Rest in peace, Mr. Byrd.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
TEXAS TOWN STILL SHADOWED BY DRAGGING DEATH
10 years after racist dragging death, a Texas town still copes with stigma
Ten years after James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death down a three-mile stretch of country road simply because he was black, some things have changed in Jasper.
Holly Blake, 2, plays in the James Byrd Jr. Memorial Park Thursday, June 5, 2008 in Jasper, Texas…. 
(AP)
Black and white teenagers can be seen playing basketball together at James Byrd Jr. Memorial Park. Blacks now make up a majority on the City Council. And an iron fence no longer separates the graves of whites and blacks in the 171-year-old cemetery where Byrd is buried.
But Byrd’s murder, which jolted the nation with its utter brutality and unvarnished racism, still casts a shadow over this timber town in deep East Texas. And many folks here think it always will.
“It is something we have to live with the rest of our lives,” said Walter Diggles, a black civic leader and executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments. “It is similar to Dallas, when people think of the JFK assassination, or Memphis, when people think of Martin Luther King’s murder.”
Ever since three white men beat the 49-year-old Byrd, chained him by the ankles to the bumper of a Ford pickup truck, then pulled him down Huff Creek Road in the early hours of June 7, 1998, Jasper has been almost synonymous with the horrors of racism.
Byrd’s remains were found scattered in 75 places along the twisting path that cuts through a pine forest. His head and right arm were discovered about a mile from his mangled torso.
A decade later, according to Diggles, some people are still afraid to visit Jasper, a town of 8,000 where the main intersection is a cluster of fast-food places and restaurants offering chicken fried steak specials. Some businesses have been reluctant to come to town, which is badly in need of industry.
However, Diggles and many others say there is a hopeful part of the story too often overlooked: The murder forced the people of Jasper, a town whose population is almost evenly divided between black and white, to confront their prejudices.
“Afterward, people came together, worked together and healed together,” said R.C. Horn, who was mayor at the time and is black. “Some people were not even aware of what was going on inside themselves. But after it happened, everyone took a look at themselves to see what was inside.”
Byrd’s murderers were quickly arrested and convicted, offering some comfort that justice was served. John William King and Lawrence Russell Brewer are now on death row. Shawn Allen Berry is serving a life sentence.
Betty Byrd Boatner pauses at the gravesite of her brother Thursday, June 5, 2008 in Jasper, Texas….
(AP)
Clergy — both black and white — called on the people of Jasper to stay calm and stay home when the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan came to march. And the residents did. Many also saw the response of the Byrd family (“We are not hating; we are hurting,” James Byrd Sr. said after his son’s murder) as inspiring, ennobling.
“This was a mother who lost her son in the most cruel way, yet she showed and taught her family by her example that she is able to forgive,” said the Rev. Ronald Foshage, a white priest at St. Michael’s Parish. “If people can forgive, and if I can learn to forgive in that fashion, then this tragedy can have a deep impact on our lives.”
After Byrd’s death, the family created the James Byrd Jr. Foundation for Racial Healing, which conducts diversity workshops, awards scholarships to minorities and helped win passage of a hate crime bill in Texas. The foundation also runs an oral history project on racism; more than 2,600 people have described their experiences.
Foshage and other townspeople said that before the killing, blacks and whites sat separately at football games and in other public settings. But now, they say, they see less of that, with blacks and whites mingling more, and they attribute that to the Byrd family’s efforts to fight bigotry.
Similarly, townspeople are attributing the black majority on the City Council to changed attitudes.
Betty Byrd Boatner, Byrd’s younger sister, said that before the killing, she didn’t see whites and blacks playing basketball together. As for the segregated graveyard, the iron fence came down a few years ago.
On Saturday, as they have every year on the anniversary of Byrd’s death, the Byrds will hold a service — not just as a memorial, but also as a challenge to those still shackled by prejudice.
“When you do things that hurt someone else, you need to remember that that person is someone’s child,” Boatner said. “My brother was someone’s child. If it was your family, your brother, your sister, how would you handle it?”
Walter Diggles, executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, is shown in his…
(AP)
There is still work to do. A few years back, Byrd’s gravesite was vandalized and defaced with slurs.
“We’re getting there,” Boatner said, “but it just takes time.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Filed under Uncategorized
RACISM NOT ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE
Experts Say Immigration Rancor Fuels Hatred
Sparkle Reid Rai’s 6-month-old daughter probably heard the commotion when a man and two women pretending to deliver a package showed up at their Union City, Ga., apartment in 2000.
