly taken over by nefarious social media actors and became an outlet for angry political diatribe.

“Anti-muslim hatred does not occur in a vacuum,” said David Saperstein, American Ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom at the event. “The rise of xenophobia across the world creates challenges that focus our attention and the data leaves us no doubt that this is happening.”

“Underreporting is a very serious structural problem that obscures these numbers. The silencing effect is enormous and we must resolve to confront this,” Saperstein said.

“I sincerely regret just how necessary these deliberations have become,” said Richard Arbeiter, the Director-General, Office of Human Rights, Freedoms and Inclusion, Global Affairs Canada. “Most Muslim hate crime is against women and I would encourage everyone to consider the gender-specific aspects to this violence.”

Panels looked at civil society building how governments could best combat anti-Muslim discrimination, and positive narratives to promote inclusion. Several topics recurred for discussion; how best to engage with political actors and organisations of different beliefs, and how to counter misinformation online.

The American Jewish Committee’s Muslim-Jewish relations director, Mr Robert Silverman reinforced the idea of creating powerful messages by finding alliances and shared priorities with unlikely groups.

“Too often initiatives result in people speaking within bubbles to each other. In a country like the United States or in a place like Europe, we need to get out of our bubbles and reach out to the unlikely and unorthodox partners.”

“You should focus on the common ground,” he continued. “Don’t try to bring in an issue like climate change. Just focus narrowly on the common grounds.”

European Commission Coordinator on Combating anti-Muslim hatred David Friggieri outlined his meeting with the heads of Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google where “open and frank discussion” lead to the enforcement of the European Union’s free speech laws in an effort to counter anti-Muslim sentiment. The ‘red line’ agreed to by the companies and the European law, he told IPS, was one of incitement.

The Pakistani Taliban destroyed over 838 schools between 2009 and 2012. Credit: Kulsum Ebrahim/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 12 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations is planning to launch a global campaign against the spread of intolerance, extremism, racism and xenophobia — largely by harnessing the talents of the younger generation.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pointedly says education is the key. “If you want to understand the power of education, just look at how the extremists fight education.”“What they fear most are girls and young people with textbooks.” -- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

They wanted to kill the Pakistani teenage activist, Malala Yousafzai and her friends because they were girls who wanted to go to school, he said.

Violent extremists kidnapped more than 200 girls in Chibook, Nigeria, and scores of students were murdered in Garissa, Kenya and in Peshawar, Pakistan.

“What they fear most are girls and young people with textbooks,” said Ban, who will soon announce “a comprehensive Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism,” along with the creation of an advisory panel of religious leaders to promote interfaith dialogue.

The proposed plan is expected to be presented to the 70th session of the General Assembly which begins the third week of September.

As part of the campaign against intolerance and extremism, the U.N.’s Department of Public Information (DPI) recently picked 10 projects from young people from around the world, in what was billed as a “Diversity Contest,” singling out creative approaches to help address a wide range of discrimination, prejudice and extremism.

The projects, selected from over 100 entries from 31 countries, include challenging homophobia in India and Mexico; resolving conflicts to access water to decrease ethnic conflict in Burundi; promoting interfaith harmony in Pakistan; encouraging greater acceptance of migrant populations in South Africa and promoting greater employment opportunities to Muslim women in Germany.

Lara-Zuzan Golesorkhi, a PhD student and instructor at the New School in New York who submitted one of the prize-winning projects, told IPS she seeks to address one of the most discussed political issues in contemporary Germany: integration of Muslim immigrants.

At the centre of these discussions, Golesorkhi said, lies the so-called ‘veil debate’, which was brought about by the Ludin case in 1998.

That year, Fereshta Ludin (the daughter of Afghan immigrants) was rejected from a teaching position in the state’s public school system on the alleged basis of “lack of personal aptitude” that made her “unsuitable and unable to perform the duties of a public servant in accordance with German Basic Law.”

The endless dispute between Ludin and the German judicial system led to the inauguration of institutionalised state-based unveiling policies for public school teachers across Germany.

These policies have been in effect in eight states and have just recently been called into question on the federal level with a court decision that demands respective states to revise the inherently discriminatory policies, said Golesorkhi.

The DPI says Golesorkhi will return to Germany to challenge the perceived discrimination against Muslim women.

She will ask potential employers to symbolically pledge to hire Muslim women. She will also produce a list of those employers so that women can feel safe and empowered to apply to those work places.

The end result is to help decrease discrimination and increase the employment of Muslim women in Germany.

The New York Times, quoting the Religious Studies Media and Information Service in Germany, reported last month that Muslims make up around 5.0 percent of the population of 81 million, compared with 49 million Christians.

The newspaper focused on the growing controversy related to the renovation of an abandoned church in the working class district of Horn in Hamburg – where the “derelict building was being converted into a mosque.”

“The church stood empty for 10 years, and no one cared,” Daniel Abdin, the director of the Islamic Centre Al Nour in Hamburg told the Times, “But when Muslims bought it, suddenly it became a topic of interest.”

Golesorkhi told IPS her ‘With or Without’ (WoW) non-profit organisation, in its most abstract form, is aimed at addressing the intersection of two crucial aspects in the German polity: immigration and religion.

Immigration and religion have played a significant role in the nation building process of Germany, specifically in terms of the country’s laws and diverse social composition, as well as the development of anti-Muslim sentiments (Islamophobia) and discriminatory acts against Muslims (particularly since 9/11).

She said the population of Muslims in Germany has increased from about 2.5 million in 1990 to 4.1 million in 2010 and is expected to grow to nearly 5.5 million Muslims in 2030.

The top three countries of origin for Muslim immigrants are Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, and Morocco.

This significant and continuously growing presence of Muslims has led to varied responses by state and society, she noted.

Though the large majority (72 percent) of those interviewed in a 2008 study claimed that “people from minority groups enrich cultural life of this country”, Muslims are the least desirable neighbours, as data from the same year shows.

Further, 23 percent of German interviewees, she said, associated Muslims with terror, while 16 percent viewed the hijab, the Muslim head scarf, as a threat to European culture.

In the latest study on anti-Muslim sentiments conducted by the Bertelsman Stiftung in late 2014, 57 percent of non-Muslim interviewees reported they perceive Islam as very threatening.

The study also disclosed that 24 percent of the interviewees would like to prohibit Muslim immigration to Germany and an overwhelming 61 percent said they think Islam does not belong to the ‘Western’ world.

Particularly alarming, in the very recent context of anti-Muslim sentiments, she noted, is the continuously growing PEGIDA (Patriotrische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes), which rejects the alleged “Islamisation” of Europe and demands an overhaul of immigration policy.

Golesorkhi’s project includes a ‘Job Ready’ seminar and workshop series to prepare Muslim women for the German job market; “I Pledge Campaign”, an online and offline campaign (Twitter and photo series) to encourage employers to symbolically pledge to hire Muslim women; and an online and offline campaign (Twitter and photo series) to raise public awareness of difficulties faced by Muslim women in the German employment sector.

While the pledge does not guarantee employment, it allows WoW to produce a database of employers that would hire Muslim women.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Scenes from the Apollo 11 television restoration press conference held at the Newseum in Washington, DC on July 16, 2009. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/cc by 2.0

By Nora Happel
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 29 2015 (IPS)

Although the United States as a whole is becoming more ethnically diverse, newsrooms remain largely dominated by white, male reporters, according to a recent investigation by The Atlantic magazine.

It found that just 22.4 percent of television journalists, 13 percent of radio journalists, and 13.34 percent of journalists at daily newspapers came from minority groups in 2014.

Another new census, by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE), found just 12.76 percent minority journalists at U.S. daily newspapers in 2014.

While the percentage of minority groups in the U.S. has been steadily increasing, reaching a recent total of 37.4 percent of the U.S. population, the number of minority journalists, by contrast, has stayed at a constant level for years.

This is particularly true for the share of minority employment at newspapers, which has been staggeringly low – between 11 and 14 percent for more than two decades, as illustrated in a graphic by the Pew Research Center and ASNE.

Many say it is a major problem for a field that strives to represent and inform a diverse public, and worrisome for a medium that has the power to shape and influence the views and opinions of mass audiences.

“Journalism must deliver insight from different perspectives on various topics and media must reflect the public they serve. The risk is that by limiting media access to ethnic minorities, the public gets a wrong perception of reality and the place ethnic minorities have in society,” Pamela Morinière, Communications and Authors’ Rights Officer at the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told IPS.

Under-representation of minority journalists has negative effects on the quality of reporting.

Speaking to IPS, Alfredo Carbajal, managing editor of Al Dia (The Dallas Morning News) and organiser for the ASNE Minority Leadership Institute, said, “The consequence [of ethnic minority groups’ under-representation] is that news coverage lacks the perspectives, expertise and knowledge of these groups as well as their specific skills and experiences because of who they are.”

ASNE President Chris Peck added: “If newsrooms cannot stay in touch with the issues, the concerns, hopes and dreams of an increasingly diverse audience, those news organisations will lose their relevance and be replaced.”

Commenting on the underlying reasons, both Carbajal and Peck underscored the lack of opportunities for minority students compared to their white counterparts.

“Legacy journalism organisations have relied too long on an established pipeline for talent. It’s a pipeline dominated by white, mostly middle class and upper middle class connections – schools, existing journalism leaders, media companies. It’s something of a self-perpetuating cycle that has been slow to evolve,” Peck said.

This argument is echoed in a recent analysis by Ph.D. student Alex T. Williams published in the Columbia Journalism Review. Confronted with the claim that newspapers cannot hire more minority journalists due to the lack of university graduates, Williams took a closer look at graduate and employment statistics provided by Grady College’s Annual Graduate Surveys.

He found that minorities accounted for 21.4 percent of graduates in journalism or communication between 2004 and 2013 – a number that is “not high” but “still not as low as the number of minority journalists working in newsrooms today.”.

The more alarming trend, he says, is that only 49 percent of graduates from minority groups were able to find full-time jobs after their studies. Numbers of white graduates finding employment, by contrast, amounted to 66 percent. This means the under-representation of ethnic minorities in journalism must be traced back to recruitment rather than to graduation numbers, he concluded.

A main reason why minority graduates have difficulty finding jobs, according to Williams, is that most newsrooms look for specific experiences such as unpaid internships that many minority students cannot afford. Also, minority students are more likely to attend less well-appointed colleges that might not have the resources to keep a campus newspaper or offer special networking opportunities.

Another reason is linked to newspapers’ financial constraints. Peck told IPS: “There is a challenge within news organisations to keep a diverse workforce at a time when the traditional media are economically challenged, even as new industries are actively looking to hire away talent that represents the changing American demographic.”

Further, union contracts favour unequal employment, according to Doris Truong, a Washington Post editor and acting president of Unity, who was quoted in 2013 article in The Atlantic.

“One piece of this puzzle is layoff policies and union contracts that often reward seniority and push the most recent hires to leave first. Many journalists of color have the least protected jobs because they’re the least senior employees.”

Different ideas and initiatives have been put forth to increase the representation of minority journalists.

Amongst the ideas expressed by Pamela Morinière are the inclusion of diversity reporting in student curricula, dialogues in newsrooms on the representation of minority groups, making job offers available widely and adopting equal opportunity and non-discrimination policies.

Chris Peck emphasises the importance of “home-grown talent”: “Identifying local students who have an interest in journalism and that have a connection to a specific locale will be a critical factor in the effort to diversify newsrooms. It’s a longer term effort to cultivate local talent. But it can pay off.”

“Second, I think it is important to tap social media to explain why journalism is still a dynamic field and invite digital natives to become part of it,” he said.

Civil society organisations such as UNITY Journalists for Diversity, a strategic alliance of several minority journalist associations, aim at increasing the representation of minority groups in journalism and promoting fair and complete coverage about diversity, ethnicity and gender issues.

The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) is part of the alliance. It seeks to advance specifically Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) journalists. Its president, Paul Cheung, told IPS: “AAJA believes developing a strong pipeline of talents as well as diverse sources are key to increase representation.”

“2015 will mark some significant milestones in AAJA’s history. AAJA will be celebrating 15 years of training multi-cultural high school students through JCamp, 20th anniversary of […] our Executive Leadership programmes and 25 years of inspiring college students to enter the field of journalism through VOICES.”

Ethnic minority journalists are not the only under-represented group at news outlets in the U.S. and around the world. The Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media states that women represent only a third of the journalism workforce in the 522 companies in nearly 60 countries surveyed for the study. Seventy-three percent of the top management jobs are held by men, while only 27 percent are occupied by women.

“When it comes to women’s portrayal in the news, the situation is even worse,” Pamela Mornière told IPS.

“Women make up only 24 percent of people seen, heard or read about. They remain quite invisible, although they represent more than half of the world’s population. And when they make the news they make it too often in a stereotypical way. The impact of this can be devastating on the public’s perception of women’s place and role in society. Many women have made their way on the political and economic scene. Media must reflect that.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A visitor looking at a panel at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
LIVERPOOL, England, Jul 21 2015 (IPS)

An exhibition on modern-day slavery at the International Slavery Museum in this northern English town is just one example of a museum choosing to focus on human rights, and being “upfront” about it.

“Social justice just doesn’t happen by itself; it’s about activism and people willing to take risks,” says Dr David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool, which includes the city’s International Slavery Museum (ISM).

The institution looks at aspects of both historical and contemporary slavery, while being an “international hub for resources on human rights issues”.

It is a member of the Liverpool-based Social Justice Alliance for Museums (SJAM), formed in 2013 and now comprising more than 80 museums worldwide, and it coordinated the founding of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums (FIHRM) in 2010.

Dr David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool, which includes the city’s International Slavery Museum. Credit: National Museums Liverpool

The aim of FIHRM is to encourage museums which “engage with sensitive and controversial human rights themes” to work together and share “new thinking and initiatives in a supportive environment”. Both organisations reflect the way that museums are changing, said Fleming.

“Museums are not dispassionate agents,” he told IPS. “They have a role in safeguarding memory. We have to look at the role of museums and see how they can transform lives.”

The International Slavery Museum’s current exhibition, titled “Broken Lives” and running until April 2016, focuses on the victims of global modern-day slavery – half of whom are said to be in India, and most of whom are Dalits, or people formerly known as “untouchables”.

The display “provides a window into the experiences of Dalits and others who are being exploited and abused through modern slavery in India”, say the curators.

“Dalits still experience marginalisation and prejudice, live in extreme poverty and are vulnerable to human trafficking and bonded labour,” they add.

Presented in partnership with the Dalit Freedom Network, the exhibition uses photographs, film, personal testimony and other means to show “stories of hardship” that include sexual servitude and child bondage. It also profiles the activists working to mend “broken lives”.“Museums [in Liverpool, Nantes, Guadeloupe and Bordeaux ] hope that they can play a role in global citizenship, educating the public and encouraging visitors to leave with a different mind-set – about respect for human rights, social justice, diversity, equality, and sustainability”

The display occupies a temporary exposition space at the museum, which has a permanent section devoted to the atrocities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the legacy of racism.

Along with the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in the French city of Nantes and the recently opened Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe, the Liverpool museum is one of too few national institutions focused on raising awareness about slavery, observers say.

But it has provided a “vital source of inspiration” to permanent exhibitions on the slave trade in places such as Bordeaux, southwest France, according to the city’s mayor Alain Juppé. Here, the Musée d’Aquitaine hosts a comprehensive division called ‘Bordeaux, Trans-Atlantic Trading and Slavery’ – with detailed, unequivocal information.

These museums hope that they can play a role in global citizenship, educating the public and encouraging visitors to leave with a different mind-set – about respect for human rights, social justice, diversity, equality, and sustainability.

“We try to overtly encourage the public to get involved in the fight for human rights,” Fleming told IPS in an interview. “We’ve often said at the Slavery Museum that we want people to go away fired up with the desire to fight racism.

“You can’t dictate to people what they’re going to think or how they’re going to respond and react,” he continued. “But you can create an atmosphere, and the atmosphere at the Slavery Museum is clearly anti-racist. We hope people will leave thinking: I didn’t know all those terrible things had happened and I’m leaving converted.”

Despite Liverpool’s undeniable history as a major slaving port in the 18th century, not everyone will be affected in the same way, however. There have been swastikas painted on the walls of the museum in the past, as bigots reject the institution’s aims.

“Some people come full of knowledge and full of attitude already, and I don’t imagine that we affect these people. But we’re looking for people in the middle, who might not have thought about this,” Fleming said.

A poster sign for the ‘Broken Lives’ exhibition under way at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

He described a visit to the museum by a group of English schoolchildren who initially did not comprehend photographs depicting African youngsters whose hands had been cut off by colonialists.

When they were given explanations about the images, the schoolchildren “switched on to the idea that people can behave abominably, based on nothing but ethnicity,” he said.

Fleming visits social justice exhibitions around the world and gives information about the museum’s work, he said. As a keynote speaker, he recently delivered an address about the role of museums at a conference in Liverpool titled ‘Mobilising Memory: Creating African Atlantic Identities’.

