For those of you who own Toyota vehicles, most specifically the Toyota Camry, Toyota Prius, 2007-10 model year Camry, 2005-10 Avalon, 2004-09 Prius, 2005-10 Toyota Tacoma, 2007-10 Toyota Tundra, 2007-10 Lexus ES350 and the 2006-10 Lexus IS 250/350, the following article addresses the acceleration of gas pedals where the occurrences of sudden acceleration or the pedal becoming stuck in the floor mat has led to serious injuries and some fatalities.

To address any concerns you have about your vehicle, contact Toyota at the following websites:

• Toyota Motor Corp., and here.
• Lexus

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Dealers To Temporarily Shorten Gas Pedals Starting In January

POSTED: 6:00 am EST November 25, 2009
UPDATED: 6:35 am EST November 25, 2009

SHANIYA DAVIS, 5-YEAR-OLD  WHO HAD BEEN MISSING

 

November 17, 2009 – FAYETTEVILLE — Police in Fayetteville have confirmed that the body searchers found in rural Lee County Monday afternoon is that of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis.

Although police called off the search for the missing Davis after Monday’s discovery, they were slow to confirm that the body was hers.

Several media outlets reported Monday night that police confirmed the body belonged to Davis, although police officials adamantly denied until around 1:50 p.m. today that identification had been made.

A brief press release from the Fayetteville Police Department reads “at this time the Medical Examiner’s office has confirmed the identity of the body found to be that of 5-year old Shaniya Davis. Official cause of death is still undetermined at this hour.”

The press release also indicated that a press conference set for 4:30 p.m. today had been rescheduled until 10 a.m. tomorrow.

The conference has been rescheduled “due to new information received in the investigation,” the press release reads.

Rescue worker describes discovery

A dog trainer who was present when the body now identified as 5-year-old Shaniya Davis was found along a wooded road in North Carolina says searchers initially overlooked the area because they saw only deer carcasses in trash bags.

But Jeff Riccio of Tarheel Cainine Training Inc. said Tuesday his team returned to the area after getting information that the body of Shaniya Davis might be near deer carcasses. The searchers then found the body Monday afternoon underneath kudzu along a rural highway southeast of Sanford.

The child’s mother has been charged with human trafficking and felony child abuse, accused of selling her daughter into sex slavery. Police also charged Mario McNeill with kidnapping after he was captured on a hotel’s surveillance video with Shaniya.

The crime

The case came to Lee County after security footage from the Comfort Suites in Sanford showed Mario McNeill of Fayetteville with Shaniya Davis around 6 a.m. on Nov. 10.

The body was found in the woods off Walker Road near N.C. 87 in the southern portion of the county.

“We’ll put information together as far as charging someone (with murder) if the body is identified as Shaniya,” said Theresa Chance with the Fayetteville Police Department.

The search for Shaniya, which included more than 250 law enforcement officers, fire fighters and search and rescure workers from multiple agencies in the area, stopped after the body’s discovery.

Chance said authorities chose the search area based on “solid information” obtained during the course of the investigation. She confirmed that police “had information that a body may have been dumped” in the area. During their search, crews came upon many deer carcasses and even wild dogs. Recent rains also hindered the search.

Chance repeatedly used the word “exhume” in reference to the process of identifying the body. When pressed by reporters, she wouldn’t say whether the body appeared to have been buried.

“Just keep in mind that we’ve just had two days of heavy rain,” she said and declined to comment on a cause of death or the condition of the body.

Authorities said McNeill admitted taking the girl, though his attorney said he will plead not guilty. Although the security footage from the Comfort Suites on Bragg Street in Sanford showed McNeill with the little girl, Chance said the hotel offered no further clues about the case.

“The tapes have been turned over since then,” she said. “That footage was taken Tuesday, and we weren’t made aware of it until Wednesday.”

Davis reported Shaniya missing on Nov. 10. Authorities first arrested a man named Clarence Coe — reportedly Antoinette Davis’ boyfriend — but charges against him were dropped a day later when investigators tracked down McNeill after receiving a tip from a hotel employee.

THE SEARCH

More than 250 searchers combed more than a square mile of soggy, wooded terrain for nearly two days before the discovery Monday.

After the body was found, a solemn group of searchers met quietly at a nearby fire station to ensure that all volunteers were accounted for.

“We were hoping that someone could carry her home,” said Syd Severe, 42, who came from Raleigh to help with the search. “It’s just sick.”

A cluster of emergency vehicles and law enforcement personnel gathered where the body was found. Authorities blocked access to the road, a rural area popular with hunters that is less than a mile from a large lakeside community.

“I still feel kind of sick to my stomach,” said Angela Jackson, 27, from Sanford, who has a two-month-old daughter but searched for consecutive days.

Particularly disturbing were the accusations lodged against Shaniya’s mother. Police charged Davis with human trafficking and felony child abuse, saying Shaniya was offered for prostitution.

“We’ve got a lot of people out at the scene right now that are torn up,” Chance said Monday. “Detectives have been running off adrenaline to find this little girl and to bring her home alive. You have a lot of people in shock right now.”

Trafficking charges

Antoinette Davis, the mother of Shaniya Davis, was calm and quiet during a five-minute court appearance in Fayetteville on Monday.

Antoinette Davis provided one-word answers to the judge’s questions and held her hands in front of her, without handcuffs. She requested a court-appointed attorney and did not enter a plea.

The investigation into the disappearance of Shaniya Davis yielded the arrest of the mother and two other men, though one man was later released.

Police charged Antoinette Davis with human trafficking and felony child abuse, saying Shaniya was offered for prostitution.

Her sister, Brenda Davis, 20, said outside of the courthouse that she does not believe the charges.

“I don’t believe she could hurt her children,” said Brenda Davis, who was able to speak to her sister at the jail Sunday.

Authorities also charged Mario Andrette McNeill, 29, with kidnapping after they said surveillance footage from the Comfort Suites hotel in Sanford showed him carrying Shaniya there. Authorities said McNeill admitted taking the girl, though his attorney said he will plead not guilty.

Davis reported Shaniya missing Tuesday. Authorities first arrested a man named Clarence Coe, but charges against him were dropped a day later when investigators tracked down McNeill after receiving a tip from a hotel employee.