Donna Lowry Reid, front left, stepmother of Sparkle Rai, sits at the Atlanta trial with her husband and the victim’s father, Bennet Reid Jr. In the inset is Chiman Rai, who is accused of hiring a hit man to kill his black daughter-in- law.
(AP PHotos )
There, say prosecutors in the high-profile murder trial, the 300-pound man allegedly choked and repeatedly stabbed Rai — a newlywed, whose only apparent crime was being black.
Today, a Fulton County jury began deliberating whether India-born businessman Chiman Rai ordered hit men to murder his daughter-in-law. Prosecutors contend Rai, 68, feared the mixed marriage would smear the family name in a caste-conscious Indian society.
Prosecutors established with black and white non-family witnesses that Rai had never told them his son “Ricky” had married a black woman and that they had a daughter. Sparkle Rai was killed a month after they wed. They are seeking the death penalty.
This case, which turned from a simple murder investigation into an alleged hate crime across two communities of color, highlights the complexity of race relations in a country that has often framed its prejudice in black and white.
But racial intolerance, sometimes in the form of violence, is increasingly more inclusive. Experts say that such bias is nothing new, although the national immigration debate has fueled that hate, giving bigots of all complexions more excuses to act on their ignorance.
Donna Lowry, who married Sparkle Reid’s father and is now raising the victim’s daughter, said, “It was such a shock to us when we found out a few years ago and we were floored.
“We had no idea it would go in this direction,” she told ABCNEWS.com today en route to the trial. “It’s mind-boggling. We are raising her biracial child and there is so much hatred on the other side of the family.”
Rai’s lawyer, Don Samuel, told ABCNEWS.com, “I’m arguing that my client is not guilty.
There is no racial issue involved at all.”
A dozen witnesses of all colors who had known Rai — once a professor at two historically black colleges — said he was not a racist. But Rai’s former cellmate, a convicted forger, testified this week that the accused had made bigoted remarks while in jail, according to reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
American-born Amardeep Singh, director of the national Sikh Coalition, which defends the civil and legal rights of Sikhs, admits that his own ethnic group is capable of bigotry.
“You don’t come to American to learn to be a bigot,” Singh said. “There is bigotry in India.
The caste system is deeply ingrained and South Asians in the U.S. still practice caste exclusion.”
And he, too, has been a victim.
Racial Slurs Against Sikhs
The 37-year-old is routinely a victim of racial slurs because he wears a beard and a turban.
Just recently, while walking home from a Starbucks in culturally diverse Hoboken, N.J., a passerby shouted, “You’ve got to take that sh– off your head, you look like a terrorist.”
And not just by rednecks. “To be honest, I’ve been called a terrorist by every single racial category — white, Latino or black,” Singh said.
Last month, during a fire drill at Hightstown High School in New Jersey, for instance, an African-American teenager set fire to a Sikh student’s turban, singeing the boy’s hair.
The incident at this diverse public school with a significant number of blacks, Latinos and Asians enraged New Jersey’s large Sikh community.
“The fact that something like this could have happened is beyond comprehension, especially in this day and age,” the victim’s mother told the New Jersey Star-Ledger.
Also, black-Latino tension has led to violence in the Los Angeles schools; in El Monte, Calif., a Latino gang targeted African-Americans in what some reports described as “ethnic cleansing.”
Last year, an estimated 191,000 hate crimes occurred in the United States, according to a survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center, although there’s no breakdown by the races of the perpetrators. At the same time, the number of hate groups has jumped 47.5 percent from 602 in 2000 to 888 in 2007.
“There is very little question that we are seeing a growing animosity, at least in some groups,” said Mark Potok, director of the center’s Intelligence Project.
“That rise is almost entirely driven by an increase in the rancid debate on immigration, and hate groups see it as an issue that works for them and they exploit them successfully,” he told ABCNEWS.com
“If there is one thing that is clear about hate crime, no ethnic group is excluded,” Potok said. “They travel in all directions.”
Still, the center reports that crimes against Latinos are up 35 percent nationwide — more than 50 percent in California, although, again, with no breakdown by the races of those who commit the crimes.
Tensions Have Nothing to Do With Gangs
In a June editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Sheriff Lee Baca, a Latino, argued that the interracial violence in his city has nothing to do with the gang crisis and everything to do with bigotry.