The meeting – organised by the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) and a new UK-based body called the Institute for Black Atlantic Research – took place at Liverpool Hope University at the end of June.

It began a few days after a white gunman killed nine people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in the U.S. state of South Carolina.

The murders, among numerous incidents of brutality against African Americans over the past year, sparked a sense of urgency at the conference as well as heightened the discussion about activism – and especially the part that writers, artists and scholars play in preserving and “activating” memory in the struggle for social justice and human rights.

“Artists, and by extension museums, have what some people have called a ‘burden of representation’, and they have to deal with that,” said James Smalls, a professor of art history and museum studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

“Many times, artists automatically are expected to speak on behalf of their ethnic group or community, and some have chosen to embrace that while others try to be exempt,” he added.

Claire Garcia, a professor at Colorado College, said that for a number of academics “there is no necessary link between scholarship and activism” in what are considered scholarly fields.

Such thinkers make the point that scholarship should be “theoretical” and “universal,” and not political or focused on “the specific plights of one group,” she said. However, this standpoint – “when it is disconnected from the embattled humanity” of some ethnic groups – can create further problems.

The concept of museums standing for “social justice” is controversial as well because the issue is seen differently in various parts of the world. The line between “objectifying and educating” also gives cause for debate.

Fleming said that National Museums Liverpool, for example, would not have put on the contentious show “Exhibit B” – which featured live Black performers in a “human zoo” installation; the work was apparently aimed at condemning racism and slavery but instead drew protests in London, Paris and other cities in 2014.

“Personally I loathe all that stuff, so my vote would be ‘no’ to anything similar,” Fleming told IPS. “And that’s not because it’s controversial and difficult but because it’s degrading and humiliating. There are all sorts of issues with it, and I’ve thought about that quite a lot.”

He and other scholars say that they are deeply conscious of who is doing the “story-telling” of history, and this is an issue that also affects museums.

Several participants at the CAAR conference criticised certain displays at the International Slavery Museum, wondering about the intended audience, and who had selected the exhibits, for instance.

A section that showed famous individuals of African descent seemed superficial in its glossy presentation of people such as American talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and well-known athletes and entertainers.

Fleming said that museums often face disapproval for both going too far and not going “far enough”. But taking a disinterested stand does not seem to be the answer, because “the world is full of ‘faux-neutral’ museums”, he said.

The most relevant and interesting museums can be those that have a “moral compass”, but they need help as they can “do very little by themselves,” Fleming told IPS. The institutions that he directs often work with non-governmental organisations that bring their own expertise and point of view to the exhibitions, he explained.

Apart from slavery, individual museums around the world have focused on the Holocaust, on apartheid, on genocide in countries such as Cambodia, and on the atrocities committed during dictatorships in regions such as Latin America.

“Some countries don’t want museums to change,” said Fleming. “But in Liverpool, we’re not just there for tourism.”

Edited by Phil Harris

The writer can be followed on Twitter: @mckenzie_ale   

Delegates to the first Summit of Women Leaders of African Descent of the Americas taking part in one of the working groups organised during the three-day gathering held Jun. 26-28 in Managua, Nicaragua. Credit: José Adán Silva/IPS

By José Adán Silva
MANAGUA, Jun 29 2015 (IPS)

They say they are tired of waiting for justice after centuries of neglect and contempt due to the color of their skin. Black women leaders from 22 countries of the Americas have decided to create a political platform that set a 10-year target for empowering women of African descent and overcoming discrimination.

“We’re going to fight with all of our strength to break the chains of racism and racially-motivated violence,” Shary García from Colombia told IPS at the end of the first Summit of Women Leaders of African Descent of the Americas, which drew 270 delegates to Managua Jun. 26-28.

García said the three days of debates in the Nicaraguan capital gave rise to the Political Declaration of Managua, whose 17 demands and central themes are aimed at eradicating discrimination based on a combination of racial and gender reasons in the Americas.

“It wasn’t easy to sum up in 17 ideas the complaints and demands of 270 women and their families, who have experienced discrimination, violence and the denial of their rights all their lives. But each and every one of us who came here knows that this is how the beginning of the end of discrimination starts.”

Altagracia Balcácer from the Dominican Republic told IPS that the 17 main themes are cross-cut by concepts like fighting racism, demanding a decent life and anti-poverty policies, demanding the right to make decisions about the future, and freedom of choice regarding sexual and reproductive rights.

“The demands include halting violence towards black women, giving the population of African descent visibility in the national statistics and census, protecting black children and adolescents, and offering opportunities to youngsters in this population group,” she said.

Other concerns, she said, are “protecting the environment, expanding access to natural and economic resources, and guaranteeing food security and sovereignty.”

In addition, the delegates called for “protection and decent treatment of immigrants, salvaging and acknowledging our cultural heritage, respect from the media, the non-stigmatisation of black people, expanding access to justice and guaranteeing safety for women and their communities.”

The Jun. 26 opening of the first Summit of Women Leaders of African Descent of the Americas Américas, when ended two days later in Managua with a declaration outlining the next decade of struggle for their rights. Credit: Courtesy of RMAAD

Dorotea Wilson, general coordinator of the Network of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women (RMAAD), told IPS that the document does not demand the recognition of rights, but the enforcement of all treaties, laws and international conventions referring to black women that have been signed since the 2001 World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa.

The Political Declaration of Managua “is not an expression of good intentions; it is an official document demanding the implementation of public policies in all countries of the Americas…to start once and for all to recognise and give their rightful place to the black populations on the continent,” said Wilson, from Nicaragua.

“With this platform, our aim is to move towards compliance with all of our rights in the context of the U.N. International Decade for People of African Descent,” added the head of the Managua-based RMAAD, which is active in 24 countries.

In January the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2015-2024 as the International Decade for People of African Descent, to promote respect for their rights and freedoms and greater knowledge of and respect for their diverse heritage and cultures.

According to the U.N., some 200 million people in the Americas identify themselves as being of African descent.

Wilson explained that over the next decade, black women in Latin America will document, with clear, reliable indicators, the real situation of people of African descent. They also hope to see poverty levels drop.

“We say ‘reliable’ because we don’t exist in the existing statistics, we’re invisible,” said Wilson. “Another of the summit’s achievements is that in each country in the Americas we will set up an observatory to follow up on the demands set forth here.”

To that end, they have technical and institutional support from U.N. agencies, European donor countries, non-governmental organisations, and defenders of human rights and gender rights.

They will also try to get their list of demands accepted by the Organisation of American States (OAS).

Dorotea Wilson of Nicaragua, the head of the Network of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women, during a working session in the summit held in Managua. Credit: Courtesy of RMAAD

The idea, said Wilson, is to press countries to design public policies targeting women and people of African descent, and to create follow-up mechanisms to make it possible to gauge the progress made by the time the next summit is held five years from now.

The head of RMAAD said the women who took part in the summit made it clear that there is a perception that police brutality and violence in general against black people are on the rise, especially in the United States and Brazil, two of the countries that were represented in the summit.

“Hate crimes in the United States make the international headlines,” Wilson said. “But because the population of African descent is invisible in Latin America, racially-motivated killings in the region do not come to public attention.”

As a panelist in the forum on human rights, Nilza Iriaci said that “in my country, Brazil, hate crimes happen every day, but there is no sense of scandal.” Brazil is the Latin American country with the largest black population.

A 2010 study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), “Afrodescendant Population of Latin America”, which was updated two years later, found that despite the creation of new legal frameworks and institutions to protect the rights of people of African descent in the region, most of the black population lived in poverty and suffered from discrimination.

Vicenta Camusso, a representative of black women in Uruguay, said things had not changed since the study was carried out. “It’s the same as always – our rights and the poverty we suffer have not improved one bit,” she told IPS.

She said that although every country in the region has legal frameworks protecting the rights of women and blacks, no specific budget funds are allotted.

“Partly because of this, most black women continue to live in inferior living conditions compared to women of other races, and young black people experience the same exclusion and violence as the older generations did,” she said.

“Since Durban, little to nothing has changed for women of African descent in the Americas,” 7she complained. “More than 80 percent of black people in the region live in a state of poverty and social inequality, with few opportunities for improvement, because of ethnic-racial reasons.”

Camusso pointed out that the 2001 global conference emerged from official efforts by the international community to design actions aimed at fighting racism, racial discrimination, ethnic conflicts, and associated violence.

In the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, the international community, U.N. agencies, development aid institutions, private organisations and society in general pledged “to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean (right) has been working with the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI), using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections. Credit: ITC Ethical Fashion Initiative 5

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Jun 4 2015 (IPS)

“Work is dignity,” says Simone Cipriani. “People want employment, not charity.”

With that in mind, Italian-born Cipriani founded a programme in 2009 called the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI) that links some of the world’s top fashion talents to marginalised artisans – mostly women – in East and West Africa, Haiti and the West Bank.

Now a flagship programme of the International Trade Centre, a joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Geneva-based EFI works with leading designers such as Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood to facilitate the development and production of “high-quality, ethical fashion items” from artisans living in low-income rural and urban areas.

The EFI says its aim is also to “enable Africa’s rising generation of fashion talent to forge environmentally sound, sustainable and fulfilling creative collaborations with local artisans.” Under its slogan “not charity, just work”, the Initiative advocates for a fairer global fashion industry.“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves. They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families” – Simone Cipriani, Ethical Fashion Initiative

This year, for the first time, the EFI is collaborating with the most important international trade fair for men’s fashion, Pitti Immagine Uomo, to host designers who represent four African countries.

Taking place June 16 to 19 in Florence, Italy, the fair will present a special edition of its Guest Nation Project, in which a particular area is designated for the “rising stars” of fashion from various countries, according to Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti.

Napoleone said that the African designers in this year’s Guest Nation give priority to manufacturing in their home countries, helping to reduce poverty, and that they are already known on the international market.

The stylists will put on a runway show, highlighting their men’s collections, in a special event titled ‘Constellation Africa’. The brands – Dent de Man, MaXhosa by Laduma, Orange Culture and Projecto Mental – have designers who represent Cote d’Ivoire, South Africa, Nigeria and Angola, and were selected as part of the African Fashion Designer competition launched by the EFI last December.

“This is where our global society is going: interconnectedness. Global and local dimensions brought together through fashion,” said Cipriani.

Market analysts expect the global value of the apparel retail industry to rise about 20 percent from 2014 levels to reach some 1,500 billion dollars in 2017. With such high volumes, the various sectors of the industry could be an increasing source of employment in many regions, from design to garment-making to sales.

But over the past several years, there has been controversy about the apparent exclusion of fashion designers and models of African descent in high-profile ‘Fashion Weeks’ and other international events

Tansy E. Hoskins, author of a polemical book published last year titled Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, has a whole chapter devoted to the question “Is Fashion Racist?”

She says that several decades after a renowned fashion magazine had its first black model on the cover, “all-white catwalks, all-white advertising campaigns and all-white fashion shoots are still the norm”.

Simone Cipriani, founder of the Ethical Fashion Initiative (EFI). Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

The Ethical Fashion Initiative is primarily concerned with poverty reduction and ethical treatment of artisans, but Cipriani acknowledges that racism is an issue and that poverty can be linked to ethnicity as well as gender.

Still, the fashion industry does have companies that try to adhere to ethical standards, including diversity, working conditions and environmental sustainability; and 30 international brands have signed on to the EFI project. But not every company is a good fit.

“We try to work almost exclusively with brands that have a clear scheme on responsible business and social engagement, otherwise there’s always the risk of being used and having to clean up after somebody else,” Cipriani told IPS in an interview, during a trip to Paris to meet with designers.

“We’ve had our troubles and have had to work through a long learning curve”, he added. “We also tried to work with big distributors and realised it wasn’t possible for what we do, so here we are.”

Groups such as the EFI and activists like Hoskins say that their major concern is how to make the fashion industry fairer, particularly with decent labour conditions for workers everywhere.

Two years ago in Bangladesh, for instance, more than 1,100 workers died and 2,500 were injured when a factory building collapsed after safety warnings were ignored. The workers made clothing for brands including Benetton, which only this year announced that it would contribute to a compensation fund for the victims.

That agreement followed a campaign in which one million people signed an online petition calling for the company to take proper action.

“What happened in Bangladesh was a horror, and there are many situations in which exactly the same horror can occur,” Cipriani said. “The first thing about responsibility should always be people. Dignified working conditions for people.”

He said that many artisans working in the fashion industry’s supply chain also do not earn enough to live on. “They don’t get the remuneration for their work that allows them to have a dignified life,” he told IPS. “Many of them are paid in such a way that they have to live at the margin.”

In Haiti, which is known for its artistry as well as its poverty, activists say that linking local artisans with international designers can and have made some impact. The Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean has been working with EFI, using Haitian craftsmanship in areas such as embroidery and beadwork in her collections, for example. She also employs textiles made in Africa.

Jean has been an EFI “partner” since 2013 and she sources several elements of her designs through its projects, Cipriani said. The collaboration started with a visit to Burkina Faso – one of the largest producers of cotton in Africa with an important tradition of hand-weaving – where the designer saw the possibilities of “working with these ethically produced textiles”. She incorporated them as a key feature of her women’s and men’s ready-to-wear collections.

Last year, she also launched a new range of bags, produced in Kenya with fabric from Burkina Faso and Mali and vegetable-tanned leather from Kenya, “making each bag a pan-African product,” says the EFI.

In Kenya, British designers McCartney (who declined to be interviewed) and Westwood have placed several orders for fashion items, and the EFI has carried out “Impact Assessment” studies to evaluate compliance with fair labour standards “and the impact the orders had on people and the communities they live in.”

“We work with women who sometimes face discrimination in their communities, but by having a job, their position in society improves,” Cipriani told IPS. “They gain independence and respect, and in many situations they become the only breadwinner in their families.”

The Ethical Fashion Initiative has testimonials from artisans about the improvement in their lives from the income they received through the orders, with several workers detailing their new ability to pay rent and school fees, among other developments.

Hoskins says that these steps are important, but that the fashion industry cannot be fully transformed without massive, collective action. “Ethical fashion has become a catch-all phrase encompassing issues such as environmental toxicity, labour rights, air miles, animal cruelty and product sustainability,” she argues.

“After 20 or so years and despite some innovative initiatives, it holds an ‘exceptionally low market share’ at just over 1 percent of the overall apparel market.”

In an interview, she said that asking whether fashion can ever be ethical is like asking “can capitalism ever be ethical?”

“For me the answer is ‘no’ because it’s based on exploitation, it’s based on competition, and above all it’s based on profit, and that’s what in the fashion industry drives wages down, drives environmental standards down and down and down,” she told IPS.

“There are small companies doing things differently but they’re producing maybe a few thousand units every year. The fashion industry produces billions and billions of units every single year.”

Hoskins also asked the question: “Why is it not the case that all products are ethically made?”

But reform evidently takes time. With the Pitti trade fair in Italy now collaborating with EFI, the “ethical fashion” movement may get a boost. It is also up to consumers to make the right choices, activists say.

“Consumers must demand change. Consumers can’t be too docile,” says Cipriani.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Azzum Atme checkpoint border crossing from the West Bank into Israel, where hundreds of Palestinian labourers cross into Israel each day using Israeli buses. These labourers already face long delays at the checkpoint and if they are banned from Israeli buses their trips will take even longer. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, May 24 2015 (IPS)

A  decision by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to segregate buses in the occupied West Bank has backfired after causing an uproar in Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, and political damage on the international stage.

This came as Israel faces mounting international criticism over its land expropriation and settlement building in the West Bank, and other forms of discrimination levelled against Palestinians.

Israel’s new extreme right-wing government is also being attacked on the domestic front with liberal Israelis, and Israeli NGOs involved in human rights, accusing the government of damaging Israel’s image and values.“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action” – Prof Samir Awad, political scientist at Birzeit University

Israeli settlers in the West Bank have been waging a campaign to prohibit Palestinians, particularly labourers who work in Israel, from using their buses in the occupied West Bank for over a year, saying that they represented a security threat, refused to give up their seats for Israelis and expressed sexual interest in Israeli women.

Last week, approval was given for buses to be segregated but after the backlash the plan was quickly scrapped.

However, Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon quickly denied that segregation or racism had anything to do with the issue and that the decision to ban Palestinians from Israeli buses had only been based on “security” needs.

Neither has Ya’alon given up on the plan. He intends to instruct the IDF to come up with a new plan to cover all 13 crossing points from the West Bank into Israel.

This development came simultaneously as European Union foreign policy head Federica Mogherini paid a 24-hour visit May 20-21 to Jerusalem and Ramallah in an effort to push the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward, stating that Europe wanted to play a more prominent role in the process.

But behind Mogherini’s visit was growing approval within the European Union for more pressure to be exerted on Israel to stop expropriating land from the Palestinians to build more illegal Israeli settlements and enlarge current ones.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry was on the defensive following its perception of bias from the European Union.