Shaniya’s father, Bradley Lockhart, said he raised his daughter for several years but last month decided to let her stay with her mother. He had pleaded for her safe return.

Lockhart told The Associated Press on Saturday that he and Davis never argued about him raising Shaniya, and Cumberland County courts had no record of a custody dispute. He described his relationship with Davis as a “one-night stand” and said he did not know McNeill.

Davis struggled financially over the years, but she recently obtained a job and her own place, so Lockhart said he decided to give her a chance to raise their daughter.

“I should’ve never let her go over there,” he said Saturday night.

Before Shaniya’s body was found, he said on CBS’s “The Early Show” Monday that he remained hopeful someone would bring his daughter somewhere safe, such as a police station or hospital.

“They can drop her off at Walmart, I don’t care,” he said.

A friend at Lockhart’s home Monday afternoon said Lockhart did not want to speak with reporters.

Gordon Anderson, Jonathan Owens, Caitlin Mullen and The Associated Press contributed to this report

Shaniya Davis

 Visit Guest Book

SOURCE

A little, innocent child, who never had a chance to live. A little growing child who will never be able to run, play, laugh, cry, or feel the Sun on her face again. A little child who will never know what it means to fail, and to succeed.

A little innocent beautiful child who now rests in the arms of Christ, the Saviour who loves all children, who said:  “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for to such belongth the Kingdom of God”.

Rest in peace little one.

Rest in peace.

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BUCKY WILLIAMS, NEGRO LEAGUES PLAYER

PENN HILLS, Pa. (AP) — Wallace Williams, known as Bucky, a retired steelworker who played for both of the Pittsburgh-area’s Negro leagues baseball teams, died Monday at his home in this suburb of Pittsburgh. He was 102.

Bucky Williams in 2006

Williams was born on Dec. 15, 1906, in Baltimore, and his family moved to Pittsburgh when he was a baby.

He began playing for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1928, played briefly with their rival Homestead Grays in 1936, then returned to the Crawfords until they folded in 1939.

After leaving the Negro leagues, Williams continued to play for sandlot and other adult teams, including the Pittsburgh Monarchs and a team sponsored by the Edgar Thompson Steel Works, where he worked as a ladle liner before retiring in 1971.

His wife, the former Marjorie Carey, died in 1977. Survivors include his son, David, and a sister, Veronica Ford.

SOURCE

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EDWARD WOODWARD, STAR OF SPY SERIES

Edward Woodward, a British actor with a long résumé in television and theater who was best known in the United States as the star of “The Equalizer,” a dramatic series about an ex-spy turned righteous vigilante in New York City, died on Monday in Truro, Cornwall, England. He was 79 and lived in London and Cornwall.

November 17, 2009

CBS

Edward Woodward in ‘The Equalizer” in the mid-1980s.

The cause was pneumonia, said Janet Glass, Mr. Woodward’s agent for more than 30 years. Mr. Woodward had heart problems and other ailments, she said.

Mr. Woodward’s career began in 1946, when he first appeared onstage, and lasted for more than half a century. He was a versatile actor with an accomplished tenor singing voice who played a number of Shakespearean roles on the English stage; starred in the Broadway musical “High Spirits,” which was based on the Nöel Coward play “Blithe Spirit” and directed by Coward himself; recorded several albums as a singer and reciter of poetry; and played leading roles in films as various as the occult thriller “The Wicker Man” (1973) and the historical courtroom drama from Australia “Breaker Morant” (1980).

But his enduring fame, both in England and in the United States, was as a television actor who specialized in disgruntled secret agents. From 1967 to 1972, he played the title role in “Callan,” a noir British series (though its last seasons were filmed in color) about David Callan, a counterintelligence agent often called on for his skills as an assassin.

Callan, urbane and capable of charm but embittered and prone to anger, was a kind of anti-James Bond, presenting the spy’s life as glamourless and nearly mundane. Callan became a popular cult figure in England, and when the show was canceled graffiti peppered the walls in the working-class East End of London declaring, “Callan Lives!” and, “Bring Back Callan.”

From 1985 to 1989, Mr. Woodward played Robert McCall, the title character in “The Equalizer,” a former American agent for a never-named intelligence agency who has set up shop in New York to right the injustices done to people whom the police cannot or will not help. McCall was a veritable reprise of Callan, but now in middle age, a man who has seen how the powerless are exploited by the powerful and the innocent by the conniving and who can’t take it any more without doing something about it.

Well-dressed, unthreatening in appearance behind his professorial glasses, McCall was nonetheless a man with a volatile temper and a willingness to pull the trigger. He found his clients with classified ads: “Got a problem? Odds against you? Call the Equalizer.”

Edward Albert Arthur Woodward was born to working class parents in Croydon, Surrey, south of London, on June 1, 1930. As a teenager he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After his first stage appearance, in 1946, he had his London debut in 1954. In 1962, he appeared in “Rattle of a Simple Man,” a comedy by Charles Dyer in which he played an effeminate, sexually inhibited man who spends an evening with a prostitute. The show was a hit; when it moved to Broadway the following year, it wasn’t so well-received, but Mr. Woodward was.

“Mr. Woodward’s Percy is all but perfect,” Howard Taubman, the reviewer for The New York Times, wrote, adding: “He seems so truly the troubled, fearful middle-aged mother’s boy from Manchester that one forgets he is an actor. He speaks Mr. Dyer’s lines as if he had just invented them, and even the way he moves and wears his dull, respectable clothes are expressions of character.”

Coward evidently agreed, because after seeing Mr. Woodward in the role, he cast him as Charles Condomine, the debonair man frazzled by a visit from the ghost of his first wife (Tammy Grimes), in “High Spirits,” a musical that ran for almost a year and also starred Beatrice Lillie.

Mr. Woodward’s first marriage, to the actress Venetia Barrett, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Michele Dotrice, a daughter of the actor Roy Dotrice; three children with Ms. Barrett, Tim, Peter and Sarah; a daughter, Emily, with Ms. Dotrice; and several grandchildren. All his children are actors.

SOURCE

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PAUL WENDKOS, DIRECTOR OF ‘GIDGET’

Paul Wendkos, a movie and television director best known for the frothy surfer film “Gidget,” but whose other productions ranged from thrillers to historical dramas, died Nov. 12 at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 84.