“The truth is that, in many cases, race is at the heart of the problem,” Baca wrote. “Latino gang members shoot blacks not because they’re members of a rival gang but because of their skin color. Likewise, black gang members shoot Latinos because they are brown.”
In Princeton, N.J., tensions between rival Latino groups — Colombians, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans and Ecuadorians — have somewhat subsided because of effective community action. But in this small university town, dependent on unskilled labor, blacks and Latino immigrants still maintain a guarded and sometimes volatile relationship.
Undocumented immigrants, who often carry cash, are victims of robberies. “These are opportunistic crimes,” according to Maria Juega, chair of the Latin America Legal and Education Defense Fund.
Still, Juega said, “There’s still a lot of immigrant rage.”
Last year, three black college students were slain and a Latino immigrant was charged with the hate crime in Newark, N.J. Two years earlier, Latino men were robbed, beaten and even murdered in Plainfield, N.J., Jacksonville, Fla., and Annapolis, Md., according to press reports.
In Indianapolis, seven members of a Latino family were murdered by young black males. The victims were mostly undocumented workers, and police speculate that the attackers regarded them as easy prey for robbery since they would be reluctant to report the attacks to the police.
But Jack Levin, a criminologist and hate crime expert from Northeastern University, told ABCNEWS.com that victimization across communities of color is “as old as time.”
“Newcomers to the U.S. often feel in competition with minority groups who have been here somewhat longer or whose members have also suffered economic deprivation,” said Levin, author of “The Violence of Hate” and “Serial Killers and Sadistic Murderers.”
“You not only see this between Asians and blacks, but there are animosities between different generations, like Chinese Americans who are recently off the boat and those a generation or two here,” he said. “The hatred is often expressed not against those who have a great deal of power and wealth, but against other groups vying for those rewards at the bottom of society.”
Indeed, in the earliest days of U.S. immigration, Irish, Italians, Jews and blacks alternately turned their hate on the group that fell at the bottom of the economic ladder. Today, new immigrant groups form pecking orders and biases.
“There are bad feelings between African Americans and blacks from the Caribbean and, historically, German Jews and Eastern European Jews hated each other,” Levin said. “Much of it is economic. You find it in every group.”
Post-9/11 Suspicions
But, he said, the post-9/11 world and new global migrations have made Americans suspicious of all those who look or worship differently.
“It shocks people when you discuss this kind of hatred between groups that have suffered so much,” Levin said. “But we should recognize that these groups consist of human beings who have weakness, frailties and prejudices. It shouldn’t surprise us.”
Americans are not the only culture to experience racial strife, according to Levin. When once-homogenous communities are threatened, they react protectively. Hate crimes are also on the rise in once-tolerant countries like Holland, Norway and Sweden.
The Atlanta murder case — an Indian father accused of killing his black daughter-in-law — is an extreme example of the phenomenon, according to Levin. “Not only did an outsider move into a neighborhood, she moved into the family,” he said.
Eight year’s after her mother’s murder, Sparkle’s daughter is “doing great,” according to her adopted mother. “She’s innocent to all this,” said Lowry, an Atlanta television reporter. “She knows me as ‘mom’ since she was 6 months old. Her mother is ‘Sparkle,’ and knows she was killed by a bad man.”
Meanwhile, Amardeep Singh and the Sikh Coalition are working to address the harassment of their own community in a post-9/11 world. Their recent survey of 1,000 New York Sikh children revealed “significant” harassment at school.
“Folks recognize that it’s not OK to use the ‘N-word’ or there will be negative repercussions, and if you are anti-Jewish, you get in trouble,” Singh said. “But calling a kid a terrorist or Bin Laden is not just a racial epithet. It’s justification for degrading a person.”
Still, he doesn’t defend Chiman Rai for his alleged crimes.
“It’s sad that a minority like the South Asian community has taken on the prejudices of the majority community,” Singh said. “You’d think members could rise above that. But we recognize the commonality of the experience in the U.S. to fight bigotry.”
“There is no community that is immune to prejudices,” he said. “It’s a sad part of the human condition.”
ABC News researcher Suzanne Bernard contributed to this report.
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Yes, racism is not always black and white.