“The Israeli government will not be pressured by the European Union into making any concessions with the Palestinians in regards to the peace process,” said a spokesman from Israel’s Foreign Ministry – who insisted on remaining anonymous due to “ongoing problems at the ministry”.

“If the EU exerts one-sided pressure on Israel, without putting any pressure on the Palestinians, the situation will backfire because it will allow the Palestinians to avoid direct negotiations with us at the negotiating table,” the spokesman told IPS.

“Any future peace negotiations will have to involve face to face talks between the Palestinians and us. We will accept nothing less.”

Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, quoting a mediaeval biblical scholar, instructed all Israeli diplomats not to apologise for Israel’s occupation, stating that “all of the land (meaning East Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories) belonged to Israel.

As Israel finds itself painted into a corner politically, Palestinian and Israeli analysts have been debating whether there would be any European pressure on Israel and whether that pressure would have any effect.

Political scientist Prof Samir Awad from Birzeit University, near Ramallah, believes that the European Union will be able to successfully pressure the Israeli government, despite its extremism.

“The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and the threat of economic sanctions on Israel is a language the Israeli government understands far more than empty threats from the Americans who never followed any criticism of the Israeli government with any action,” Awad told IPS.

“EU pressure on Israel will also be buoyed by the fact that a number of EU countries have officially recognised a Palestinian state while others have recognised a state in principle and are critical of Israel’s continued occupation and land expropriation in the West Bank,” added Awad.

However, political analyst Benedetta Berti, a research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, is not convinced that the European Union will succeed in pushing Israel to any negotiating table.

“If we look at their record so far there has been a lot of rhetoric but not much actual action. So far, 16 out of the 28 EU ministers have told Mogherini to go ahead with labelling settlement goods exported to Europe,” Berti told IPS.

“It hasn’t happened yet as they have to get 20 of the 28 EU ministers on board for that and due to the divisions in the EU over Israel I’m not sure that it will happen in the near future,” explained Berti.

Meanwhile, an Israeli rights group has accused the Israeli authorities of being indifferent to attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers and security forces.

“Most cases of violent crimes against Palestinians not only go unpunished – but often are completely ignored by the authorities. Even when criminal investigations against soldiers accused of such offences are opened, they almost always fail,” said Yesh Din, a volunteer organisation working to defend the human rights of Palestinian civilians under Israeli occupation.

The groups said that approximately 94 percent of criminal investigations launched by the IDF against soldiers suspected of criminal violent activity against Palestinians, and their property, are closed without any indictments. In the rare cases that indictments are served, conviction leads to very light sentencing.

“Moreover, Palestinians who attempt to file complaints about crimes committed against them face staggering obstacles in their way. The complete absence of military police stations open to the Palestinian public in the West Bank, for example, makes it literally impossible for Palestinians to file complaints directly with the military police,” stated Yesh Din.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Washington DC, the evening of April 29. 2015. Activists and supporters affiliated with the #DCFerguson movement gathered in Chinatown for a march in solidarity with the Baltimore protests of the cop killing of African-American youth Freddie Gray. The DC event involved over a thousand marchers by the time it wound up in front of the White House. Credit: Stephen Melkisethian/cc by 2.0

By Kitty Stapp
UNITED NATIONS, May 6 2015 (IPS)

Since being roundly chastised last fall by the U.N. Committee Against Torture for excessive use of force by its law enforcement agencies, the United States hasn’t exactly managed to repair its international reputation.

Fatal beatings and shootings of African American and Latino citizens, mainly men, by the police have continued seemingly unabated, with the latest being the widely publicised case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray, 25, died Apr. 19 of spinal cord injuries in what has been ruled a homicide after being arrested for allegedly carrying an illegal pocket knife. Six officers have since been charged in his murder."As the U.S. claims a human rights mantle and criticises others for racism, it becomes the world’s greatest hypocrite." -- Michael Ratner

The wave of cases – many caught on camera and shared via social media – have sparked a nationwide protest campaign grouped under the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.

On Nov. 28, a year after the Committee’s damning report, the U.S. must provide information on what it has done to follow up on its recommendations, which included prompt investigation and prosecution of police brutality cases and providing effective remedies and rehabilitation to the victims.

“The best way to begin to bring this racism and particular police murders to an end is by what we are seeing today: massive and militant demonstrations everywhere and shutting cities down,” Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS. “We are in a special moment that rarely occurs in this country; people are mobilised and in the streets. That is the key. Our cities cannot be governed without the consent of the governed.

“But of course there are other important elements as well. The platform the U.N. CAT offered for Blacks particularly to speak out was important, very important. It gave Michael Brown’s family an opportunity to be heard around the world as it did others. The conclusions of the committee were powerful and while the United States tried to ignore them, the world would not. The report gives international legitimacy to the protests we are seeing every day.”

Michael Brown was an unarmed Black teenager who was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. A grand jury refused to indict in his Aug. 9, 2014 death.

Brown’s parents testified before the U.N. committee in Geneva last year, and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein cited the case in condemning “institutionalised discrimination in the U.S.”

“The CAT report put pressure on the U.S. to do something and while its response was inadequate, the report’s findings can be seen as the beginning of the end for the belief both in the U.S. and abroad that the U.S. is a just society toward Blacks,” Ratner said.

“As the U.S. claims a human rights mantle and criticises others for racism, it becomes the world’s greatest hypocrite. Yes, the U.S. is the most powerful country and can ignore the U.N., but ultimately by doing so, it will be ignored.”

Ratner cited a previous instance that demonstrates how important the U.N. can be in this regard. In 1951, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” was submitted to the U.N. by the Civil Rights Congress and detailed the horrendous situation faced by American Blacks.

“It received huge international press. The U.S. realized that it could not call itself a democracy and claim it was better than Communist countries if racism was so embedded in its society. Three years later the Supreme Court ended school desegregation.

“While the report was not the only reason for that change, the point is that the U.N. and particularly the recent CAT committee report has pointed to serious defects in U.S. democracy and human rights. It’s hard after this report, although surely the U.S. will try, to criticise other countries’ human rights and not simply be laughed at.”

Because the U.S. is a state party to the Convention against Torture, it is regularly examined by the CAT committee. Its next report is due in November 2018, after which the date for the next review will be set. In general, these reviews happen every four or five years.

Alba Morales, a researcher for the U.S. Programme at Human Rights Watch, agrees that advocates have been able to use the international attention brought by these reports to strengthen their local work.

“Take the John Burge torture cases in Chicago, for example,” she told IPS. “Burge was a Chicago police officer commander who oversaw the torture hundreds of arrestees in that city. Chicago advocates worked for decades to obtain accountability for those acts of torture by police, and appeared before the U.N. Committee Against Torture in 2006.

“It was only after the U.N. Committee called for accountability in that case that the U.S. government took action, eventually indicting and convicting Burge of obstruction of justice. While this was the result of many years of local advocacy, the spotlight that the U.N. report shone on these cases also contributed to the outcome.”

Morales said that the United Nations can continue to welcome the voices of those directly affected by human rights violations everywhere, including in the U.S.

“The families of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis attended the last meeting of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Their testimony powerfully illustrated the racial discrimination that persists in the U.S. While none of these U.N. committees can enforce any judgements against the U.S. or any other country, having an international platform amplifies the voices of those who are working incredibly hard to improve the human rights situation in the U.S.”

Ratner noted that U.S. racial discrimination, backed by state violence, has a lengthy and deeply rooted history that dates back hundreds of years.

“Ending the police murders and brutal treatment of Black people in the United States is no easy task,” he said. “Many whites, particularly in law enforcement, are racist to the core. It is a racism that has a history since the early days of slavery and it is a racism that continues in many aspects of Black people’s lives.

“Once it was called slavery, then Jim Crow, then slavery by another name, then the new Jim Crow. Yet we all know this unequal and brutal treatment of Black people must end.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Hundreds protest police brutality in Jerusalem, April 30, 2015 Credit: Screen capture/Facebook

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, May 4 2015 (IPS)

A video that caught an Israeli police officer and a volunteer shoving and punching a black soldier in uniform outraged members of the Ethiopian Jewish community and set off a clash Sunday between Ethiopian Jews and police in central Tel Aviv.

Thousands took part in the Sunday protest over the incident, including many non-Ethiopian Israelis. Police met the crowd, which froze traffic along a major highway, with water cannons and tear gas.

Some 13 people were injured and two policemen were reportedly suspended on suspicion of using excessive force.

From the video, caught by a security camera, the soldier, Damas Pakada, a member of the Israeli Defense Force, appears to be pushing a bicycle. Two officers approach him and after a brief interaction, attack him, push him to the ground, punch him, and appear to put him in a headlock. The officers look to weigh about twice Pakada’s slim size.

Pakada was initially accused of attacking the officer and arrested, only to be released once the surveillance video of the attack was uploaded to social media.

Fentahun Assefa- Dawit, executive director of Tebeka – Advocacy for Equality and Justice for Ethiopian Israelis, says that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but not an isolated incident.

The only thing unique about this incident, he said, is that it was caught on film. Young Ethiopian Israelis being attacked by police and then falsely accused of crimes is an all-too common scenario, he said.

“You can imagine, if there were no footage, what would have happened to this soldier?” asks Assefa-Dawit rhetorically. Pakada would have been put in jail with a record for assaulting a police officer following him around for the rest of his life.

The clashes reflected widespread frustration in the Ethiopian community which, three decades after it first arrived in Israel, has become an underclass plagued by poverty, crime and unemployment.

“Anyone who attended the protest yesterday experienced at one point in their life humiliation based on nothing but skin color,” said Mehereta Baruch-Ron, a Tel Aviv deputy mayor of Ethiopian descent. ‘We have had enough. It is time to do something.’

Shlomo Molla, a former lawmaker of Ethiopian origin, said his generation failed to make a change and that hope lies with the younger generation who were born in Israel and are less intimidated by the establishment.

“We should stop enlisting in the army, not join the police, and stop paying taxes, because if the state doesn’t take its citizens into account, the citizens are also permitted not to take the state into account.’

Children of the older generation of Ethiopian Jews speak fluent Hebrew, study in universities and serve in the army alongside native Israelis. But despite such gains, the younger generation is still struggling compared to other Israelis.

As the video of the beating went viral, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set up a meeting with the young soldier. “I was shocked by the pictures,” he told Pakada.” We cannot accept it, we will change things.”

“Maybe good things will come out of this difficult situation.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

In the wake of last week’s attack on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo that left 12 people dead, a heated battle of opinion is being waged in France and several other countries on the issue of freedom of expression and the rights of both media and the public.

On one side are those who say that freedom of expression is an inherent human right and a pillar of democracy, and on the other are representatives of a range of views, including the belief that liberty comes with responsibility for all sectors of society.

“I’m worried when one talks about our being in a state of war,” said John Ralston Saul, the president of the writers group PEN International, who participated in a conference here Jan. 14 on “Journalism after Charlie”, organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

“The war against fundamentalists isn’t going to work,” he said, arguing that education about freedom of expression has to start at a young age so that people know that “you have to have a thick skin” to live in a democracy.“Ignorance is the biggest weapon of mass destruction, and if ignorance is the problem, then education is the answer” – Nasser David Khalili, Iranian-born scholar and philanthropist

PEN International, which promotes literature, freedom of expression and speaks out for “writers silenced in their own countries”, has strongly condemned the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, but the organisation is also worried about how politicians are reacting in the aftermath.

It called on governments to “implement their commitments to free expression and to desist from further curtailing free expression through the expansion of surveillance.”

In the Jan. 7 assault, two hooded gunmen gained access to the offices of Charlie Hebdo during an editorial meeting and opened fire, killing cartoonists, other media workers, a visitor and two policemen. The attackers were in turn killed by police two days later, after a huge manhunt in the French capital, where related attacks took place Jan. 8 and 9.

In the other acts, a gunman killed a young female police officer and later held hostages at a kosher supermarket, where police said he murdered four people before he was killed by the security forces.

Charlie Hebdo had been under threat since 2006 when it republished controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad originally published in 2005, and in 2011 its offices were firebombed after an edition that some groups considered offensive and inflammatory.

Several critics accused the magazine of Islamophobia and racism, while the cartoonists defended their right to lampoon subjects that included religious leaders and politicians.

Before the attacks, the magazine’s circulation had been in decline, with readers apparently turned off by the crudeness of the drawings, but the publication is now being given wide moral and financial backing.

More than three million people of different ethnicities and faiths marched in Paris and other cities last Sunday in support of freedom of expression, including some 40 world leaders who joined French government representatives.

Among those marching, however, were officials from many countries active in “restricting freedom of expression”, according to PEN International and other groups. “This includes murders, violence and imprisoned writers on PEN’s Case List. These leaders, when at home, are part of administrations which are serious offenders,” said the organisation.

Saul told IPS that in the last 14 years, PEN International has noted a “shrinking in freedom of expression” in Western countries, “not only of writers and journalists but of citizens”. He said that the main problem for the organisation was impunity.

While everyone condemned the Charlie Hebdo attacks, some participants at the UNESCO conference argued that the media need to act more responsibly, especially as regards the portrayal of minority or marginalised communities.

As the debates took place, the latest edition of the magazine was being distributed, with another cover portraying Muhammad, this time holding a placard saying “Je Suis Charlie” and with the caption “All is forgiven”.

“The media must mediate and refrain from the promoting of stereotypes,” said French senator Bariza Khiari, in a segment of the conference debate titled “Intercultural Dialogue and Fragmented Societies”.

She said that most adherents of Islam were “quietly Muslim”, keeping their religion to themselves while respecting the secular values of the countries where they live. “But we have to recognise the existence and importance of religion as long as religion does not dictate the law,” she argued.

Khiari told IPS that the radicalisation of some French youth was taking place because of their hardships in France and the humiliation they faced on a daily basis. These include Islamophobia, joblessness and stops by the police.

The senator said she hoped that young people as well as the media would reflect on what had happened and draw some lessons that would result in positive advances in the future.

Annick Girardin, the French Secretary of State for Development and Francophonie, said that democracy meant that all newspapers of whatever belief or political learning could publish in France and that people have access to legal avenues. But she acknowledged that there was a failure of integration of everyone into society.

Regarding the protection of journalists, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova told IPS that “now was the time” for the United Nations and particularly UNESCO “not just to reaffirm our commitment to freedom of expression” but to consider other initiatives.

“Something that is probably not so well known to the general public is that we are constantly in contact with governments where these cases (attacks on journalists) have happened in order to remind them of their responsibilities and asking for information on the follow-up measures, and I would say that even if they are not spectacular, we’ve still seen more and more governments who are taking this seriously.”

Alongside journalists and cartoonists, the UNESCO conference included Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives who called on the state to do more to educate young people about the co-existence of secular and religious values and ways to live together in increasingly diverse societies.

“Ignorance is the biggest weapon of mass destruction, and if ignorance is the problem, then education is the answer,” said Nasser David Khalili, an Iranian-born scholar and philanthropist who lives in London.

One topic overlooked however was the less discernible attacks on journalists, in the form of press conglomeration, cuts in income and a general lack of commitment to quality journalism.

“Freedom of expression has no meaning when you can’t find a job and when media is controlled by big groups,” said a former journalist who left the conference early.

Edited by Phil Harris

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Dec 4 2014 (IPS)

The fact that in a referendum Switzerland has taken a path that goes in the opposite direction from that of Europe is an unusual fact which calls for reflection, especially because Switzerland has taken a much more progressive path, while we all were accustomed to see it as a very conservative country.

On Nov. 30, Swiss citizens were asked to vote on a proposal for reducing immigrants to a maximum of 17,000 per year, compared with 88.000 in 2013. This was rejected by 73 percent of the voters, after a unanimous campaign by the government, industrialists and trade unions that without immigrants there would be serious problems in keeping the economy expanding.

Roberto Savio

It is worth noting that foreigners account for 23.5 percent of the population in Switzerland, compared with an average of 4 percent in Europe as a whole.

Another proposal in the same referendum called for dedicating 10 percent of Swiss international cooperation to birth control in poor countries in order to reduce their birth rate. It was clearly a racist proposal, and was also defeated. Swiss citizens have no right to decide birth policies in other countries.

While the Swiss were voting, British Prime Minister David Cameron was making public his proposal to drastically restrict European immigration. Europeans would be expelled if they did not find a job within six months. They would have work continuously for four years before having access to the country’s social benefits of the country. They would also face restrictions to their right to bring their families with them, even after finding a job.“The real problem is that Europe has a dramatic lack of real statesmen or stateswomen who are ready to go against the polls for the good of their country”

The same debate is going on in Germany, where the government is also carrying out a media campaign to popularise its bill of law which also contemplates the expulsion of European immigrants who do not find a job within six months. It is obvious that this will have a cascade effect in several other European countries.