November 22, 2009

C. Christie Craig, via Associated Press

Paul Wendkos in 1957.

The cause was complications of a stroke, said his wife, Lin Bolen Wendkos.

Mr. Wendkos was assigned to direct “Gidget” in 1958, a year after Harry Cohn, the president of Columbia Pictures, signed him to a contract. The film starred Sandra Dee, then 17, as the tomboyish Francie Lawrence, who doesn’t understand why her girlfriends are so boy-crazy. Francie’s only interest in the guys at the beach is having them teach her how to surf. But love eventually snares her, and she’s soon drinking beer with the Big Kahuna (Cliff Robertson) just to make Moondoggie (James Darren) jealous.

Released in 1959, the movie and its sequel, “Gidget Goes Hawaiian,” also directed by Mr. Wendkos, were hits and helped popularize a surfing culture that began spreading to the mainland.

Mr. Wendkos’s first feature film, “The Burglar,” starring Jayne Mansfield, then a little-known actress, had brought him to Mr. Cohn’s attention. Mr. Wendkos had raised the money for the movie, a low-budget thriller whose noirish style foreshadowed many of his later films. Ms. Mansfield played the girlfriend of the leader of a gang that steals a precious necklace and who then goes on the lam.

Among his more than 100 productions, Mr. Wendkos directed television movies about an amphetamine addict and an alcoholic who struggle for love (“A Cry for Love,” 1980); a man tortured by multiple personalities (“The Five of Me,” 1981); and a man who travels the country and marries 82 women (“Scorned and Swindled,” 1984).

Reviewing “Scorned and Swindled” in The New York Times, John J. O’Connor wrote, “Paul Wendkos directs with an unerring ability to make the decidedly bizarre seem almost comfortably commonplace.”

The struggle against slavery and discrimination was another theme for Mr. Wendkos. In 1978, he directed the mini-series “A Woman Called Moses,” starring Cicely Tyson as the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who helped organize the Underground Railroad. In 1989, he directed “Cross of Fire,” about the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s.

Besides the “Gidget” movies, Mr. Wendkos’s big-screen films include “Guns of the Magnificent Seven” (1969), a sequel to the 1960 western “The Magnificent Seven,” and “The Mephisto Waltz” (1971), about a classical pianist whose soul is assumed by another pianist.

Abraham Paul Wendkos was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 20, 1925, to Simon and Judith Wendkos. After serving in the Navy in World War II, he graduated from Columbia University and studied film at the New School for Social Research (now the New School).

Mr. Wendkos’s first wife, the former Ruth Burnat, died in 1978. Besides his wife, Lin Bolen Wendkos, he is survived by his son, Jordan, of Calabasas, Calif.; and a granddaughter.

One of the productions her husband was most proud of, Ms. Bolen Wendkos said, was “Right to Die,” a 1987 television movie with Raquel Welch as a strong-willed woman who is stricken with Lou Gehrig’s disease and who must decide whether to go off life support.

“Here is a film that deals candidly and indeed toughly with a profoundly serious issue,” Mr. O’Connor wrote in his review, adding, “There is little pussyfooting and no phony uplift.”

SOURCE

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ROBERT ENKE, GOALKEEPER OF THE HANNOVER 96 SOCCER CLUB

Robert Enke was a leading candidate for the German World Cup team but feared his depression would break up his family.

November 12, 2009

Gero Breloer/Associated Press

Hundreds of mourners in Germany attended a memorial for goalkeeper Robert Enke.

He was the club’s goalkeeper, its captain, its most likely player to make Germany’s World Cup team next year. On Tuesday evening, Enke was hit and killed by a train at a level crossing near his home.

Almost at once, the police talked of suicide, and his widow, Teresa, who had to identify the body at the scene, said at a news conference Wednesday that Enke suffered from a depression he feared could result in their family being broken up.

Germany was in shock. The mood from Chancellor Angela Merkel down was of silent waiting. Enke, 32, had an adopted 8-month-old daughter, Leila, and lived on a farm where he and his wife, both animal rights campaigners, kept many pets.

The German national squad, in Bonn preparing for a friendly match against Chile on Saturday, canceled training Wednesday. The match was also canceled.

Enke could have been with the team but for a recent intestinal infection, and Oliver Bierhoff, the national squad manager, summed it up, “We are too shocked to find words.”

Enke’s car, a Mercedes, was found near the crossing, unlocked and with his wallet on the passenger seat. The two train drivers saw a man on the track and applied the brakes, but at 160 kilometers an hour, or 100 miles an hour, it was too late to prevent the death.

The police said there was a suicide note, and German newspapers ran with two lines of commentary. One was that Enke, a quiet and reserved individual, was a troubled man ever since his biological daughter, Lara, died at the age of 2 in September 2006. She had a rare heart malformation. The other was the loneliness, the uncertainty, of a goalie’s situation.

On Wednesday afternoon, Teresa Enke said at a news conference attended by her husband’s psychologist that he was first treated in 2003. “When he was acutely depressive, he lacked motivation and hope,” she said. “I tried to be there for him. I said football is not everything, there are many beautiful things in life, it is not hopeless.”

The psychologist, Dr. Valentin Markser, said Enke had a fear of failure.

Enke had chosen as a boy to play in the most exposed position, the last line of defense, and the one first blamed when things go wrong. Born in Jena, in East Germany, he joined SV Jena Pharm in 1985, when he was 8.

He moved to Carl Zeiss Jena the next year and had been moving on ever since.

There were three years at Borussia Mönchengladbach, three years in Portugal with Benfica, a squad that went through three coaching changes while he was there and had financial difficulties that resulted in players sometimes being paid late.

Enke’s counseling began when he moved to Barcelona. He was the eternal understudy there, the rising German keeper given just three opportunities with the first team. Barcelona thought highly of him, but lent him to Fenerbache of Istanbul, then to Tenerife. His Turkish misadventure lasted just one match, a loss after which Fenerbache fans bombarded him with firecrackers and missiles in their anger at losing.

Finally, he found relative security at Hannover, where he stayed for five years despite offers to move to more glamorous clubs. He was the team captain, chosen in part by his fellow players. When Jens Lehmann retired from Germany’s national team after Euro 2008, Enke was expected to be entrusted with the jersey.