Many non-Blacks who live in this country as well as come to America have bought into the lie of the inferiority of Black Americans, as well as the lack of regard for the value and sanctity of black life. Filth such as this human know that if they were to take a White person’s life, they would get death, so they commit their beatdown and direct their hate towards those who are given the least respect in America—Black citizens. Oh, I’m sure the defense will come up with the lame excuse of this was not an “honor-killing/caste system murder.” Bullshit. Ms. Sparkle was in no way a Dalit, a Punjabi, nor a Sikh, so, even for the defense to use such ludicrous strategies would be insulting. (And no, this was not a robbery/murder.)
That Rai’s son married a Black woman is what sent him into a racist, vicious murdering rage.
As for the gutless son, Ricky, he showed his true colors by not keeping his own daughter, Analla, but, instead threw her off as if she was some trash. In the meantime, he went and married an Indian woman. Yeah. . . .shows just how much he gave so little of a damn about Sparkle.
Their own kind and Whites are given so much high regard, but the life of a Black person is given vile and venomous maltreatment.
If faced to choose an immoral, abject, wantonly mendacious White, Hindu, Sikh, etc. person over a moral, hard-working and decent Black person, many non-Black, non-White so-called persons of color would choose the White over the Black.
It does not surprise me that this happened.
Many sadistic weak-minded fecal matter like Chiman Rai exist in this world, and their greatest object is to glorify, worship, and uphold the villification of blackness.
In this thing’s case, he took it to the maximum.
May he receive the maximum allowed under the state of Georgia, but, something tells me that in no way will he receive the death penalty.
No matter who kills a Black person, they will never get the death penalty.
So much for the value of black life.
So much for the so-called brotherly love of POC towards Black people.
Filed under Uncategorized
160 SUSPECTED ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS DETAINED IN EAST HOUSTON I.C.E. RAID
05:35 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 25, 2008
HOUSTON — An immigration raid had employers at a business on Port Houston Road on edge Wednesday.
ICE executed the action at around 7 a.m. at a company called Action Rags USA.
“We received information over a year ago of allegations of illegal hiring,” said Robert Rutt with ICE.
About 160 workers were questioned during the east Houston raid that included as many as 200 immigration agents.
“My mother-in-law’s in there,” said Maria Lopez.
Francisco Luquin’s wife has been detained. “She got a permit to stay here. I know she got no permit to work, but she got a permit to stay over here. We got seven kids over here.”
The feds say some of the workers are not only undocumented, two of them are also underage.
“They didn’t have fans. They didn’t have AC. You could say it’s an oven in there,” said Lopez.
11 News discovered that working at Action Rag was hard, but people stayed here because they didn’t have much choice.
“Her son was gonna have an operation on his ear and she had to come to work to get some money for the operation,” said Lopez.
But the company’s lawyer, William Estes, tells a different story. “OSHA’s been thru here, been inspected regularly.”
Estes denied the company knowingly hired illegal workers. “I’m understanding that a system is being set up, but when you show us your ID. That’s all we have.”
On this day, Francisco Luquin was one of the lucky ones. He was reunited with his wife.
ICE says that at least 60 of the workers that were detained will be released for humanitarian reasons. That means they’re either sole caregivers of minor children or they’re pregnant or have some other medical condition.
All, however, will have to attend an immigration hearing where a judge will decide if they’ll be deported.
Action Rags could also face legal action. That company processes rags for industrial use.
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I.C.E. raids businesses where there are suspected illegal immigrants, detains/arrests the workers, but never arrests/detains/or, at the very least, takes into custody (for questioning) the employers/owners of these sweatshops.
Now, why is that?
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SCOTUS REJECTS DEATH PENALTY FOR CHILD RAPE
Justices Narrow the Scope of the Death Penalty with 5-4 Ruling
In a closely divided opinion today, the Supreme Court found that while the crime of raping a child is a “revulsion” to society, it does not merit the death penalty.
The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that Louisiana death row inmate Patrick O. Kennedy can not be put to death for the rape of his then-8-year-old stepdaughter.
(ABC/AP Photo)
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a 5-4 majority, found that “a death sentence for one who raped but did not kill a child, and who did not intend to assist another in killing the child, is unconstitutional.”
Louisiana and five other states have laws imposing the death penalty for that crime. The ruling today overturned those laws.
The decision and a fiery dissent from the conservative justices explored the controversial moral questions society must face in addressing the topic of child rape.
Kennedy acknowledged as much, writing that such a crime “cannot be recounted in these pages in a way sufficient to capture in full the hurt and horror inflicted on the victim.”