In both cases, this is an attempt to undercut anti-European parties – the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) which is on the rise in Britain and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany, although the AfD is not a threat like the UKIP and what Chancellor Angela Merkel is doing amounts to an act of populism.

There is a wave of xenophobia spreading throughout Europe. Marine Le Pen’s National Front is aiming to become the number one party in France. In Italy, the right-wing Northern League is growing by the day. Today there is a xenophobic and anti-European party in every country of Europe, with the notable exception of Spain, where the People’s Party has been able to make a right-wing party redundant.

What is striking is that all those parties are creating alliances and creating a pan-European rejection of the European Union. Marine Le Pen has just chaired a meeting in Lyon of seven extreme right-wing parties, like the Flemish Vlaame Belang in Belgium and the Dutch Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders.

What was even more striking was the presence of two leaders of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Among Europe’s right-wing parties there is growing support for Putin, and a Russian bank, the First Czech-Russian Bank with headquarters in Moscow, has just given a loan of nine million dollars to the Le Pen’s National Front.

The reality is that Europe is in serious need of young immigrants to remain competitive internationally, and innumerable studies show that immigrants have a positive impact on the economy.

In England, immigrants account for 4.3 percent of the population, their rate of employment is 78.8 percent, slightly higher than the British average (73.6 percent), and just 15 percent of immigrants request some kind of subsidy. According to a study by University College London, European immigrants who arrived in the United Kingdom contributed more than 20 billion pounds to the country’s public finances between 2001 and 2011.

Similarly, all national and European studies on immigration show that immigrants request less subsidies than nationals, are net contributors in terms of taxation, and take jobs that nationals no longer want.

According to United Nations projections, Europe has a deficit of 20 million people if it wants to keep the pension system viable, but this is not simply “politically correct” at this moment. The very small minority of immigrants involved in crime is what everybody sees through strong media exposure, and the parties which are making their fortune are calling for a white and pure Europe again.

Pope Francis speaks about ethics and solidarity with immigrants, but if parties are able to ignore economics, just imagine ethics!

The Spanish National Institute of Statistics has just released its latest findings, and they are in line with similar studies everywhere in Europe. In 1976, 676,718 children were born in Spain – 18.7 babies for every 1,000 mothers. In 1995, there were 363,467 births – 9.2 babies for every 1,000 mothers.

For every 100 Spaniards of working age, 27.6 are over the age of 64 – by 2050, this figure will be closer to 73. An even more extreme figure comes from the Population Division of the United Nations. If the Spanish borders were to be closed and nobody could enter or leave, and with the growing reduction in the number of women of fertile age, by 2100 the Spanish population would stand at around 800,000 people!

We have just to look to the United States to see the opposite policy. Every year, young people bring constant expansion to the labour force and the economy. Not even the most rabid Republican speaks of abolishing immigration, just of keeping it at a lower rate.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is riding the issue of immigration due his shrinking popularity, but in the opposite direction. He wants to legalise as many illegal immigrants as possible … and there are already 52 million immigrants.

The real problem is that Europe has a dramatic lack of real statesmen or stateswomen who are ready to go against the polls for the good of their country. The best example is the powerful Angela Merkel, who has never taken any risk or any difficult decision (except on abolishing nuclear power, and that only because of the general aversion after the Japanese tsunami).

Merkel’s comment on the law on restricting European immigrants was: “Europe is not a social union”. In other words, the flow of capital is protected, the flow of workers is not.

In all this, the European Commission has been silent on immigration. And now, its President, Jean-Claude Juncker, unmoved by the revelations on how he helped hundreds of corporations to avoid taxes in Europe with deals in Luxembourg, is now presenting a development plan to which the Commission would contribute just 10 percent and the remaining 90 percent would be funded by the private sector… and that is his landmark!

Europe is clearly committing suicide and people will find out when it has already lost its position in world competition … only then, maybe, will the difference between a statesman and a politician become clear. (IPS/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

“It’s like putting explosive, gasoline and matches all in one shed. These are things that should be stored in separated places.”

Giuseppe Giorgioli, an inhabitant of the Tor Sapienza district of Rome and a member of the Tor Sapienza Committee, was explaining the mid-November outburst in the district against a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees, in which dozens of paper bombs were thrown.

The Tor Sapienza district, situated in the east side of the Italian capital, is home to almost 13 thousands citizens and, according to Giorgioli, is treated as a “second class quarter” by the Rome administration because of its relatively small dimensions.Episodes like the attack on a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees “are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed” – Monsignor Giancarlo Perego

“For the last 10 to 15 years there has been a progressive phenomenon of disruption-parking in our suburb. This is how we ended up hosting four reception centres for migrants and two gypsy camps, while other districts in the city have none,” Giorgioli complained.

The residents’ uprising followed an alleged attempt of rape by a Romanian citizen against a local resident and a series of attempted robberies in apartments in the neighbourhood.

The Tor Sapienza Committee had organised a demonstration to ask the Rome Town Council to act against the urban decay the neighbourhood is suffering but once the march was over, a group of people – about one hundred according to witnesses – gathered in front of the building where the ‘Il Sorriso’ cooperative manages different services, including a reception centre for asylum seekers and refugees and three structures hosting foreign unaccompanied minors.

“When I arrived in the centre the following morning, I found huge pieces of asphalt, broken glass and people – both adults and minors – suffering from panic attacks,” recalls Alessia Armini of Italy’s System of Protection for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR), who is coordinator of the cooperative. “Let’s not forget the kind of vulnerable guests we have in such centres,” she adds.

While no one denies the critical conditions suffered by many suburbs in Rome, with cuts in transport services, council houses not having been refurbished for decades and inefficient garbage collection among others, the explanations for such a violent outburst vary widely.

“People are not racists, they are exasperated. Rome is just the tip of the iceberg, but this is about the whole country,” Paolo Grimoldi, MP for right-wing Northern League party, told IPS. “When you receive 150 thousand migrants – we say illegal, the government says refugees – in one year who are given a house, money and are taken care of by the State, this inevitably destabilises our social fabric.”

However, according to Monsignor Giancarlo Perego who runs Migrantes, the foundation of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) for migrants, the numbers tell a different story: “Migrants are abandoning our country because it no longer represents an economic opportunity for many of them,” he told IPS.

“The reasons must be found in a management of the suburbs that looked at the interests of building speculators rather than guaranteeing common assets such as meeting places that are necessary to build a feeling of safety within a territory.”

In addition, the economic crisis also plays an important role also in this context. “Episodes [like the Tor Sapienza] incident are being worsened by a growing poverty that now affects 13 million people in Italy, with 42 percent of young people unemployed,” said Perego.

“But such a difficult situation does not exempt us from the need of building relationships, delivering correct information and managing the places where people live in order to encourage encounters and not social clashes.”

For their part, the citizens of Tor Sapienza firmly reject any accusation of racism. “We welcome everybody and we’ve been welcoming everybody for twenty years,” Giorgioli told IPS.

“You don’t become racist in four days. But there are rules that need to be respected and services that the town council needs to provide. If such services are not provided, unfortunately someone with less patience begins to see red.”

In the days that followed the attack on the reception centre, both local and national politicians visited the neighbourhood, provoking strong criticism – and not only from angry citizens – that they were using the situation for instrumental reasons.

“I think that any form of manipulation, whether from left or right, is a serious aspect to be avoided. Politicians must govern a city, not pour in new reasons for social clashes,” Perego said.

Meanwhile, the violent episode in Tor Sapienza and signs of social unrest in other Italian neighbourhoods that have sparked debate and drawn attention to the migrant issue are not to be underestimated.

“In these suburbs, the level of social distress is extremely high, but all that hate, taking a symbol and pouring everything out on it … it’s frightening,” said Armini. “We heard people [outside the centre] screaming ‘let’s burn them all, let’s make soap out of them’. This issue brought out the worst in people.”

While condemning the recent violence, Giorgioli of the Tor Sapienza Committee is not sure that such situations will not be repeated

“I have reasons to fear that the same people who have already shown that they are capable of violent actions will repeat them if there are no signs of change. They could feel disrespected, as if the institutions were making a fool of them.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Jazz musician Marcus Miller (left), spokesman for the Slave Route Project, is using music to help educate people about slavery. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 14 2014 (IPS)

The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave recently generated international discussion about the barbarity of slavery, but it is not alone in the attempt to break the silence around the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade and to “shed light” on the lasting historical consequences.

At the United Nations level, The Slave Route Project observed its 20th anniversary this month in Paris and is pushing for greater education about slavery and the slave trade in schools around the world.

“People of all kinds suffered from slavery and people of all kinds profited from slavery just like so many people are now profiting from modern-day slavery. Racism is a direct result of this monstrous heritage and we need to increase the dialogue about this” – Ali Moussa Iye, head of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project
Ali Moussa Iye, chief of the History and Memory for Dialogue Section of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, and director of the Project, says: “The least the international community can do is to put this history into the textbooks. You can’t deny this history to those who suffered and continue to experience the consequences of slavery.”

The Project is one of the forces behind a permanent memorial to slavery that is being constructed at UN headquarters in New York, scheduled to be completed in March 2015 and meant to honour the millions of victims of the traffic in humans.

UNESCO is also involved in the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), which is aimed at recognising people of African descent as a distinct group and at “addressing the historical and continuing violations of their rights”. The Decade will officially be launched in January next year.

“The approach is not to build guilt but to achieve reconciliation,” Moussa Iye said in an interview. “We need to know history in a different, more pluralistic way so that we can draw lessons and better understand our societies.”

He is aware that some people will question the point of the various initiatives, preferring to believe that slavery’s legacy has ended, but he said that international organisations can take the lead in urging countries to examine their past acts and the results.

“People of all kinds suffered from slavery and people of all kinds profited from slavery just like so many people are now profiting from modern-day slavery,” he said. “Racism is a direct result of this monstrous heritage and we need to increase the dialogue about this.”

According to UNESCO, the Slave Route Project has put these issues on the international agenda by contributing to the recognition of slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity, a declaration made at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.

Ali Moussa Iye, head of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

It has also been collecting and preserving archives and oral traditions, supporting the publication of books, and identifying “places of remembrances so that itineraries for memory” can be developed.

For many people of African descent, however, much more needs to be done to raise awareness. Ricki Stevenson, a Paris-based African-American businesswoman who heads a company called Black Paris Tours, focusing on the African Diaspora’s contributions in the French capital, told IPS that there ought to be “national and international conversation about the continued effects of enslavement.”

“We need to break the silence on how racism continues to hurt, not just Black people, but all people in any country that would kill, imprison, deny education and rights to individuals,” she said. “The United States, France, and all of Europe made unimaginable money from the cruel, inhumane kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans.

“These nations grew rich, built their cities and economies on the enslavement of Africans, on the forced labour of Black people who were stripped of every basic human right, treated less than animals,” she added. “Today we are learning that the wealth of Wall Street and so many major corporations, insurance companies, shipping companies, banks, private families, even churches, is still tied to slavery.”

Stevenson said she knows that some find it hard to comprehend the legacy of slavery. “I doubt if anyone who has never lived in the United States can understand the overwhelming challenge of ‘breathing while Black’,” she told IPS. “It is a horrible, daily fact of life every Black man, woman, child has faced or will face at some point in their lives.”

In France, meanwhile, the rise of nationalism is leading to a culture of exclusion as well as racism, according to political observers. Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, for example, author of a 2001 law bearing her name that also recognises slavery as a crime against humanity, has been the target of racist depictions on social media and in certain publications.

Speaking at the 20th anniversary ceremony of the Slave Route Project, Taubira described her battle against “hatred” and said that the world’s challenge today is to understand the global forces that divide people for exploitation.

“We cannot accept this kind of inhumanity,” she said, adding that the “anonymous victims” were not just victims but “survivors, creators, artists, cultural, guides … and resistors”, despite the immense violence they suffered.

Some individuals and municipalities in France have worked to highlight the country’s active role in the transatlantic slave trade, through cultural and memorial projects. The northwestern city of Nantes, which achieved vast wealth through slavery in the 18th century, built a memorial to victims in 2012.

Historians say that more than 40 percent of France’s slave trade was conducted through the city’s port, which acted as a transhipment point for some 450,000 Africans forcibly taken to the Americas. But this part of Nantes’ history was kept hidden for years until the move to “break the silence” cumulated in the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery.

In England, the city of Liverpool has an International Museum of Slavery, and Qatar and Cuba have also set up museums devoted to this history, carrying out partnership projects with UNESCO.

Acclaimed American jazz musician Marcus Miller, spokesman for the Slave Route Project, is also using music to educate people about slavery. Prior to an uplifting performance in Paris with African musicians, Miller said he wanted to focus on the resistance and resilience of the people forced into slavery and those who fought alongside to end the centuries-long atrocity.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

“Strong together, we love Israel and trust the army” banner in Jerusalem. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS

By Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Aug 7 2014 (IPS)

“Strong together, we love Israel and trust the army” – while a tentative truce takes root, banners adorned with the national colours still dominate cities and highways across the country.

Calling for unquestioned patriotism and solidarity, the embrace is a bear hug in the minds of those who question the merits and morality of Israel’s latest onslaught on Gaza.

It is tough to subscribe to the credo of peace when nationalist emotions are exacerbated by plaintive sirens and the deafening sound of Iron Dome missiles slamming incoming rockets, when rational judgment is mobilised for the war effort and crushes rational assessment of the effect of war.

War is the antithesis of peace is a tautology. Challenged by war, Israeli peace activists grapple with dilemma.... ordinary Israelis took refuge in the safety net of their emotions, seeking comfort in national anxiety, pronouncing moral judgment on the “sanctimonious” critics at home who contest the axiomatic assertion proclaimed time and again that “the Israel Defence Forces is the world’s most moral army”

A war, when launched, must be won. Yet this war results neither in victory nor defeat, is not a war to end all wars, but a war to avoid the next war by means of deterrence, maybe. In war, there is only loss, and losers, peace activists reckon.

If war will not have solved the conflict – it contains the seeds of the next round of violence – peace will, they assert.

But when the cannons roar, peace is silenced.

Stressing that there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Peace NGO Forum called for a ceasefire and a resumption of the negotiations towards a two-state solution on Day 22 of the operation.

The Peace NGO Forum is an umbrella platform for Jewish and Palestinian civil society organisations dedicated to peace within a two-state solution to the conflict. The partner organisations, which include the women’s peace coalition Bat Shalom and the Combatants for Peace movement, partake in networking, capacity-building and joint demonstrations,

The belated statement generated by the Israeli wing of the forum exposed the dilemma: “Israelis reserve the right to self-defence and deserve to live in security and peace, without the threat of rockets fired at them and enemy tunnels dug into their midst.”

And so, at its height, the war was justified, enjoying quasi-consensual approval ratings among Jewish Israelis. Social media brimmed with racist, intimidating, “Kill Arabs”, “Kill leftists” comments.

“No more deaths!” On Day 19 of the operation, 5,000 Israelis joined a rally organised by pro-peace civil society organisations. The emblematic Peace Now movement was absent, as was the liberal Meretz party. The protestors dispersed after rockets were fired at the Tel Aviv metropolis.

Succumbing willingly to the 24 hours a day news coverage on TV, ordinary Israelis took refuge in the safety net of their emotions, seeking comfort in national anxiety, pronouncing moral judgment on the “sanctimonious” critics at home who contest the axiomatic assertion proclaimed time and again that “the Israel Defence Forces is the world’s most moral army”.

Left-wing Israelis counter that self-righteousness is intrinsic in such proclamation.

“How can you not identify with our national pain when we’re under threat” is a blame often levelled by right-wingers against fellow Israeli peace activists.

The Israeli public which, in its overwhelming majority, is at the centre and right of the political spectrum, charges that the country is falling victim to ‘victimology’, the victim-focused coverage of the conflict.

Supporters of the peace movement see respect for “human rights as our last line of defence”, as Amnesty International director Yonatan Gher put it in the liberal daily Haaretz on Wednesday. They object to the disproportionate reaction of the military. Israel must understand the weakness inherent in its own military might, they suggest.

The mainstream’s assumption is that peace activists too often give in to ‘the mother of all tautologies’ – that “war is hell” and “evil” and, in essence, a war crime. Any sign of soul searching that this war is not just is resented as vacillation and unwanted self-flagellation.

Peace activists hold Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territories as the source of evil.

The 47-year occupation, most Israelis argue, reduces their predicament to a simplistic imagery, because the occupation does not justify the hatred of Israel professed by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, and the repetitive cycle of violence. The occupation continues because peace is unattainable, they stress.

“Try,” retort peace activists, “We’ve proven enough that we’re strong enough to take a risk for peace.”

Israelis have been stuck in this perennial debate for 14 years.

During this time, they have experienced a flurry of conflicts with no end in sight: the 2000-2005 Palestinian Intifadah uprising, the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah, onslaughts on Hamas in Gaza in 2006 (“Summer Rains”), 2008-2009 (“Cast Lead”), in 2012 (“Pillar of Defence”), and now.