It was not certain. In goalkeeping, more than any other position, you are only as good as your last mistake. Trust is between the coach and the last man standing, and that presupposes that the goalie has the style, the personality and the authority that defenders in front of him also like and trust.

Enke was being pressed by René Adler, the 24-year-old Leipzig-born goalkeeper. Enke had more experience, Adler has youth, greater height and reach, and the advantage of playing for Bayer Leverkusen, which currently leads Germany’s Bundesliga.

Joachim Löw, the coach, was thought to favor Enke for the 2010 World Cup. But of course no trainer would make such a promise to one goalie, because it would be too great a disincentive to the others.

It seems the professional uncertainty fed Enke’s anxiety. Illness and injury could not have helped. A year ago, shortly after Lehmann left the national squad, Enke lost two months to a broken bone in his hand.

In his final game for the German national team in August, he had a goalkeeper’s dream score, shutting out Azerbaijan. Then he contracted an intestinal virus that cost him another nine weeks. He had just returned to Hannover’s lineup.

The loneliness of a player sidelined for months, the exclusion from the team training and comradeship, are all part of the professional experience.

As fans laid wreaths and lighted candles at the gates of the stadium, Teresa Enke faced the news media there. She said: “He was scared of losing Leila if his depression came out. Now it is coming out anyway. We thought we could do everything with love, but you can’t always do it.”

And so along with his widow, a club and the national team also mourn for a man who took his own life near the peak of his sporting career

SOURCE

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ELISABETH SODERSTROM, REVERED SWEDISH SOPRANO

November 22, 2009

Scanpix, via European Pressphoto Agency

Elisabeth Soderstrom as Madame Butterfly in 1953.

Her death came after several years of complications from a stroke, said the Swedish mezzo-soprano Kerstin Meyer, her friend and colleague, speaking by phone from Stockholm. Ms. Soderstrom was 82.

While Ms. Soderstrom was admired by opera lovers around the world, notably in Sweden and England, where she performed most often, within the field she was revered. With her radiant, creamy voice, thorough musicianship and keen dramatic instincts, she was a model for singers.

In roles like the Countess in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” the Marschallin in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and more, she combined insightful acting with nuanced singing and a lovely stage presence to create alluring and memorable performances. An element of Scandinavian reserve in her dramatic and vocal artistry enhanced her work, lending an elusive quality to her portrayals.

Reviewing a song recital that Ms. Soderstrom gave at the Frick Collection in New York in 1975, the New Yorker critic Andrew Porter perceptively summed up her artistry. Her “quick musical intelligence, her vivid and engaging temperament, and a protean voice not exceptionally powerful but well able to compass soubrette mirth and tragic passion have brought her triumphs in a wide variety of roles,” Mr. Porter wrote.

Anna Elisabeth Soderstrom, born in Stockholm on May 7, 1927, was the daughter of a Swedish naval captain and a Russian mother. Trained at the Royal Academy of Music and Opera School in Stockholm, she made her debut as Mozart’s Bastienne when she was just 20 at the Drottningholm Court Theater, on the outskirts of the city, a company she would direct in the mid-1990s.

Shortly after her debut, she joined the Swedish Royal Opera. She remained a member of that company until her retirement. In her early years she focused on soubrette roles, including Mozart heroines. Soon she was branching out dramatically. Her debut at the prestigious Glyndebourne Festival in England came in 1957 as the Composer in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” and for years she remained a favorite with the festival. Among Strauss singers, she was one of the few to have sung all three lead roles in “Der Rosenkavalier,” as the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie.

A milestone in her career came in the 1969-70 season with the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London, when she sang Mélisande in an acclaimed production of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” conducted by Pierre Boulez, subsequently recorded. That Sony Classical recording, with George Shirley as Pelléas, is considered by many to be definitive.

Another series of landmark performances and recordings involved the Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, an informed champion of the Janacek operas. Ms. Soderstrom became Mr. Mackerras’s soprano of choice for his Decca label recordings of complete Janacek operas, including “Jenufa” and “Katya Kabanova,” with Ms. Soderstrom singing the title roles, and “The Makropulos Case,” a mysterious, haunting work in which Ms. Soderstrom portrayed, unforgettably, the 300-year-old Emilia Marty.

Among the many contemporary roles she sang were Elisabeth Zimmer in Hans Werner Henze’s “Elegy for Young Lovers” and Juliana Bordereau in Dominick Argento’s “Aspern Papers” for the premiere production in Dallas in 1988. She was also an active song recitalist.

Throughout her career, Ms. Soderstrom relied on the support of her husband, Sverker Olow, a retired Swedish naval officer, whom she married in 1950. Mr. Olow survives her, along with three sons, Malcolm, Peter and Jens Olow, and several grandchildren.

Ms. Soderstrom made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1959 as Susanna in Mozart’s “Figaro.” For the next five years, she made regular appearances at the Met, but then drifted mostly to Europe, returning in the 1980s for performances as the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier” and the Countess in “Figaro.”

For her last Met performances, she came out of retirement, essentially, to sing the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades,” a dramatically complex and crucial role with scant vocal demands. She received an enormous ovation.

SOURCE

Many people by now are very familiar with the movie “Precious-Based on the Novel “Push”, by Sapphire. But, how many of you have heard of the movie “American Violet”? Not many, I would surmise.

“American Violet” involves the story of a single Black American mother, Regina Kelly, who struggles against a racist/sexist system to clear her name after being wrongly accused and arrested for dealing drugs in an impoverished town in Texas. It is base on a “true story” a film based on the racially charged drug war scandal that rocked the town of Hearne, Texas, nine years ago, and the film explores the devastating impact of America’s “war on drugs”. Directed by Tim Disney and written by Bill Haney, the film stars Alfre Woodard, Will Patton, Tim Blake Nelson, Charles Dutton, and Nicole Beharie as Regina Kelly. It is part of a long, sad, and sorry string of incidents in the lives of the mostly Black citizens who not able to afford high-powered legal defense, threatened with long prison sentences, and excessive bail, when wrongly accused of selling drugs. This story is similar to the well-known incident of Tulia, Texas, where many poor residents, mostly Black, some Latinos, and a few Whites who were dating Blacks, were accused of selling drugs to a corrupt racist White cop, Tom Coleman).

Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town by Nate Blakeslee (Paperback – Sep 30, 2006)

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But, I digress.

“American Violet”, shows how unequal under the law people are where it concerns drugs. How the gestapo, police state storm-trooper mentality seeks the destruction of the Black community and how not only the local police, but the federal government’s involvement in the so-called drug war has escalated in the massive concentration-type arrests of Black citizens who are accused of selling drugs.

The so-called war on drugs is unconstitutional. It is racist. It seeks to destroy the very people who do not bring drugs into this country. It paints a face of black on drugs when in essence, and truth, the face of drugs is anything but black:  those who have the big money, boats, planes, money laundering, drug kingpins, and international drug cartel connections to mule-traffic drugs into America.

When a weak, cowardly and sniveling Democratic-backed congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act  back in 1986, they did not realize the maelstrom they set into action, especially with the dichotomy shown between powder cocaine and crack cocaine and drug sentencing  for prison time. Though both drugs differ in looks and composition, they are still drugs which give a feeling of euphoria to the users. But, with the disparate and draconian sentencing that occurs with each drug (crack cocaine users/sellers given stiffer and stronger prison sentencing than powder cocaine users/sellers), the use of federal money and sensational headlines in newspapers across the country, to prosecutors seeking the highest sentence that can be obtained, the so-called war on drugs has let loose a militaristic attack on poor Black communities, to support the drug task forces that storm into and occupy poor Black neighborhoods as if they are some foreign country rife for occupation and decimation.

Power-and-vote-hungry district attorneys have literally taken over the court system with their demagogue law-and-order mantra that poor Black people are the demons to fear where drugs are concerned, and when people like Regina are targeted, they become just one more notch in the scalp belts of district attorneys. The brow-beating of rail-roaded Blacks into copping a plea of guilt to avoid a long prison term, fuels the DA’s desire to obtain more federal monies to create drug task-force units that are funded by the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program (which was refunded under President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan), with the money disbursed based on the number of drug busts and people accused, as opposed to the validity and legal evidence obtained to detain and hold the accused citizens in these bogus drug busts. The more people arrested, the more grants/funding the counties/states receive. Therefore, the stomping on Black citizens is regarded as collateral damage in the war on drugs———–no matter who is destroyed by it. Even a mother with children. Not to mention, that the DA/drug task forces, feel that they will not be challenged on their ruthless actions; the belief that everyone so charged will buckle under their bullying tactics. That no one will speak out against them.

But Regina surprised her accusers and tormentors.

She fought back.

In the ACLU team-led case against the government, Regina and the 16 people who were accused  of drug traffiking went to court, with Regina agreeing to be the lead plaintiff in the case. The so-called drug task force was shown up for what it was:  attackers who cared nothing for the law on which they trampled (putting the Black residents on lockdown, searching and detaining innocent residents, often in handcuffs for lengthy periods of time and  without warrant or cause), but, they also cared nothing for the lives and humanity of the Hearne, Texas Black citizens.

Regina Kelly, and Erma Faye Stewart  (another victim in the Hearn, Tx. case), know what it is like to accused, and arrested, unjustly, as this PBS/Frontline documentary shows.

Facts have long been in need of being faced. . . .

. . . .the so-called “War on Drugs” is a dismal failure, and moreso because of its targeting the Black community.

These race-based sweeps are a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment and the Ninth Amendment.

In fact, some counties are leaving the so-called drug task forces (mainly because their tactics have embroiled them in controversy and tragedy):

“Travis County Leaving Anti-Drug Task Force”

The American Civil Liberties Union has called upon Congress to reform the Department of Justice Grant Program that subsidizes these race-based drug raids.

(See also:

“Congess Scrutinizes the Use of Informants in Drug Law Enforcement Following Accidental Shooting of 92-Year-Old Woman”

“ACLU Coalition Letter to House Judiciary Leadership Urging Them Not to Reauthorize the Bryne Justice Assistance Grant”

If you are able, view “American Violet”.

American violence has fueled the so-called war on drugs, and many innocent Black people continue to be the casualties of war in the pathway of this mindless, senseless juggernaut of inhumanity.

Founded in 1989, by panel member Karen Evans, the Black Women Playwright’s Group seeks to address the issues that Black women playwrights face in an overwhelmingly White and male-dominated industry. 

Karen L.B. Evans is President and Founder of the Black Women Playwrights’ Group. She has received Individual Fellowships in Playwriting from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. She was a Helen Hayes nominee for “Outstanding New Play” as well as a Sundance Institute finalist. Karen participated in the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights’ Conference and is a recipient of the John F. Kennedy Center.

At the close of a seminar at the Arena Stage that focused on the African American woman playwright, Karen Evans used her concluding remarks to talk about the loneliness of being Black and female in this profession and asked for the names and addresses of women in the audience who were playwrights.  She held a meeting at her home the following month and became BWPG’s president and founder. Since then the group has met regularly on a monthly basis to provide professional support to its members. Incorporated in 1993, BWPG held its first retreat in 1999 and received 501 (c)3 status in 1999.

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The Black Women Playwrights’ Group (BWPG) is a service and advocacy group for African American playwrights writing for the professional theater. The mission of BWPG is to support and promote the work of our members as well as advocate on critical issues within the theater world. Many of our members come to us after being misunderstood or ignored in larger white, and sometimes male-dominated, writing groups. There is an established need among regional theaters for new artists to explore the African American experience, and BWPG is a conduit between African American women playwrights and theaters, ensuring that the voices heard on the American stage are rich and diverse.

MEMBER SERVICES INCLUDE:

• Monthly writing workshops
• Year round networking opportunities with directors, producers, designers and actors
• Encouraging, fun and professional atmosphere

ESTABLISHED WRITERS AND EMERGING ARTISTS WELCOME!

Founded in 1997 by award winning actress Terri J. Vaughn, who is a product of one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most notorious inner city neighborhoods, the Take Wings Foundation encourages young girls to “take wings and soar” in giving back to their community, by specifically address the needs of the young women living in Hunters Point and similar communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation encourages personal growth and development, and provides a series of workshops geared towards developing positive self esteem. The Foundation also provides a variety of activities for young adult women that give them the opportunity to interact with positive role models, receive academic scholarships, and participate in community service projects.