Disillusion and despair are all the more potent that, during the years of the Oslo_Accords, a process of mutual reconciliation engaged both Israelis and Palestinians towards tentative recognition of the other’s pain.

With the ensuing confrontations, both people quickly backpedalled to the existential, elemental, dimension of their conflict.

In adversity, it has become necessary for both Israelis and Palestinians not only to exclude any identification with the other’s pain but also to inflict pain on the other as the sole way to assuage one’s pain and deter the other from inflicting pain.

What, however, unifies the overwhelming camp of war supporters and the dedicated ranks of peace supporters is the acknowledgement that the reality is complex.

Mainstream Israelis realise that their argument that an assessment of the situation requires not being focused solely on the body count in Gaza is a lost cause.

Peace activists understand that the threat that triggered Israel’s operation is tangible, but also the direction in which its outcome might be leading, its consequences and implications for Israel, and, by correlation, for the Palestinians and for peace between the two peoples.

Their ideal of co-existence grinded by years of wars, peace activists reject the focus on suffering if it only serves the hackneyed precept that, on one hand, in war, the end justifies (almost) all means, or, on the other, that war cannot be justified.

They draw fine lines between exercising a legitimate right of self-defence against an unwarranted act of aggression and ever greater use of force, and between the morality, rights and laws of war and the wrongs of the Occupation.

And now that the war seems over, they hang their hope on the realisation by their national leaders that they will urgently initiate a bold diplomatic move towards peace with the Palestinians, and will not let the same amount of time since the previous operation be wasted lest the same, recurring, reality blows up in both peoples’ faces.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

In the United States, African American children continue to face more barriers to success than any other race, new research suggests.

A new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation lists 12 categories that can contribute to a child’s success, including enrolment in preschool, living with two parents and distance from the poverty line. Under these metrics, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders scored highest (with a total score of 776 out of 1000), followed by whites (704).“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.” -- David Osher

African American children not only scored the lowest under this ranking, but with a score of just 345 they were found to have less than half of the indicators for potential success as other races in the United States.

“We know that the current status of poor kids is bad, the current status of black kids is bad, and the combination of poverty and racial discrimination is particularly toxic,” David Osher, vice-president of the American Institute for Research, told IPS. “But we also know enough to make a difference, like the emerging understanding that kicking kids out of schools is not a good solution.”

Osher refers to new civil rights-related data released by the U.S. Department of Education last month. These findings suggest that African American students are being suspended from school at inordinate levels, even at the very earliest grades.

While a fifth of public preschool students in the United States are African American, nearly half of all preschool students who received more than one out-of-school preschool suspension are African American. White students, on the other hand, represent 43 percent of public preschool enrolment but make up just 23 percent of preschoolers given out-of-school suspension.

“This data collection shines a clear, unbiased light on places that are delivering on the promise of an equal education for every child and places where the largest gaps remain,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on releasing the new data. “In all, it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed.”

The study marked the first time that a federal initiative known as the Civil Rights Data Collection included preschool, but the numbers reflect similar trends at all levels of lower and secondary school.

“Black children are not behaving worse,” Jim Eichner, the managing director of programmes at the Advancement Project, an advocacy group, told IPS. “But they are being punished and punished more severely.”

Zero tolerance

While the reasons children are suspended in preschool are not reported, anecdotally such actions appear to be being taken for relatively minor infractions, such as like “not paying attention, being late or talking back,” Eichner says.

Out-of-school suspension has multiple and varied negative impacts on the student and school community. Not only do students miss class time, but they tend to receive the message they are not welcome in school.

Such actions also tend to create new mistrust between the student and teachers that can challenge future learning.

In addition, out-of-school suspension can jeopardise a family’s income if a parent needs to leave work. Or, if a parent cannot leave work, the child may not be sent to a well-supervised home.

Finally, some advocates worry that excluding a child fails to teach him or her how to manage the behaviour that originally caused the problem.

Suspending children at such a young age comes from a “zero tolerance” discipline policy. Such an approach stems from anti-drugs policy adopted by the U.S. criminal justice system during the 1980s, and brought into schools as an attempt to combat increased violence and school shootings.

Yet the broader approach has been seen as something of a failure by the U.S. criminal justice system, a view increasingly being adopted by those working in the school system, as well.

Both Osher and Eichner, for instance, are involved in studying and promoting alternatives to zero-tolerance policies. Eichner particularly points to restorative justice techniques that have students work together to mend any problems, adding that punitive atmospheres have been found to harm all students.

Implicit bias

Although the Civil Rights Data Collection does not investigate why these disparities occur, Osher and Eichner both explain that this is one effect of overarching social, economic and political structures.

“There are disparities in all aspects of youth life: education, juvenile justice and corrections, health. When you control for any of the explanations people come up with, they don’t work,” Osher says.

“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.”

He notes that here are several characteristics related to classrooms from which more kids are suspended. These include class size, the ratio between teachers and students, teacher stress levels, and the availability of mental health consultation.

Both Osher and Eichner also note the role of implicit bias in teachers.

“People can be very well-intended, but in moments of stress they can make a subtle set of calculations that are probably intuitive on whether to get more help or whether to tell the kid to get out,” said Osher.

This implicit bias appears to be particularly notable when dealing with young black preschool students. Researchers have found, for instance, that people tend to overestimate the age of black students, adding as much as three years, thus perceiving the student as less childlike and less innocent.

The first step in ending implicit bias is to name it and talk about it, scholars say.

Some are working on “peer coaching” models, for instance, in which teachers film themselves teaching. Peers can then point out ways a teacher might be acting with bias – and recommend ways to overcome it.

New approaches like this make Osher optimistic that ongoing today’s racial disparity can be decreased.

“These indicators don’t have to be predictors of the future,” he says. “Rather, they’re indicators for what public policy should do.”

“Organised neighbours: Thief if we catch you, you’re not going to the police station, we’re going to lynch you!” Credit: Courtesy of the Cosecha Roja network

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 10 2014 (IPS)

The term “lynching”, which emerged in the United States and refers to vigilantism or a mob taking justice into its own hands, has now entered the vocabulary in a number of Latin American countries.

But while in some countries of Central America and South America’s Andean region mob justice is a longstanding phenomenon, it is new in Argentina. What is not new, however, is that the targets are the same old victims: the darker-skinned poor, in a modern-day version of vigilante justice.

In less than two weeks, a dozen lynchings or attempted lynchings were reported in Argentina. In the first, 18-year-old David Moreyra was killed on Mar. 22, after he allegedly tried to steal the purse of a woman in the central city of Rosario.

The term lynch law originated during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), when Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace and militiaman, presided over extralegal trials of Tories loyal to the British crown

The loyalists were executed even though they had previously been acquitted by a jury, says a study by sociologist Leandro Gamallo, who studied the phenomenon of lynching for his master’s thesis at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.

Decades later, the term “lynch mob” began to be used to refer to the practice of groups of white men in the South of the United States setting out on patrols to hunt down blacks for whatever reason.

This “popular justice” later gave way to “the use of collective force as a method of racial exploitation and segregation by whites against blacks,” Gamallo said.

Lynchings are back in the headlines in Latin America today, whether “instigated” or merely “reported” by the media – depending on where one stands in an ongoing debate. They have now reared their ugly head in Argentina, a country where there is no deep-rooted tradition of “tribal community justice”, as there is in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador or Guatemala.

In Bolivia, the Defensoría del Pueblo or ombudsperson’s office reported 53 cases of vigilante justice killings between 2005 and October 2013.

Mob justice is also present to a greater or lesser extent in Brazil, Mexico, and countries in the Andean and Central American regions.

In Guatemala, political scientist Marcelo Colussi said they were linked to the breakdown in the social fabric by over three decades of civil war (1960-1996), when some 200,000 people – mainly Maya Indians in the highlands – were killed and 50,000 people were forcibly disappeared.

But in every case, the common denominator would seem to be the same: the victims are poor, indigenous or black people who are targeted by mobs taking justice into their own hands in response to a real or perceived rise in crime.

The victims “are still the same ones who suffered the worst of the repression in years past, and who historically have been left out of the benefits of development in Guatemala: impoverished Maya indigenous people,” Colussi said.

“There is a process of stigmatisation of poor young men,” Argentine historian Diego Galeano, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS. He said, however, that it was premature to talk about a “wave” of lynchings in his country.

Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa cited the looting that broke out in late 2013, starting in the central province of Córdoba, pointing out to IPS that “there were attempts to lynch suspected looters whose only ‘crime’, besides [being young and dark-skinned] was that they had tried to cross through the Nueva Córdoba upscale middle-class neighbourhood.”

But there is another problem that, according to Svampa, a researcher with the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research, a public institution, merits a warning: the appearance of armed groups ready to take action against looters – as seen in photos published on online social networks, which she interpreted as “a frightening attempt at the privatisation of justice.”

“Both developments [attempted lynchings and vigilante groups], as a collective response to the looting, were a symptom of a profound setback for democracy and human rights,” Svampa said.

“In a context marked by new social conflicts, greater inequality, growing social disorganisation and tough-on-crime rhetoric, our country seems to be opening up a dangerous Pandora box,” she said.

In Argentina, as expert on security policies Luis Somoza told IPS, the lynchings are occurring against a background of a sensation of rising crime.

“They are the reflection of a society that is totally fed up with the levels of crime,” said the professor at the University Institute of the Argentine Federal Police.

“People have the perception that the state isn’t protecting them, whether or not that is real,” he said.

“But this backsliding to a primitive state of society poses the additional risk of a probable appearance of non-state forces that take on the role of defenders, who refer to themselves as self-defence forces, militias, paramilitaries, death squads,” he said.

The juvenile public defender of the eastern city of La Plata, Julián Axat, associates the phenomenon with the impunity surrounding less-publicised lynchings that have been ignored by the media.

There are thousands of cases of poor adolescents being beaten up before they are arrested – kicked, slapped, pushed and spit on by crowds in incidents that appear to be accepted by the police.

“The impunity surrounding lynchings is what has contributed the most to generating the climate created by the repetition of these events. It’s not the media; it’s the police and the justice systems, who don’t arrest them,” Axat wrote in an article.

“To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, today it’s the dark-skinned people with kinky hair, tomorrow possibly those who go after them, while the powers-that-be and the police will thank them because they will continue to do brisk business with the ‘insecurity’ and with a society where the poor kill the less poor and the authoritarian middle class applauds,” human rights lawyer Claudia Orosz told IPS.

In any case, the experience of Guatemala, one of the countries with the highest homicide rates in the world, demonstrates that lynchings do not dissuade crime.

“Although numerous criminals have been the victims of ‘mob justice’, the crime rates throughout the country, and in former war zones as well, remain alarmingly high,” Colussi said.

In Argentina, President Cristina Fernández said on Mar. 31 that “anything that generates violence will always, always engender more violence,” referring to a phenomenon – lynching – that she avoided naming.

A photograph of Nido Taniam who was killed in a racist attack is displayed at the Arunachal Bhawan in New Delhi. Credit: Bijoyeta Das/IPS.

By Bijoyeta Das
NEW DELHI, Mar 25 2014 (IPS)

L. Khino, 27, vividly remembers Christmas Eve at the Indian capital’s famed Connaught Place shopping hub four years ago: the blinking lights, the buzzing crowd, the winter chill – and the salty taste of her tears.

Khino had just arrived in New Delhi from her home in India’s northeastern state of Manipur. “I was so excited. But suddenly a group of men surrounded me. ‘How much do you charge for a night?’ they asked. I yelled, ‘Get away,’ but they pinched my cheek and touched my back,” she tells IPS."We want a comprehensive anti-racism law because most Indians, including the government, deny that racism exists.”

Others giggled, some laughed aloud. A few snapped photos with their cell phones. “Chinki, chinki,” they kept teasing as she fled into a metro station. ‘Chinki’ is an offensive reference to the East Asian features of many people from India’s northeast.

Khino is one of thousands of youngsters who migrate each year from the eight northeastern states to Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and other cities in their quest for “higher education and better opportunities.” She works at a business process outsourcing centre in the capital’s satellite city Gurgaon.

“Enough is enough. They call us ‘chinki’ everyday, assault and harass us. What is this? Just discrimination or racism?” she asks.

According to activists and student groups, people from the northeast have harrowing experiences across India. They are regularly subjected to verbal taunts, slurs, jokes, physical and sexual assaults as well as cheating by landlords and employers.

For years, complaints have been piling up and the fury has been simmering. Matters came to a head this January when Nido Taniam, the 19-year-old son of a legislator from the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, was killed.

A student in Punjab state, Taniam was visiting Delhi. He had stopped at a store to ask for directions when shopkeepers made fun of his dyed blonde hair. This led to a brawl, and he was seriously assaulted. The next day he succumbed to his injuries.

Taniam’s death led to widespread protests across India. Many from the northeastern community are now campaigning for an anti-racism law to deal with apparent hate crimes. The North East India Forum against Racism (NEIFAR) was formed in February.

Phurpa Tsering, spokesperson for NEIFAR, tells IPS that their short-term demand for fast-tracking all pending cases of hate crime has been accepted.

“In the long run we want a comprehensive anti-racism law because most Indians, including the government, deny that racism exists,” says Tsering, who is from Arunachal Pradesh and is a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

A spate of recent attacks on people from India’s northeast has stirred disconcerting questions.

Protesters point out that the identity of mainland India often excludes the northeast, a region often described as far-flung, remote and conflict-ridden. They say northeasterners are frequently stereotyped as morally loose women in skimpy skirts who are sexually available, or good-for-nothing men who are drug addicts or insurgents.

About 86 percent of people from northeast living in Delhi have faced discrimination, according to research by the North East Helpline and Support Centre based in New Delhi. Alana Golmei, the founder, says they receive 20-30 calls a month, and most complain about non-payment of salaries and assaults.

“We have become immune to people calling us chinki, momo, Bahadur, Nepali, chow-chow, king-kong [terms alluding to their physical appearance],” she says. When she calls to negotiate with employers and landlords, she is told she is an outsider. “A strict anti-racism law will give us more negotiating power.”

But can a piece of legislation battle racism?

In 2012, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a directive to punish anyone who calls a northeasterner ‘chinki’ with up to five years in prison under the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. The SCs and STs comprise some of India’s most socially marginalised people.

Golmei calls this an “emotional, stray reaction” with little effect – there have been no convictions so far. Many in the northeast are not categorised as SC or ST.

Sanjoy Hazarika, director of the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research at the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, wants an amendment and expansion of this Act. “New laws are difficult to make and difficult to push through,” he tells IPS.

Support for anti-racism law depends on a crucial question: if a man from northern or eastern India is beaten up in western India, it is called regionalism; so is it racism when someone from the northeast is attacked?

Hazarika, who is from Assam in the northeast, tells IPS, “We want it to include everybody in the country and all cases of discrimination on the basis of appearance, language, gender, food and attire. Only face is not enough.”

But opinion is divided.

Senti Longchar, assistant professor of psychology at Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, points out that people from states like Bihar or Assam look the same as anyone from northern India. “Discrimination against them is regionalism but name-calling and attacks on those with a Mongoloid face is racism.”

India signed the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1967. But Longchar cites a Washington Post infographic that uses World Values Survey data to show India and Jordan are the most racially intolerant countries.

Racist hate crimes are only one end of the spectrum of discrimination that people from the northeast encounter, says Kadambari Gladding, spokesperson for Amnesty International, India. She says they are also denied goods and services. “Non-discrimination is not a concession, but a right,” she adds.

Instead of a pan-India law, NEIFAR is advocating legislation specific to the northeast that will deter racist attacks on those with East Asian features, and include positive aspects such as preferential treatment, awareness campaigns, sensitisation of police and inclusion of the northeast’s history in textbooks.

NEIFAR is researching anti-racism laws in other countries, particularly Bolivia, to push for a model that suits India, says Id Gil, a Manipur native who studies in Delhi and works for the forum.

He tells IPS, “Every racial remark has the potential to kill somebody, as we have seen in Nido’s case.”

A ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in relation to a Turkish national has kicked up a new row on anti-racism legislation.

The court ruled in December that Switzerland violated the right to freedom of speech of the Turkish national Doğu Perinçek by convicting him for calling the idea of an Armenian genocide an “international lie”.

In 2007, a court in the Swiss Canton of Vaud had found Perinçek guilty of racial discrimination as defined by Section 261 of the Swiss Criminal Code, ruling that the Armenian genocide was a proven historical fact. Already in 2003, the Swiss National Council had acknowledged the Armenian genocide.Until today, diverging interpretations of what happened in Armenia during and after the First World War strain bilateral relations.

Perinçek subsequently appealed in Switzerland’s Federal Court, which dismissed his claims. After that, Perinçek took his case to the ECHR in Strasbourg.

In its ruling, the ECHR found that Perinçek’s conviction by the Swiss court was wrong, as it violated Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights on freedom of expression. The court argued that Perinçek had never questioned the massacres and deportations perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, but had denied their characterisation as “genocide”. He didn’t mean to incite hatred against the Armenian people, the ECHR pointed out.

In fact, Perinçek’s view corresponds with Turkey’s official stance that is widely shared by the Turkish public, all main political parties as well as the state-run Historical Society. Turkey’s Foreign Ministry called the ECHR decision “a victory for the rule of law.”

Schools and universities in Turkey teach that the killings of Armenians were neither deliberate, nor orchestrated by the Ottoman leadership in Istanbul. Further, Turkish historians doubt that up to 1.5 million Armenians had died, as many Western scholars claim.

However, Turkish estimates vary, starting around 10,000 Armenian casualties. Turkish historians argue that most of the death occurred due to illness and malnutrition.

Beyond Turkey’s eastern border, lobbying for worldwide genocide recognition is a fundamental part of Armenia’s foreign policy. Until today, diverging interpretations of what happened in Armenia during and after the First World War strain bilateral relations.

The ECHR highlighted that it wasn’t called upon to address either the veracity of the massacres and deportations perpetrated against the Armenian people or the appropriateness of legally characterising those acts as “genocide”. It doubted that there could be a consensus on the issue.

The Switzerland-Armenia Association (SAA) said it was “deeply disappointed and appalled by the ECHR verdict.”

Dominique de Buman, Swiss national councillor and co-president of the SAA told IPS: “The ECHR ruling isn’t just a setback for human dignity, but also contradicts a European Council Framework Decision that ordered member states to ensure that publicly condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes were penalised.”

Such framework decisions do not pose a legal basis for the ECHR, however. De Buman also referred to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. “Don’t forget that the convention was adopted in reaction to the Holocaust as well as the Armenian genocide,” he told IPS.

The ECHR ruling has sparked a debate in Switzerland on whether or not the government should appeal the decision and if and how Swiss anti-racism legislation may be amended.

Councillor De Buman told IPS he was optimistic that an appeal could lead to a further examination of the case, as the ECHR ruling wasn’t unanimous: “Two of the seven judges had expressed a joint concurring opinion. They stated that there existed an international consensus regarding the characterisation of the massacres against the Armenian people.”

Judges András Sajó and Guido Raimondi would welcome a Swiss appeal to the Grand Chamber, as so far the court has never taken a view on the massacres and deportations of the Armenians. “It’s our symbolic and moral obligation to define and qualify these events,” they wrote. Switzerland’s Federal Office of Justice hasn’t yet taken a decision in that regard.

The ECHR ruling plays into the hands of right-wing groups such as the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) who have repeatedly tried to knock down the country’s anti-racism legislation. Consequently, the party’s long-time leader Christoph Blocher demanded a change of the criminal code. Legally, the ECHR ruling doesn’t force Switzerland to amendments.

Silvia Bär, the SVP’s secretary general, told IPS that the party is preparing a parliamentary request to specify or even abolish Swiss anti-racism legislation. “We reject racism. However, the current application of the legislation is getting increasingly absurd and incorrectly limits the right to freedom of expression.”

According to Bär, the anti-racism legislation is being misused to discipline and sanction unwelcome opinions. In addition, the SVP demands that Switzerland resigns from the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and that it dissolves the Federal Commission against Racism (EKR).

Martine Brunschwig Graf, National Councillor for the Liberals and President of the EKR has doubts about these intentions. “The ECHR ruling is complex and doesn’t put the Swiss anti-racism paragraph in question,” she told IPS. From 1995 to 2012, Swiss courts have sentenced accused persons in 310 cases under that paragraph.

Brunschwig Graf calls the legislation an indispensable instrument: “The fight against racism requires prevention at all levels, but also repression if certain limits are surpassed.”

Among the other parties, the Swiss anti-racism legislation enjoys broad support. Hansjörg Fehr of the Social Democrats told the Swiss national radio that if the criminal code was to be changed, then “we need a passage that explicitly punishes the denial of the Armenian genocide.”

The debate is expected to ignite at the next parliamentary session in March.

Indigenous and peasant women from every region in Bolivia at a demonstration in La Paz. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Feb 13 2014 (IPS)

Three years ago Bolivia passed a law to combat discrimination and racism, but no one has been convicted as a result, in spite of hundreds of legal complaints.

Rebeca Javier, a young journalist without distinguishing features, was assaulted and insulted by a man using racial slurs of the kind often used against indigenous people, while she interviewed people in the street in the southeastern city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

A few hours later, the man was free, in spite of the existence of filmed evidence and witnesses."There are no known prosecutions under the law that have led to prison sentences for these acts..." -- Verónica Sánchez, the secretary general of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights

“I asked the prosecutor for justice, but she did not listen to me,” Javier complained to IPS.

“There has not been a single sentence” because prosecutors and judges do not classify acts of discrimination as crimes, Leoncio Gutiérrez, the head of the governmental Fight against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination, told IPS.

“If there is a law, there should be a penalty,” Griselda Sillerico, the acting ombudsperson, told IPS. She condemned “the impunity” that continues to condone discrimination in this country of 10.3 million people, the majority of whom are indigenous, and where the president since 2006 has been Evo Morales, a native Aymara.

“Those in charge of prosecutions are not forceful and convincing, and justice cannot be permissive and tolerant,” she said. In her view, the problem resides in the system of administration of justice in Bolivia, a plurinational state under its 2009 constitution.

On Dec. 31, after holding him for eight hours, the prosecutor in the Javier case freed the aggressor, Víctor Hugo Soria, in spite of proof and witnesses’ testimony that he had hit Javier, spat on her and insulted her with phrases like “colla de mierda” (roughly translated it means “bloody Indian”) which are used against Aymara women by racist sectors in the west of the country.

Javier, a Spanish-speaking journalist for one of the foremost television channels in the region, described her feelings of impotence in the face of the prosecutor’s action, and said she had lodged a second legal complaint. Now the case is being investigated by a police department special victims unit.

In October 2010 Morales promulgated the Law Against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination, which was controversial from the outset because it included sanctions against the media if they disseminated “racist and discriminatory ideas,” with the penalty of a temporary ban for up to a year.

Promotors of the law, which was welcomed among the indigenous peoples, are now working three years later on its dissemination via social agencies, through eight departmental committees, the ombudsman’s office and the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, Gutiérrez said.

The law is intended to eliminate racist behaviour and all forms of discrimination, and to consolidate public policies for protection and prevention, according to Article 1.

Actions committed for racist motives are criminalised, as are discrimination, dissemination and incitement to racism or discrimination, participation in racist or discriminatory organisations or associations, and insults or other verbal aggression. Penalties can range from one to seven years of imprisonment.

In Sillerico’s view, the barriers to enforcing the law are related to the difficulty in dismantling a “colonial state” that is embedded in Bolivian society and is indifferent to the problem.

“It is remarkable that there are no known prosecutions under the law that have led to prison sentences for these acts, and three years later there is no progress evident in the judicial branch, which is in charge of enforcement,” Verónica Sánchez, the secretary general of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights in La Paz (APDHLP), told IPS.

Much the same happens with cases that come to international notice, like that of 10 teenage girls who applied to enrol in a private all boys’ school in the central city of Cochabamba in 2012.

Their request unleashed protests by the school’s staff, students and parents, in spite of a law in Bolivia prohibiting sex segregation in education, Julieta Montaño, head of the Legal Office for Women, an NGO, told IPS.

“The mothers of the boy students said they would not be responsible if the girls were raped,” said Montaño, who managed to have charges laid against eight leaders, parents and teachers who opposed the girls’ entry to the school.

The girls were eventually admitted after an agreement was reached, but the criminal case is proceeding at snail’s pace. “We are not seeking the maximum penalty; we just do not want the crime to go unpunished,” in order to send a message against gender discrimination, the lawyer said.

Between January and October 2013, the Vice-Ministry of Decolonisation accepted 135 complaints about racism or discrimination, most of them based on sexual orientation and educational level, and 57 percent of them arising in public agencies.

The ombudsman’s office received 1,652 complaints between 2010 and October 2013. The cases included older adults, people with disabilities, peasant farmers, coca growers, prison inmates, migrants, young people, pregnant women and others.

One example quoted by the ombudsman’s office is a xenophobic statement made by Isaac Ávalos, a senator for the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement Toward Socialism), in 2012. “Out of every 10 Colombians who come to Bolivia, eight are involved in illicit activities,” he said, as a justification of public insecurity.

Later he apologised for his words.

“I would not like to see anyone sent to prison because of discrimination, that would be the worst thing that could happen to us” as a society, Jorge Medina, an Afro-Bolivian congressman and the principal promotor of the law, told IPS.

“The law is not necessarily punitive, and its spirit is not to fill the prisons with those who discriminate,” said the MAS lawmaker.

Medina is in favour of conciliation methods by means of an apology from the aggressor, but he is concerned about the lack of follow-up in cases that should be resolved in the ordinary courts.

APDHLP’s Sánchez supports education on values and respect for differences with programmes for students. “It’s an issue of mental structure” that must be changed by training and policies, she said.

The case with the greatest repercussions to date has been the opening of a lawsuit against the Fides news agency and the newspapers El Diario and Página Siete. The government is accusing them of incitement to racism for alleged distortion in their reports on a speech by Morales on Aug. 15, 2012.

(L to R) Eric Gjertsen from Payday Men's Network, Carolyn Hill and Celyn Camen from EMWM. Credit: Kanya D'Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
PHILADELPHIA, U.S., Dec 7 2013 (IPS)

Seated at a table in the dimly lit café in Philadelphia’s public library, Carolyn Hill looks no different from her fellow diners. A few minutes of conversation, though, are enough to reveal the extent of her distress.

She is fighting a fierce custody battle against the city of Philadelphia, whose Department of Human Services (DHS) removes more children of colour into state custody than any other city of its size in the United States."All of the services needed to run this operation represent the possibility of huge government contracts for private companies.” -- Celyne Camen

Hill told IPS the only reason she is unable to get back her children is because she is a low-income, single black woman – an analysis shared by many activists and experts working to reunite families torn apart by state authorities. [Read Part One of the series]

On Apr. 3, 2011, DHS Philadelphia placed Hill’s two nieces – one of them aged six months, the other just one-and-a-half years old – in her care, after their birth mother’s rights were terminated on charges of drug abuse.

Barely a year later – while the paperwork necessary to grant Hill status as the girls’ legal adoptive mother was being processed – a social worker from the Lutheran Children and Family Service, a private child support agency contracted by DHS, deemed Hill unsuitable for adoption, or even fostering.

Citing her lack of a GED as grounds for the immediate removal of the children, the social worker took the girls away, without notice, just before the Easter holiday.

“When they came to visit the kids, they would only stay 15 minutes,” she told IPS. “What can you learn about someone in 15 minutes? They call them home inspections, but they are more like home invasions.”

Unaware at the time of her rights as a caregiver and frantic for help, Hill stumbled upon a Philadelphia-based self-help group calling itself ‘DHS – Give Us Back Our Children’ (DHS-GUBOC).

Together with this community of volunteers and legal advocates, she has spent the last two years digging through to the nucleus of a systematic child removal policy in Philadelphia – beginning with overworked and under-qualified caseworkers sitting at the receiving end of child protection hotlines, and up through every level of social workers, agencies, courts and “child advocates”.

Anyone lodging a complaint against a parent need only call one of the many national hotlines, which refer calls to agencies like DHS for investigation.

(Philadelphia DHS did not respond to IPS requests for comment for this article).

Investigating caseworkers can then list the parent in a central register of child abusers based on nothing more than an hour-long interaction with the family.

“In some states, parents can appeal after the fact, in others there is no appeal at all,” Phoebe Jones, a member of the U.S.-wide Every Mother is a Working Mother (EMWM) Network, told IPS.

Once the allegation of abuse has been made, caseworkers can carry out strip searches and enter homes without warrants. In over 29 states, caseworkers are free to “confiscate” a child immediately if the parent resists any of these measures. In the rest of the states, Jones said, caseworkers can ask law enforcement to take the child for them.

Hill lays the blame for her current plight squarely at the feet of her own social workers. She says they were blinded by the fact that she lived in low-income housing, and failed to see that there was always food in the fridge, a home-cooked meal on the stove, and lots of laughter in her home.

“My nieces and I went out for walks together, took naps together, ate together, played together,” she said. “Now they are stuck in a daycare center from six in the morning until six in the evening every day.”

A lucrative enterprise

After fighting for a full year – protesting outside the courthouse, providing endless documentation as proof of her capabilities as a caregiver, enlisting the willing support of her extended family, her church and community – Hill finally managed to extract a retraction from the DHS.

But no sooner was she proclaimed fit to welcome back her children than the Support Centre for Child Advocates stepped in.

Child advocates, according to Celyne Camen of the EMWM Network, are tasked with representing children in ongoing dependency cases.

The advocate’s mandate is to press for what they think is best for the child, regardless of what the child may actually want. In the case of Carolyn Hill, one of the children in question was only 15 months old.

“How can a child of that age be represented by strangers who don’t understand her needs?” Camen asked.

In Camen’s opinion, the board of the Support Center for Child Advocates – which includes Swiss financiers, investment banks like Merrill Lynch, mammoth law firms like Blank Rome and some of the wealthiest CEOs of major drug companies – represents the huge financial incentives powering the child removal/foster care system in the U.S.

“These corporations are very interested in restructuring this particular sector to shift more influence into private hands,” she said. “All of the services needed to run this operation represent the possibility of huge government contracts for private companies.”

Aramark, a facilities management and supply firm, sits prominently on the board of the Support Centre. Among their many clients are 600 correctional institutions to whom they supply “everything from uniforms to pencils”, Camen said, pointing to a continuum between child care institutions and the vast archipelago of prisons scattered across the U.S – not unlike the widely covered “school-to-prison pipeline.”

In addition, added Eric Gjertsen from Payday men’s network, a Philadelphia-based group working with men impacted by DHS’s practices, cash cows also come in the form of parenting capacity tests, anger management classes, psychological evaluations and medical exams conducted by hundreds of private companies.

Todd Lloyd, child welfare policy director of the non-profit organisation Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC), says housing alone for a single child could cost anything from 10,000 to 66,000 dollars a year.

“Keep in mind,” he told IPS, “that placement costs are not the only costs involved with out-of-home removal – there are other administrative, court and case management costs that come into play as well.”

All told, the finances required for statewide child removal operations grant DHS Philadelphia an annual operating budget of 600 million dollars – “Enough to transform the conditions for many children said to be neglected, along with their families,” Jones told IPS.

Hill says her struggle has put her in touch with dozens of parents fighting for their children. Many of them are juggling large families of five or more kids, and the vast majority report losing their parental rights over minor shortfalls.

“I met a mother whose aunt called DHS on her. When they arrived they didn’t find anything wrong except that the toilet in her house was backed up. But they took her kid away. That don’t make no sense – if your toilet is backed up you don’t need DHS, all you need is a plumber.”

Excerpt:

While only 50.3 percent of Philadelphia’s children are black, they comprise 73 percent of children in foster care. Credit: Bigstock

By Kanya D'Almeida
PHILADELPHIA, U.S., Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

It is nearly impossible in this day and age to turn on the news without hearing about systemic racial discrimination in the United States.

Ample evidence shows that disproportionate numbers of African Americans are imprisoned, subject to police brutality, excluded from employment opportunities and denied decent healthcare, compared to their white counterparts."Thirty percent of foster children in the U.S. could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing." -- Richard Wexler

One government agency has, by and large, escaped such scrutiny. It goes by different names in different places: Child Protective Services, the Department of Youth and Family Services, or the Department of Child and Family Services.

In Philadelphia, it’s known as the Department of Human Services, or DHS, and by its own admission it is responsible for moving roughly 3,000 children in this city of 1.5 million people into “out-of-home” care every year.

According to Todd Lloyd, child welfare policy director of the non-profit organisation Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children (PPC), “The most recent annual data shows 9,205 children entering foster care in [the state of] Pennsylvania, with about 71.7 percent of those children being first-time entries, as opposed to re-entries.”

Lloyd told IPS that Philadelphia County has the highest “placement rate” in the state, with 14 per 1,000 children being moved to out-of-home care every year – over twice the national rate of 6.4 per 1,000 children.

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR), meanwhile, reports that DHS Philadelphia removes children at up to six times the rate of other cities of its size. 

It is not the rate of transfer alone that has families in Philadelphia on edge but the racially lopsided nature of the entire child welfare system: studies show that while only 50.3 percent of Philadelphia’s children are black, they comprise 73 percent of children in foster care.

Officials dismiss this discrepancy with a single explanation: poverty. The poverty rate for African Americans in Philadelphia, according to a survey conducted by Pew in 2013, is 39 percent – exceeded only by the poverty rate in Detroit, Michigan.