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VISION

 
Take Wings Foundation envisions a productive community of positive, educated, professional and confident young people who are serving their communities by being role models for future generations.

CORE SERVICES

Scholarships

Take Wings Foundation provides scholarships to assist graduating high school seniors in furthering their formal education and to provide all participants the opportunity to attend leadership programs.

Community Service

Take Wings Foundation requires all participants to complete 40 hours of community service annually. The purpose is to provide the girls the opportunity to serve their community and to build self-esteem through knowing their participation helps to make a difference in the lives of others.

Take Wings Foundation provides life skills training that is comprised of various workshops, group and one-to-one activities that allows girls to experience and learn through (but not limited to) sessions on etiquette, health awareness, conflict resolution, financial literacy, personal leadership and decision making.

Images of Black Women showcases the skills, talents, creativity and of many Black women in the film industry, whether in front of the camera, or behind it. The site celebrates and promotes women of African-descent in cinema, thereby increasing the visibility, and acknowledgement of women of African-descent in film.

IBW achieves these goals by giving a Lifetime Achievement Award by screening an established woman filmmaker’s work; an Emerging Filmmaker’s Award, a short film competition for 15-minute length films; an Animation Workshop, a program for children between the ages of 8-14-years of age; Young Adult Digital program, for young people 16+ years of age; and workshops and seminars on the film industry, how to navigate it and how to film documentaries.

The festival, back at the Tricycle Theater in London, England, showcases films that seek to dispel the negative images of Black women in film and videos, presents films from directors and producers by African and Black women throughout the Diaspora, and a Q&A panel of actors, directors and producers who will be on hand to discuss their films.  Tickets for the festival can be bought for a weekend pass or on an individual basis for a specific film.

Here is a website, Cinnamongirl, Inc.  that addresses the needs, accomplishments, and positive contributions that Black American and Latina American girls give to their families, communities, and nation. 

The organization seeks to develop “proud, confidant and courageous women”, to empower them, and help them reach their highest potential,  in a world that constantly seeks their annihilation and defamation.

The website’s “Bill of Rights” speaks to the needs of black and brown girls uniqueness as individuals, their right to be loved, to have opportunities in life, to express their intelligence, and their pride in themselves as human beings in this country and this world.

All-in-all, a very worthy organization for more uplifting of black and brown girls.

The site’s overview is as follows:

OverviewThe Cinnamongirl Inc. (CGI) program is designed to complement the education participants receive in school. Each month the 15 participants and 8 mentors spend time organized under three main headings: Relationship Building, Enrichment Activities and Empowerment Dialogues.In these meetings, participants are introduced to a wide variety of experiential activities that promote in CGI’s participants a sense of belonging to a community in which they explore personal-growth discussions and enrichment trips related to culture, history, health & nutrition, education and career development. Sharing these experiences encourage support, guidance and “sistership.” Relationships with Dynamic Women Participants build long-lasting relationships with professional women across career paths and backgrounds. Participants also establish new friendships with other highly motivated young girls. Enrichment Activities Participants will experience a world outside their community. Enrichment trips include visits to cultural festivals, museums, live theatre, career development, Day-in-the-Life…and more. Empowerment Dialogues The girls will participate in discussions like, “What Is a True Leader”, “Handling Rejection, Criticism & Failure” and “Developing a Positive Body Image.” Moderators facilitate these discussions and mentors add their feelings and experiences.

A Turned Around Life

By Stacey Kennelly

This article was published on 11.12.09.

Former skinhead TJ Leyden used to recruit kids into the white-supremacy movement. Now, as an anti-racism activist, he teaches children about tolerance. PHOTO BY TJ LEYDEN

Combatting hate: TJ Leyden’s lecture was sponsored by the Paradise Center for Tolerance and Nonviolence. Visit www.pctn.org for info on upcoming events. He also spoke last week at Chico State. To learn more about Leyden, visit www.strhatetalk.com.

One day, while watching a Nickelodeon show featuring black actors, TJ Leyden’s younger son haughtily walked up to the television. The boy pushed the power button and turned around to scold his father.

“Daddy, no nigger-watchin’ in the house,” the 3-year-old chided.

Leyden, who was then a member of the white-supremacy movement, at first reacted with a mix of humor and surprise. However, as he continued to mull what the toddler had said, he couldn’t help but think about his many stints in jail, the time he was stabbed at a party, and his cousin who is serving a life sentence at San Quentin State Prison for stabbing someone more than 60 times.

“If I didn’t want my boys to be that or be me, what was wrong with me?” Leyden recalled asking himself. “What was wrong with my beliefs?”

That startling confession is just a glimpse into Leyden’s transformation from violent bigot to anti-hate activist. Co-author of Skinhead Confessions: From Hate to Hope, the 43-year-old commanded the attention of more than 60 people for nearly two hours Sunday evening Nov. 8, at the Paradise Elks Lodge during a community forum called “Turning Away From Hate.” His story was one of a violent adolescence and a shameful adulthood spent recruiting young men into the white-supremacy movement.

His foray into that world began in the late 1970s. Leyden, who grew up in the Southern California city of Fontana, was a punk-rock kid known for his extreme aggression. Back then, he explained that the scene focused on violence, anarchy and a “might makes right” attitude.

When Leyden’s parents divorced in 1980, he sought further refuge in this subculture. He began spending more and more time on the streets and at punk shows, where he turned increasingly violent. His behavior attracted attention of the worst kind—from older men who were skinheads.

“The older kids saw, and they liked my violence,” said the bespectacled Leyden, whose tattooed forearms showed below a short-sleeved plaid shirt.

Around the same time, skinheads began breaking into two factions: The SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) and the neo-Nazis. Leyden and his white middle-class friends created one of the first neo-Nazi skinhead gangs in Southern California, and began terrorizing others in nearby Redlands—for reasons ranging from race to physical appearance.

Leyden described feeling “intolerance for anyone, even the white kids,” and engaged in beatings of anyone who rubbed him the wrong way. He rattled off a list of gruesome stories involving humiliation, degradation and mutilation of those who resisted recruitment into the gang or offended members in any way. The group used steel-toed boots and other weapons against their victims.

His described himself as “a hood ornament for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department” during that period of his life. On nearly 20 occasions he spent time in jail—a place that only perpetuated his separatist ideology and racism.

Leyden took all that he had learned with him when he joined the United States Marine Corps, which he claims permitted passive racism. He recalled passing out copies of The Turner Diaries to fellow soldiers, sharing with them the racist and anti-Semitic novel written by physicist and ’80s-era white separatist leader William L. Pearce.

“While I was passing out the book in my Marine uniform, someone else was passing out The Turner Diaries in an Army uniform—Timothy McVeigh,” Leyden said, eliciting a gasp from the audience.

His role in the military also allowed him to begin working with separatist groups. He affiliated with the organization The Order (also known as the Silent Brotherhood), a white nationalist revolutionary group that declared “war” on the U.S. government for being controlled by a group of conspiring Jews.

“Seriously, it’s not a game,” Leyden assured the audience. “They think of it as a war.”

Leyden said he was never approached by military officials about the blatant “A” (for Aryan) tattoos, swastikas and other neo-Nazi symbols that littered his body, including an obvious symbol tatted on the side of his neck. He had “earned” many of these adornments through race altercations and hate crimes. Eventually, the military sent him to rehabilitation and then discharged him a year early due to violent behavior and drinking.

He married a white-supremacist woman and had his first child after leaving the military. He also hit the streets in an effort to attract young men to the skinhead lifestyle. His recruitment tactics were manipulative and methodical; he focused on boys who showed signs of violent behavior, exploiting their vulnerabilities and malleable senses of self-identity and belonging. Leyden explained how he attended parties filled with young people, where alcohol-fueled violence and a “tear-down-and-rebuild” technique of humiliation and affirmation drew in youngsters afraid of being victimized by skinhead violence.

Leyden remained in the movement for 15 years. The turning point was the day his 3-year-old uttered that racial slur. He left the movement a year and a half later.

His reformation took place with the help of his mother, who lived out of state. Leyden turned over all his racist propaganda to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and debriefed officials about his past. He also reluctantly met with rabbis—with his mother at his side for support—who eventually encouraged him to speak out against his friends in the white-power movement. The decision has made him a target for retaliation.

Leyden made his first appearance at a Bakersfield middle school in 1996, and has since spoken in front of more than 850,000 school kids about tolerance and is active in efforts to remove racist Web sites from the Internet and create stricter hate-crime laws. California ranks No. 1 in the nation for the most hate groups, with 88 active.

He and his second wife, Julia, founded StrHATE Talk Consulting, an organization that fights against intolerance and discrimination through education. Leyden called on the audience to “fight with their minds” to become active anti-racists, and not to engage in the perpetuation of stereotypes in local communities. He noted the positive impact volunteering with organizations such as the Boys & Girls Club has on young people, and how mentors can deter children from adopting a lifestyle of hate.

“Help this world stop creating people like me,” he pleaded.

SOURCE

Remarks of Cynthia McKinney, former representative of the state of Georgia, former Green Party candidate for president of the United States, where she speaks at the World Conference to Criminalize War, at the War Crimes Conference & Exhibition that took place at the Putra World Trade Center in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia on 28th October 2009.

by Black Commentator, blackcommentator.com

October 21, 2004

Forget the hoopla and ballyhoo celebrating Black faces in high places. The median net worth of an African American household is about $6,000, while white households wield 14 times as much wealth: more than $88,000. The disastrous details are contained in a report on wealth disparities by the Pew Hispanic Center, “The Wealth of Hispanic Households: 1996 to 2002,” but the worst news is for Blacks, one-third of whom have no assets or a negative net worth.

The bottom fell out of Black wealth accumulation in the deep recession of 2000 – 2001, a downturn that hurt all ethnic groups, but from which whites and Hispanics rapidly rebounded. Whites recouped their losses from the recession and fattened their holdings by 17 percent between 1996 and 2002. Hispanics boosted their meager household wealth to about $7,900 during that period – still only one eleventh of white households, but almost fully recovering the 27 percent loss they suffered at the turn of the 21st century. Blacks also lost 27 percent of their net worth in 2000 – 2001, but got back only 5 percent in 2002. These African American losses appear near-permanent, the result of the deindustrialization of the United States – the destruction of the Black blue-collar workforce.

Hispanics, clustered in the low wage service sector, suffered less lasting effects. However, for African Americans, the worst news just keeps on coming, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. As Roderick Harrison, a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told the Associated Press: “Wealth is a measure of cumulative advantage or disadvantage. The fact that black and Hispanic wealth is a fraction of white wealth also reflects a history of discrimination.”

It is a ‘reflection’ in the American mirror that whites don’t want to see, believing in the vast majority that their privilege and wealth has been earned – and at no one else’s expense. In truth, as Harvard social demographer Dr. Michael A. Dawson puts it, “The racial structures in the United States continue to this day to produce wealth disparities.” Today, these structures are working feverishly to dislodge Blacks from their precarious perches in the middle class. Yet whites remain implacably opposed to engaging in even a discussion of reparations, while continuing to profit from ‘the inherited gift that keeps on giving’ (see , May 8, 2002). Surfing through the recession with their assets largely intact, white America pretends that some malady of ‘culture’ – rather than the crimes of a nation – is what holds African Americans back. And some Black fools believe them.

Tomfoolery in high places

“There were several members of the Congressional Black Caucus who took the position that the racial wealth disparity was due to the misbehavior of Black folks,” says Dr. William ‘Sandy’ Darity, recalling events at the 2003 Black Caucus Week, in Washington. Several silly Black lawmakers theorized that wealth disparities could be eliminated if only African Americans would engage in less impulse buying and save more money, said Darity, a Professor of Public Policy Studies, African and African American Studies and Economics at Duke University. He continued: “In fact, if you control for income, the Black savings rate is at least as high as the white savings rate. There is some evidence to suggest that it might be higher.”

By Darity’s calculations, African Americans would have to go without food, shelter, clothing and all other expenses en masse “for well over a decade” to save enough to achieve wealth parity with whites. “So I would say, there is no way that you can catch up by systemic and careful savings. If African Americans saved all of their income – that is, if we didn’t eat, pay any bills, but saved every cent of income – we could not close the wealth gap,” said the professor, who also teaches economics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

In economics, the past is present; it is the cushion on which some folks arrive in this world. In the United States, those white cushions were likely embroidered by no- and low-wage Black folks whose descendants are today being slammed to the pavement with no buffer of any kind.