Still, to remove a child from his or her home, federal law states that human services agencies must first establish proof of neglect, mistreatment or abuse. [Read Part Two of the series here]

In reality, critics say, this provision is a catch-22 for low-income families. For instance, the state of Pennsylvania’s definition of neglect includes “failure to provide essentials of life, including adequate medical care, that endangers a child’s life or development or impairs the child’s functioning” – in short, a perfect definition of poverty.

According to NCCPR Executive Director Richard Wexler, the correlation of poverty with neglect is so widespread that a full “30 percent of foster children in the U.S. could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing.”

Child protection agencies like Philadelphia’s DHS – which declined IPS requests to comment on the issue – say the vast majority of children removed from their homes were being abused. Indeed, some 3.6 million children were investigated as potential victims of abuse in 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Digging a little deeper, however, the NCCPR found that “2.8 million of those children – nearly four-fifths of them – were subjects of reports that turned out to be false.”

That child abuse is a reality in far too many homes cannot be denied. According to Lloyd, the most recent annual child abuse report issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare found 3,408 “substantiated” reports of child abuse in 2011.

But activists working with families whose children have been taken from them say this data must be carefully examined in the context of racial bias: several studies have shown that toddlers with similar injuries were three times more likely to be reported to DHS Philadelphia if the family was African-American or Latino.

Phoebe Jones, a member of ‘DHS – Give Us Back Our Children’ (DHS-GUBOC) – a Philadelphia-based self-help group coordinated by the Every Mother is a Working Mother Network (EMWM) – told IPS that foster homes have become notorious as places where abuse is rampant.

“In general, children are worse off as a result of fostering,” she said, citing several studies that found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. “The record of group homes and institutions is even worse,” she added.

Earlier this year dozens of families – particularly mothers, aunts and grandmothers – expressed outrage when the United Nations bestowed its prestigious Public Service Award on DHS Philadelphia for its efforts to “improve the outcomes of children in foster care”.

“DHS is breaking up families in this city,” Jones said in a press release back in June. “We want to know why the U.N. gave this award without consulting families in Philadelphia. Did they decide on this honour from conferring with officials at cocktail parties?  We never heard of them conferring with grassroots people impacted.”

Excerpt:

Members of La Muñeca Negra, a group that makes papier-mâché figures inspired by Afro-Cuban deities. Credit: Ernesto Pérez Zambrano/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Nov 25 2013 (IPS)

From a very young age, Irma Castañeda has braided her curly hair and cared for it with natural recipes inherited from her mother, ignoring the widespread conception that black women’s hair is “ugly” or “bad”.

Gently, with skilful hands, she aims to chip away at something much more complex: the silence surrounding the issue of race, a subject that was taboo for decades in official rhetoric, according to which racism was eradicated by the Cuban revolution in 1959.

In the Balcón Arimao barrio in the largely black municipality of La Lisa, on the west side of Havana, Castañeda and nine other women have launched an effort to improve self-esteem, teaching hairdressing techniques and traditional cosmetics recipes for black skin, because they are not available in stores.

“Whether it is straightened or worn in an Afro or dreadlocks, hair can look beautiful on a black woman, who has the right to have resources for taking care of her image,” Castañeda told IPS.

“We want to break the stereotype that we black women are less beautiful, without trying to look like white models,” added Castañeda, an educator by profession and promoter of the project Rizos (Spanish for “Curls”).

For these hairdressers, facial masks and tweezers are tools for raising awareness around problems faced by people of African descent, who officially account for 36 percent of Cuba’s population of nearly 11.2 million, although researchers such as Esteban Morales estimate the non-white population at around 60 percent.

Rizos is one of a number of initiatives of the Afrodescendent Neighbourhood Network (Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, RBA), which is reviving anti-racist activism in Havana.

About a year ago, activists from various urban communities founded the RBA to take research and debate about the race question into the neighbourhoods. Every month, in a community centre in La Lisa, lectures are given to train 35 local leaders.

All of these people, who work in different jobs and have different educational levels, assume the responsibility of taking what they learn to their families, neighbourhoods, and workplaces.

Marlene Bayeux, a 63-year-old former veterinarian, says she knows what it feels like to be underestimated. “To be respected as a professional, I had to overcome a racist boss, but if I had been equipped with the arguments that I learned in the network’s workshops, I would have saved myself a lot of grief,” she told IPS.

Bayeux feels that she contributes to the cause as part of La Muñeca Negra (The Black Doll) – a group of artisans who create papier-mâché figures inspired by female Afro-Cuban deities.

Another group sews black rag dolls, but they are dressed as flight attendants, doctors, nurses, and soldiers, instead of the typical religious or slave woman rag dolls.

While small, these efforts are important because of the direction they are moving in, historian Daisy Rubiera told IPS. She is part of the Cuban chapter of the regional network of African Descendants from Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAC), created in September of last year.

Rubiera described the work being carried out by academia and intellectuals as insufficient; for years, they have been talking, carrying out research and even making money on the issue, but they have not managed to really reach the wider public, she said.

“The historic causes of racial discrimination do not appear in the official texts, so they go unnoticed by the majority,” said Rubiera, who is an advisor to the RBA.

Maritza López, who is the RBA’s coordinator and has extensive experience in social work in poor neighbourhoods, said discussions need to happen with the people most affected, who are in the streets and not in bookstores, theatres or academic seminars.

“Academic activism opened up the road, but the intellectuals need to come down to our neighbourhoods to transmit their knowledge and wisdom in terms that people can understand,” López told IPS.

In Cuba, racial discrimination is manifest above all in subtle personal, social, and cultural prejudice and attitudes. It is low-key because public displays of racism are not socially acceptable.

“Sometimes black people do not perceive that they are being discriminated against because socially, the problem is accepted as natural,” said retired high school teacher Hildelisa Leal.

Segregation and discrimination are also reflected by the fact that blacks or people of mixed-race are a majority among the poor and a minority in decision-making posts and emerging economic sectors such as tourism and self-employment, according to researcher María del Carmen Zabala.

According to her studies, less than 20 percent of Cubans who leave the country in search of a better future are non-whites. For that reason, most of the remittances sent home by immigrants – an essential source of income for much of the population – go to white families.

According to the 2002 census, while unemployment stood at 2.9 percent among whites, it rose to 6.3 percent among the black and mixed-race workforce. And with respect to higher education, 4.4 percent more whites than non-whites held a degree.

These figures have not been updated with information from the 2012 census.

President Raul Castro has referred to increasing the presence of blacks in political office.

In the legislative National Assembly elected this year, 37 percent of seats are held by non-whites.

In January 2012, the ruling Communist Party declared its intention of “confronting prejudice and discriminatory conduct based on skin colour that runs counter to the Constitution and law and hurts national unity.”

However, activists are demanding more resounding actions in this nation, which has the second-highest proportion of blacks in Latin America after Brazil.

Tato Quiñones, a leading member of the citizens’ project Cofradía de la Negritud (roughly, Brotherhood of Blackness), is proposing a specific legal structure for prosecuting acts of racial discrimination.

In an award-winning essay, researcher Zuleica Romay suggested a general law against discrimination.

Learning about the cultural and historic roots of racism has helped Damayanti Matos, a member of the RBA, feel more empowered.

“I became aware of my rights – it used to seem normal for people to address me as ‘negra’ (black woman),” she told IPS. “Now I know that behind that innocent gesture, there is a history of discrimination.”

A young black street vendor selling "acarajé", a traditional type of fritter, in Salvador, Bahia in Brazil’s Northeast. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Walter García and Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.

The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.

But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.

But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”

More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.

Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers.

A survey by the Data Popular polling firm and the Patrícia Galvão Institute (IPG), a women’s rights organisation, interviewed 1,501 women and men over the age of 18 in 100 towns and cities spread across every region of the country.

In the study “Representations of women in TV advertising”, 56 percent of those surveyed said ads did not show “real” Brazilian women.

For 65 percent of the respondents, the model of beauty in TV ads has little to do with the way Brazilian women really look, and 60 percent said they think women get frustrated when they do not feel reflected on TV.

Most ads show “young, white, thin, blond, straight-haired upper-class women,” the study says.

At the age of 17, Karina Lopes feels insecure as a woman. Her body has changed, but not into the shape she sees in the ads offering her clothes, make-up and low-cal yogurt.

“Even if I eat that yogurt every day, I’ll never be thin like that woman selling it,” she told IPS. “You feel bad because that image is so different from the way you look. Normal women aren’t shown on TV.”

Mara Vidal, assistant director of IPG, said “women come in all colours and shapes. We aren’t stereotypes. That’s what the public is saying – it’s not something that women’s organisations or academic studies came up with.

“It’s the public who are saying ‘we want to be better represented in society, not just by one single, universal type’,” Vidal told IPS.

She said she also suffered in the past. As a girl, she didn’t want to go to school because other kids called her “black girl with broom-bristle hair” because of her brown skin and red hair.

“I didn’t start liking my hair till I got to university, when I stopped straightening it,” she said. “My generation wasn’t as aware as people are today. The concept of someone who was ‘good-looking’ didn’t include people with our hair and colouring.”

In the study, 51 percent of those surveyed said they would like to see more black women in ads, and 64 percent said they would like to see more women from lower-income sectors.

Brazilian TV and the country’s world-famous telenovelas have gradually started to overcome prejudice and today black or brown-skinned characters are less limited to the traditional discriminatory roles of domestics, family drivers, or criminals. Some have even cast darker-skinned women as central characters.

But advertising, unless it specifically targets that segment of the population, still does not represent blacks.

“In an ad for margarine we don’t see black women or happy black families. But in the area of cosmetics we’re starting to see a change,” Vidal said.

For example, there are now lines of products specifically designed for darker-skinned women and shampoos for “curly” or “dark-coloured” hair.

Meanwhile, advertising by the government and public enterprises has become increasingly “politically correct,” reflecting the country’s ethnic diversity.

But that is not happening yet “as much as we would like,” said Vidal. “Brazil, because of its tradition of excluding blacks, has not yet dared to fully show that reality.”

Renato Meirelles, director of Data Popular, said that exclusion is now hurting advertisers. According to the polling firm, women in Brazil represent 500 billion dollars a year in income and are the ones who decide on 85 percent of what families consume.

Women are not just a “niche market but the main consumer market, and advertisers don’t know how to reach out to them,” Meirelles told IPS.

The idea that “Brazilian women want to be like Europeans is old,” he said. “Now women are proud of their new identity.”

Factors that have helped boost this newfound self-esteem include laws aimed at fighting racial discrimination that have been adopted in recent years and the fact that some 30 million people have left poverty behind and have moved up into the middle class.

According to Meirelles, “the big problem of advertisers and advertising agencies is that they belong to the elite and their decisions emerge from an elite mind-set. That’s why they fail to understand that a new consumer market has emerged.

“Their fear is that white women won’t buy a product if the girl in the ad is black. Few of them worry that black women won’t buy products because the model in the ad is white,” he said.

“Aspiration has given way to inspiration, where the model represents successful black women. Companies should understand this process of achievement that we have experienced,” he said.

In the aftermath of a recent high-profile U.S. murder trial, several new studies have found that the controversial self-defence law at the heart of the case, known as “Stand Your Ground”, is being applied differently depending on defendants’ ethnicity.

The new statistics on this racial disparity have come out as the Stand Your Ground laws, which have been passed in nearly three-dozen U.S. states, have come under review at the state and federal level.“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down.” -- Paul Graham of the Centre for Community Change

That includes in Florida, the location of the widely viewed trial of a “neighbourhood watch” volunteer named George Zimmerman, who was accused of the murder of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman’s acquittal last month, explained by some jurors as being based largely on the legality of his actions under Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, outraged broad sections of the country.

The state-level “self-defence” statute was first introduced in 2005, and allows someone who feels threatened to use deadly force against an attacker without first trying to get away. For this reason, the law is also known as “No Duty to Retreat” and, by critics, “Shoot First”, and has been increasingly criticised for escalating rather than mitigating conflict.

Yet according to a new study by the Urban Institute, the application of this law has varied significantly according to the ethnic make-up of both the attacker and the victim.

The shooting of a black person by a white person, for instance, has been found to be justifiable under Stand Your Ground 17 percent of the time. On the other hand, the shooting of a white person by a black person has been found justifiable just slightly over one percent of the time.

In the states that have no such statute, white-on-black shootings were found to be justified about nine percent of the time.

“Stand Your Ground clearly has racial implication in communities of colour and black neighbourhoods,” Paul Graham, with the Ohio Organising Collaborative at the Centre for Community Change, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“When you have this kind of disparity and this kind of inequality, it is a devastating blow for all communities.”

Another recent investigation, carried out by the Tampa Bay Times, a Florida newspaper, looked at some 200 Stand Your Ground cases and found that defendants who had killed a black victim went free 73 percent of the time. Yet defendants who killed a white victim went free just 59 percent of the time.

Since 2005, 31 other states have followed Florida’s lead in passing similar laws, while several others are reportedly considering similar legislation. On average, so-called justifiable homicide rose by about eight percent in states with Stand Your Ground laws, amounting to about 600 additional killings.

“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down,” Graham says.

Under fire

The Stand Your Ground laws were strongly pushed for by a few high-profile gun-rights groups here, in particular the National Rifle Association (NRA). In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin verdict, these groups have doubled down their support for these laws, including by suggesting that minorities stand the most to gain from such self-defence legislation.

“We all know why it’s come under fire right now, because of that one case in Florida, but that’s just a ruse for attacking self-defence in general,” Erich Pratt, communications director for Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“[Changing Stand Your Ground] would adversely affect minorities, if we say that they are not going to be able to defend themselves when they fear for their lives. That’s really what we are talking about.”

Indeed, the Tampa Bay Times study also found that black gunshot victims were more likely than whites to be carrying a weapon when they were killed and were more likely to be committing a crime, such as burglary, at the time of any altercation.

In addition, while blacks make up just 12 percent of the U.S. population, they constitute some 55 percent of its homicide victims, with the majority of those murders committed by other blacks.

Further, black youths have had a high success rate in arguing for justified homicide under Stand Your Ground law in “black-on-black” crimes.

However, there remains significant disparity in the success rate of justified homicide between white defendants and black defendants in white-on-black crimes.

“The bottom line is that it’s really easy for juries to accept that whites had to defend themselves against persons of colour,” said Darren Hutchinson, a law professor and civil rights law expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

This evident racial disparity is now strengthening national calls for investigations into Stand Your Ground laws and their application on the ground.

“[I]f a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario … both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different,” President Barack Obama said last month in unusually personal remarks following the Zimmerman acquittal.

“And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?”

He continued: “And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

Since then, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a government body, has started an investigation into these laws, while the Senate Judiciary Committee has also stated it would hold hearings on Stand Your Ground in September.

The Florida State Legislature will also be taking another look at the effect, benefits and consequences of the law this fall, the first such move it has made. Still, supporters are girding for a fight.

“I don’t expect that the legislature’s going to move one damn comma,” Matt Gaetz, chairperson of the Florida Criminal Justice Subcommittee and a supporter of the law, said recently. “If the members of the committee support changes, they will be proposed, but nobody can count on my vote.”

A homeless man looks from his makeshift playground shelter on Third Street in Detroit, Michigan. Credit: Jeffrey Smith/cc by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

President Barack Obama is vowing to spend his remaining time in office encouraging bipartisan efforts to strengthen the U.S. middle class by ensuring it is open to those from all backgrounds.

“Thanks to the grit and resilience of the American people, we’ve cleared away the rubble from the financial crisis and begun to lay a new foundation for a stronger, more durable economic growth,” the president said in a major address Wednesday. “We are not a people who allow chance of birth to decide life’s winners and losers.”“In the civil rights movement, some blacks would refer to whites as allies, but in this fight for America’s soul and dignity and economic fairness, there are no allies. We are all in this thing.” -- Congressman Keith Ellison

Yet a new analysis is suggesting that a half-century after the apex of the U.S. civil rights movement, relatively little progress has been made in education, poverty and wages.

“The outlook of young people today would be so much different if they knew that when they finished high school or college, they could get a job,” Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy Programme at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, said at a symposium this week.

“For young people of colour in particular, when they face such high levels of unemployment, it increases their changes of getting tangled in the criminal justice system.”

According to a new EPI study, from the 1960s until today, African American unemployment has been 2.0 to 2.5 times the white unemployment rate. In 2012, the black unemployment rate was 14 percent, 2.1 times what it was for whites and higher than the average national unemployment rate of 13.1 percent during the recession.

“We have to go from protest to action to outcome,” Ernest Green, a former assistant secretary of labour, told IPS. “What the [EPI] is doing is important – it’s obvious that in this atmosphere, no one person or organisation can carry the full load.”

Even when the national unemployment rate has been low, the rate for African Americans has remained high, according to the study. In 2000, for instance, when the national unemployment rate was at four percent and the white unemployment rate was 3.1 percent, the unemployment rate for non-Hispanic blacks was 7.6 percent.

The study’s release was timed to coincide with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a touchstone 1963 event that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Washington to urge equal civil and economic rights for African Americans. At the event, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famed “I Have a Dream” speech.