African American households earn less than 60 percent of median white income. At the pace of catch-up since 1968, according to a report issued earlier this year by United for a Fair Economy (UFE), “it would take 581 years’ to achieve income parity with whites. But wages are not wealth. For most Americans, home ownership is the major asset. Seventy-five percent of whites own their homes, while more than half of Blacks rent. At the rate of ‘progress’ recorded since 1970, UFE estimates ‘it would take 1,664 years to close the ownership gap – 55 generations.”

The roots of this unbridgeable gap – unbridgeable, that is, by the conventional mechanisms of capitalism – are much nearer. Duke University’s Dr. Darity follows the path the mule never took to examine the value of the 40 acres most ex-slaves never got. “We were supposed to get 40 million acres, we managed to accumulate 15 million by dint of our own efforts, and now we’re down to about one million acres,” said the professor. “I think people tend to deemphasize the importance of land as wealth. The areas designated by Union General William Sherman’s [1865] field order are now some of the most valuable land in American.” He is referring to the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia, now home and playground of the rich.

Of the 15 million acres of land accumulated by Blacks throughout the South in the aftermath of the Civil War, most “was fairly systematically taken away through terror, taxes and fraud. There were instances of the wholesale destruction of Black deeds by arson,” said Darity. The African American real estate patrimony was all but wiped out through white private and public lawlessness – crimes that led directly to today’s racial wealth disparities.

Had the post-Civil War federal government honored and expanded upon Gen. Sherman’s 1865 promise, or passed Congressman Thaddeus Stevens’ 1867 Reparations Bill for the African Slaves in the United States, which would have allotted 40 acres “to each [formerly enslaved] male person who is the head of a family,” African Americans might actually have gotten an economic leg up on the waves of European immigrants that poured into the country during the latter decades of the 1800s.

Trillions lost

What would an 1865 plot of 40 acres be worth to Black America today? According to economist Darity’s numbers, about $1.6 million dollars to every African American – not counting the mule. “That should be the anchor for reparations,” he said.

And what of free and devalued Black labor? In a 2000 paper, Professor Joe R. Feagin, of the University of Florida, at Gainesville, reviewed a number of labor reparations calculations. He concluded:

“Clearly, the sum total of the worth of all the black labor stolen by whites through the means of slavery, segregation, and contemporary discrimination is staggering – many trillions of dollars. The worth of all that labor, taking into account lost interest over time and putting it in today’s dollars, is perhaps in the range of $5 to $24 trillion.”

Feagin also tackled the land issue, to demonstrate that historical federal largess to whites dwarfs current Black reparations claims:

“Passed under the Abraham Lincoln administration, the Homestead Act provided access to productive land and wealth, mostly for white families, from the 1860s to the 1930s. Some 246 million acres were provided by the federal government, at minimal cost, for some 1.5 homesteads. Research by Trina Williams estimates that – depending on calculations of multiple ownership, mortality, marriage, and childbearing patterns – somewhere between 20 and 93 million Americans are now the beneficiaries of this large wealth-generating program over several generations. Williams (2000) suggests that the most likely figure is in the middle range, perhaps 46 million, a figure equal to about one quarter of the current population. Almost all of these beneficiaries have been white, as only 4,000 African Americans made entries under the Homestead Act.”

Thus, white folks, many of them immigrants, received multiples of the acreage promised to Blacks – 246 million vs. 40 million – yet their descendants laugh out loud when African Americans bring up “40 acres and a mule.”

Not one cash dollar

Reparations supporters may tally the bill by any number of formulas, but white America isn’t hearing any of it. Data from a study of racial divisions under the George W. Bush administration, conducted over the past four years by Harvard University Professors Michael C. Dawson and Lawrence Bobo, reveal no support among whites for cash payments to compensate Blacks for slavery and Jim Crow. “None, no support, not any,” Dawson emphasized. “It’s a different world, in terms of how different groups see reality. There’s also a different moral universe.”

Within that morally challenged universe, only 4 percent of whites favored reparations for Black slavery in surveys conducted in 2000 and 2003. Two-thirds of Black respondents favored reparations for slavery.

This year, Dawson and Bobo, both professors of African and African American Studies, sought to clarify Black and white attitudes toward three reparations proposals: cash payments to African Americans as individuals; scholarship funds for disadvantaged African American youth; or the establishment of a Community Trust, to be used to rebuild Black schools and community infrastructure and foster small business.

Whites unanimously rejected the idea of cash payments to Blacks. When asked to assume that reparations were necessary, and to choose some form of compensation, whites favored a Community Trust over scholarships. African Americans favor both cash payments and the Community Trust idea, but are more likely to support the Community Trust framework. All three proposals enjoy some degree of support among African Americans.

A question from the Dawson-Bobo 2003 survey may provide the best measure of general white moral obtuseness on issues of race. When asked if reparations should be paid to the survivors of the white destruction of the Black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921) and Rosewood, Florida (1923), 84 percent of Blacks said “yes.” Only 11 percent of whites agreed, an indication that widespread white feelings of guilt over racial oppression is a myth.

Professor Dawson noted that “even when presented with a demonstrable survivor of a contemporary event, whites oppose any reparations to the Black victims.”

That’s because most whites consider themselves to be, somehow, victims of African Americans, just as they feel set upon and victimized for no good reason by dark Islamic forces in the world, and for the same reasons that they constructed a national mythology of victimization at the hands of ’savage’ Indians. The Dawson-Bobo statistics tell a tale of racism in the raw.

So deep is the collective psychosis, that the current and historical reality of enforced Black economic instability, as detailed in the Pew wealth disparity study, seems to affirm many whites in their delusions of superiority. Against all facts and reason, white America rejects redress of Black grievances, because it refuses to recognize its own bloody legacy, as described by University of Florida Professor Joe Feagin:

“White privilege is ubiquitous and imbedded even where most whites cannot see it; it is the foundation of this society. It began in early white gains from slavery and has persisted under legal segregation and contemporary racism. Acceptance of this system of white privileges and black disadvantages as ‘normal’ has conferred advantages for whites now across some fifteen generations.”

There will be a reckoning.

SOURCE