“We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as we should be, and yet we have a racial wealth gap that’s growing,” Clarence Lang, a professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas, said at Monday’s symposium.

“We also have an unemployment rate that is catastrophic – if it characterised the majority of the country, we would declare a national disaster.”

Racial profiling

According to the EPI researchers, the lowest black poverty rate on record was 22.5 percent in 2000, meaning that nearly a quarter of the African American population was still living at or below the poverty line. When the economic downturn began in December 2007, that rate rose to 27.6 percent, while the white poverty rate was only 9.8 percent.

Currently, federal policies aren’t doing enough to stem these figures, the report suggests.

In order to lift a family out of poverty, a full-time worker would have to be paid a minimum wage of 13 dollars an hour, experts have said. Yet the current minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation, is 7.25 dollars per hour.

Education has long been highlighted as one of the top ways to combat the high black unemployment and poverty rates, although the EPI study outlines several problems with this approach. During the 1960s, for instance, more than three-quarters of black children attended majority-black schools, while today almost the exact same proportion attends majority non-white schools.

Segregated schools have long been found to lack equal resources as schools with majority white students, which the EPI suggests violates the U.S. belief in equal opportunity.

According to William Spriggs, the chief economist at AFL-CIO, one of the country’s largest labour unions, education is only one of the solutions to this problem.

He cited the recent U.S. court case in which a neighbourhood watch member shot and killed a black teenager in Florida and was acquitted, arguably largely due to a law allowing the use of deadly force if one feels threatened, as an example of the race culture that  still exists.

“What people need to understand about the [Trayvon] Martin case is what that jury was saying about young black men,” Spriggs said. “Do you really have to ask why young black men are having a hard time getting jobs? In the African American community, yes, education is important, but there is a lot more going on.”

According to Lang, one of the key problems being little discussed in the public debate today is the general notion that a black youth walking around at night is “up to no good”.

“If we want to talk about what the key issue is, we have to talk about [racial profiling],” Lang told IPS. “It affects job prospects, it affects families and, indeed, it affects someone’s ability to walk around minding his or her own business and not being harassed.”

Such profiling, critics say, re-introduces a divisiveness that many saw as being weakened during the March on Washington and related awareness-raising of the 1960s.

“We are at a moment when there are no allies, there is just ‘us’,” Keith Ellison, a member of the U.S. Congress, said Monday. “In the civil rights movement, some blacks would refer to whites as allies, but in this fight for America’s soul and dignity and economic fairness, there are no allies. We are all in this thing.”

The acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has sparked backlash against Stand Your Ground laws. Above, a 2012 protest against Martin's death. Credit: David Shankbone/CC by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

In the aftermath of the recent acquittal of 31-year-old Florida native George Zimmerman, the state’s so-called Stand Your Ground law has come under national scrutiny, as have dozens of other states that have enacted similar legislation.

The criticism will perhaps be led by whatever the U.S. Justice Department chooses to do with the case. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder denounced the law Tuesday in a keynote address at an annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), an esteemed advocacy group.

During his speech, Holder also pledged to open a full investigation into the death of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African-American youth whom Zimmerman, a Latino, fatally shot in February 2012. Over the past two months, Zimmerman’s case has riveted U.S. audiences and sparked a countrywide discussion of the role of race – and racial profiling – in the United States today.

“It is our collective obligation,” Holder said. “We must stand our ground to ensure that our laws reduce violence and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.”"We must..take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent."
-- Eric Holder

Florida’s Stand Your Ground law was passed in 2005 with a unanimous vote in the state senate and a 94-20 vote in the house. Five years later, the rate of so-called justifiable homicide in Florida had tripled. And since 2005, 31 other states have followed Florida’s lead in passing similar “self-defence” laws.

Under the Florida law, a person can use “defensive force” that is intended to cause harm to another person if they feel “reasonably” threatened – say, if someone is breaking into their house or if they are beaten or kidnapped. The law does not apply if the person against whom defensive force is used has a right to be on the property or is a law-enforcement officer.

“A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be, has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force is he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so,” according to the Florida law.

The law also states that if a person is being unreasonably attacked, they have no obligation to retreat. This element has led to increasingly strident criticism from those who worry the law results in escalation, rather than de-escalation, of potentially violent situations.

Such a dynamic appears to have taken place in the ensuing fight between Zimmerman, an armed “neighbourhood watch” volunteer, and Martin in February 2012.

Some suggest the law is a solution looking for a problem and point out that there was no evidence of any such problem prior to the signing of the Stand Your Ground law in Florida.

“It [the law] allows someone to shoot and kill another human being in the fear of great bodily harm. Great bodily harm means a fist fight,” Ladd Everitt, director of communications at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“Even if someone hasn’t sustained any damage, this law allows them to shoot and kill someone based only on a fear.”

Zimmerman’s lawyers did not bring up the law during his trial, but it was included in the instructions to the jury, who acquitted him on Saturday, Jul. 13.

Time to re-examine

“There has always been a legal defence for using deadly force if – and the ‘if’ is important – no safe retreat is available,” Holder noted Tuesday.

The Immunity from Criminal Prosecution clause of the Florida law states that if the person who used defensive force in accordance with the law is granted immunity in court and wins the case, the prosecution is required to pay the defence’s attorney fees, court costs and compensation for any loss of income. Zimmerman did not file for immunity in the criminal court case that ended last week.

“The attorney general fails to understand that self-defence is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right,” Chris W. Cox, the executive director of the National Rifle Association‘s Institute for Legislative Action, the lobby group’s advocacy arm, said in a statement.

“To send a message that legitimate self-defence is to blame is unconscionable, and demonstrates again that this administration will exploit tragedies to push their political agenda.”

Following the 2005 passage of the Stand Your Ground law, NRA operatives and legislators aligned with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and created a piece of model legislation mirroring the Florida law and which could in turn be passed throughout the country. ALEC encouraged and advocated this passage and initially called the legislation one of its successes.

Subsequently, 49 major corporations, including General Motors, General Electric and Coca-Cola, severed ties with the organisation. ALEC has since abandoned its criminal justice task force that promoted the Stand Your Ground law and has disavowed gun bills.

Thirty-one states, including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana, currently have a Stand Your Ground law. Eight states have related bills in the legislature right now or are expected to have legislation introduced soon, including Alaska, Illinois and Massachusetts.

California, Colorado and Washington do not have a bill, but Stand Your Ground actions have been upheld in their courts, making it a de facto law. Only seven states have no such laws or bills.

The Zimmerman trial may have sparked pushback against this legislative trend, however.

President Barack Obama “urges upon all communities to examine what we can do … to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening in the future; and to reduce gun violence in general”, press secretary Jay Carney said during a press briefing at the White House on Tuesday.

The president is also urging communities “to look at our laws and examine whether those laws that we have serve to reduce gun violence or, in some cases, inadvertently make the problem worse”.

Holder sharpened this growing critique by suggesting on Tuesday that such self-defence laws actually undermine public safety.

“Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation’s attention,” he said, “it’s time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defence and sow dangerous conflict in our neighbourhoods.”

The NRA did not return calls for comment.

Nationwide protests, marches and petitions have erupted in the days following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the focus of a widely watched murder trial over possible racial profiling, late on Saturday evening.

Protesters in New York City. Credit: Jere Keys/cc by 2.0

Zimmerman, a 29-year-old Hispanic man and volunteer neighbourhood watchman, shot and killed a black youth named Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, allegedly in self-defence. Zimmerman was subsequently charged with Martin’s murder.

Over the past five weeks, the trial has transfixed much of the U.S. television-viewing public, as commentators have explored what the incident has to say about race relations in the United States today.

After deliberating for more than 15 hours, the jury found Zimmerman not guilty, largely due to a controversial state law known as Stand Your Ground, which authorises the use of “deadly force” if someone is being threatened.

Following the court decision, crowds reportedly gathered in a Los Angeles park and chanted “Trayvon Martin”, while police officers looked on. In Chicago, hundreds more rallied downtown, chanting “No justice, no peace” and “Justice for Trayvon”.

“People have been speaking up and speaking out against this culture of violence and calling for people to be held accountable,” Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, an investigative reporting organisation, told IPS.

“In a civil society, gathering together to be heard is one of the most vital rights.”

Protests of up to several thousand demonstrators also took place in New York City and Boston, among other places.

“It’s outrageous that we have a situation in which a young man like Trayvon can’t walk home without the fear of being accosted by some police wanna-be who is armed and dangerous,” Graves told IPS.

A former advisor to President Barack Obama, Van Jones, tweeted an image showing civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt similar to the one Martin was wearing the night he was shot.

Along with the photo, Jones posted the words “April 4th, 1968 #RipTrayvon Martin”, the date King was shot; the image went viral and was re-tweeted by thousands.

“The worst thing we could do is sit back and accept this and that this is just the law,” Ajamu Dilahunt, a senior outreach coordinator for Black Workers for Justice, an advocacy group, told IPS. “If we don’t do this [protest and march], there will be many more Trayvons.”

Lethal combination

Signed into law in 2005 by then-Florida governor Jeb Bush, the Stand Your Ground legislation allows people to use deadly force to prevent bodily harm or death. The rate of so-called justifiable homicides in Florida tripled after 2005, and now 24 other states also have similar laws on the books.

Yet Saturday’s jury decision does not appear to be the end of the matter for Zimmerman or advocates on either side of the issue. The Center for Media and Democracy launched a petition on Monday asking the Department of Justice to file civil rights charges against Zimmerman, and Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to pursue a federal investigation into the shooting, using evidence provided at the trial.

“We are resolved, as you are, to combat violence involving or directed at young people,” Holder said in Washington Monday, “to prevent future tragedies and to deal with the underlying attitudes, mistaken beliefs and stereotypes that serve as the basis for these too common incidents.”

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have been particularly vocal about their support for the federal prosecution of Zimmerman.

“I am disappointed in the jury’s verdict, and heartbroken for the scores of young black men nationwide for whom this verdict delivers a startling message: Our fight for civil rights is far from over,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, and a senior member of the CBC.

In order to convict Zimmerman of any civil rights violations or hate crimes, the government has to prove to a jury that his actions against Martin were racially motivated. Though Martin’s friends and family say Zimmerman has a history as a racial profiler, Zimmerman’s lawyer says there is no evidence.

According to Graves, civil rights charges are not the only legal option for the Martin family to take.  The family could also pursue a civil case, where the burden of proof is less difficult than at a criminal trial.

“Often times, people do have success pursuing a civil case in the face of not prevailing in a criminal case,” Graves told IPS.

Yet Graves cautioned against pursing a civil case due to the Stand Your Ground law, which states that if the defendant is granted immunity and a win in court, the prosecution is required to pay their legal fees and losses. Zimmerman did not seek immunity in the criminal trial.

“Everyone is entitled to their day in court and shouldn’t be penalised for doing that,” Graves says. “[The Stand Your Ground law] creates huge incentives to not pursue justice for yourself. It imposes a penalty on people whose loved ones have been killed. It’s just wrong.”

Despite losing in court, an attorney for Martin’s parents said the experience will have a lasting impact on the United States, and compared Martin to Emmett Till, a black boy who was murdered in Mississippi after allegedly flirting with a white woman. Till became one of the more prominent martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement.

“Whenever there is injustice like this and someone loses their life, and there is a feeling or fear that it was based in part because of race, those types of parallels are quite natural,” Graves says.

She adds that such tragedies will happen again, due to the type of “vigilante culture” that laws such as the Stand Your Ground law have created.

“There are a lot more people who are armed and dangerous,” she says. “Combined with laws that say you don’t have the back down, that’s a very lethal combination.”

According to Dilahunt, the way to prevent future tragedies is to change the mindset of the country.

“The mindset of George Zimmerman that is shared by so many others in the country is that black youths ought to be seen as ‘others’, that they are criminals and that they should be profiled,” Dilahunt told IPS. “This happened over a long period of time and is widespread. We have to deal with that.”

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Roberto Zurbano (white shirt) next to Gisela Morales, during a meeting of ARAC activists with journalists. Credit: Patricia Grogg/IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

Jokes, songs, crude gestures and epithets that degrade people of African descent are still common in Cuba, despite the fact that the constitution prohibits discrimination based on skin colour, and in spite of more recent political measures, activists say.

According to Esther Ruiz, a member of the executive committee of the Regional Articulation of African Descendants from Latin America and the Caribbean (ARAC), these types of expressions of racism occur every day in neighbourhoods, workplaces and schools.

“These and other discriminatory expressions need to be identified and fought,” she told IPS.

Vigilance against these problems is one of the tasks that ARAC has taken on, as part of a network that Cuba joined shortly before the start this year of the International Decade for People of African Descent, proclaimed by the United Nations.

One of ARAC’s goals is to draw up strategies that will contribute to diminishing racism in the country.

“This is a task for today that was not solved yesterday, and postponing it until tomorrow could be too late. Hence the urgency that we all work together towards this goal,” Ruiz said.

Researcher and writer Daysi Rubiera said ARAC emerged during a crucial moment in Cuba. “Civil society is less fragile and people are trying to address their concerns, not just about the present, but also about the future of our country,” she told IPS.

It would be a “great leap forward” to join forces and create racial awareness – the work that has been done for years by groups like Afrocubanas, to which she belongs, and the Cofradía de la Negritud.

Another member of ARAC’s executive committee, Aries Morales, said that inequality and discrimination are universal. She said she believes Cuba is prepared to debate and deal with its contradictions head-on, with an eye toward the future. “That has always been my dream, and I have worked for it for years,” she told IPS.

The Cuban chapter of ARAC was created in September 2012, during a meeting in Havana attended by 30 community leaders and activists from the anti-racism and anti-discrimination movement in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

During that meeting, Zuleica Romay, president of the Cuban Book Institute, said that ARAC was independent of any institution, but would have the support of various government agencies.

“ARAC wants to address many situations that are subjective but become obstacles as objective as a wall,” she said.

This new instrument against racial discrimination is an organisation “under construction,” and has a collective leadership, according to the network’s coordinator, Gisela Morales. “We have invited everybody to participate — intellectuals, neighbourhood activists, homemakers, and groups that are already involved in these problems. It is an inclusive and plural initiative,” she said.

She added that the idea is for people to join in from their workplace.

“If they work in the educational system, then people should try to observe how study plans are carried out; if they are in the press, they should be attentive to how the issue is addressed in the media. Neighbourhood leaders can do very important work in their communities,” she noted.

For the near future, the network’s agenda includes concrete actions, such as channelling a dialogue with institutions when concrete instances of discrimination are reported; holding training workshops; and creating alliances among different initiatives that address the race issue.

This is a social problem that “we must make more visible, because there are people who are ignorant of or refuse to recognise these problems,” Morales said.

Researchers such as Esteban Morales say that more than 60 percent of the Cuban population of 11.2 million is non-white, including blacks and mixed-race persons. That proportion is much higher than what was found by the 2002 census, according to which 10 percent of the island’s inhabitants view themselves as black, and just under 25 percent as “mulatto” or mixed-race.

Morales told IPS in 2010 that skin colour was a variable in social differences, because whites came to the island of their own free will, as colonisers, while “blacks were brought forcibly and made into slaves.” In his opinion, “those are different starting points that cannot be forgotten or ignored, and they carry weight even today.”

A sign of the progress that has been made can be seen in the current Council of State, the highest representative of the Cuban state, where 39 percent of the members are now black or mixed-race.

According to essayist Roberto Zurbano, one of the ARAC Political Committee’s four members, a number of challenges remain for carrying out the actions proposed. The biggest is understanding the process of “updating the socialist model” in which Cuba is immersed, he said.

He said the economic reforms being carried out address a number of problems related to social justice and quality of life.

And, he added, there are reforms that have to do with bringing visibility to questions that have been less widely discussed in Cuban society, and that are emerging as conflicts that are still unresolved, such as racial discrimination, Zurbano said.

“I think it is a big challenge to organise ARAC and make it a space that is capable of the integration that we still don’t have, a space capable of debate that we don’t have or that is insufficient, because all of those courses, academic spaces and publications are not enough. It needs to be addressed at all levels of society,” he commented.

An article by Zurbano on racism in Cuba was published in the New York Times on Mar. 23. He was subsequently removed from his post as editorial director of Casa de las Américas, where he continued to work as a researcher, however. His article triggered a heated debate in Cuba that showed what a touchy subject racism is at both the social and political levels.

On that occasion, ARAC issued a statement backing the “free expression of ideas by all of its activists” and opposing “obstructive or repressive institutional or personal measures or procedures against anyone” expressing their own personal opinion in public debates.

During its national conference in 2012, the ruling Communist Party of Cuba established, as one of its objectives, “confronting discriminatory prejudice and conduct based on skin colour, gender, religious belief, sexual orientation, territorial origin, or others that are contrary to the constitution and its laws, do harm to national unity, and limit the exercise of people’s rights.”