“We cannot dismiss the years of long anguish that must be endured by the victim of child rape,” he wrote. But he said that capital punishment is not a “proportionate” penalty for the crime.
In an emotional dissent, Justice Samuel Alito criticized the majority for finding that the crime of child rape should be penalized differently from that of some murders. He said, “With respect to the question of moral depravity, is it really true that every person who is convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death is more morally depraved than every child rapist.”
Alito said, “In the eyes of ordinary Americans, the very worst child rapists — predators who seek out and inflict serious physical and emotional injury on defenseless young children — are the epitome of moral depravity.”
While the majority said that only a small number of states had enacted the death penalty for child rape, Alito argued that such efforts could have grown in the upcoming years, but the court’s decision “snuffs out” such a possibility.
Advocates for child’s rights praised the decision. They condemned Louisiana’s law because they were fearful that the if a child rapist knew he might face the death penalty he would have an incentive to kill his victim.
On June 25, 2008, the Supreme Court cut a $2.5 billion penalty in the Exxon Valdez disaster.
(PhotoDisc)
The case that went before the court dates back to 1998, when Patrick O. Kennedy called 911 to report that his 8-year-old stepdaughter had just been raped.
Kennedy blamed two boys from his suburban New Orleans neighborhood for the attack and told police that the boys had fled on bicycles, but police soon suspected Kennedy of the crime.
At trial, the girl, who had required surgery after the attack, testified that Kennedy had raped her and that he had coached her to lie to police.
Testimony at trial also revealed that Kennedy had called a carpet cleaning company about removing bloodstains from his carpet even before dialing 911.
Kennedy’s crime was considered so heinous that he was sentenced to death under Louisiana law, which imposes the death penalty for the rape of a child.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a group opposed to the death penalty, there are more than 3,300 people on death row in America, and Kennedy is one of only two who did not commit murder.
Kennedy had argued that laws in Louisiana and five other states that impose the death penalty for child rape violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Kennedy’s lawyers praised today’s decision.
“The Court makes clear that Louisiana’s experiment with the death penalty for rape ran afoul of the United States Constitution,” Ben Cohen, of the New Orleans-based Capital Appeals Project, said.
The organization has represented Kennedy for the past four years.
“Given the Court’s decision, we can only hope that the money that Louisiana has been spending drafting and defending this anomalous and unconstitutional statute will be reallocated to efforts at treatment for victims of sexual abuse and for measures that actually reduce the risk of such abuse in our communities,” Cohen said.
Representatives of Louisiana had argued strenuously for the law.
“In this instance, the victim was an 8-year-old girl who was asleep in her own bed in the morning and found her 300-pound stepfather violently physically raping her,” Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz said during oral arguments.
But some victims of child rape also supported Kennedy. Jody Plauche, now 36, who was raped and kidnapped as a child, says that the possibility of the death penalty adds too much burden to the child.
“A child who’s been raped has been through enough,” he said.
He points out that the offenders are usually a trusted adult and he worries the children will feel “extra trauma” if they know that the offender might die if the child reports the crime.
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DAD ACCUSED IN CHILDREN’S MURDERS, APPEARS IN COURT
05:07 PM CDT on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 RELATED LINKS: http://www.khou.com/news/local/stories/khou080624_tj_sylvesterjailhouse.37758489.html
HOUSTON–The Pasadena father accused of killing his two children appeared before a judge again Wednesday morning.
Randy Sylvester is charged with capital murder.
The remains of his kids, Randy Jr., 7, and Denim, 3, were found last week in southeast Houston. They had been stuffed into a trunk and a suitcase and burned.
Sylvester remained silent before the judge.
The court appointed him an attorney and set the official arraignment for July 31.
Police on Tuesday said they believed the children were killed in Sylvester’s apartment and then dumped in the wooded area where they were found.
Prosecutors on Wednesday said when police searched the apartment for evidence, they noticed a strong odor of cleaning supplies and windows that were left ajar.
They refused to speculate on what that might mean.
They also said witnesses saw Sylvester putting a large suitcase in the trunk of his car the day police believe the kids were killed.
“I’ve tried several capital murders, I’ve tried doubles, I’ve tried children that have been killed. I’ve never tried a double where they were both children,” one prosecutor said.
After his first meeting with his client, Sylvester’s court-appointed defense attorney said the accused killer appeared to be depressed.
He’s being held in the Harris County Jail without bond.
A memorial for the children was planned for Wednesday night. The family said the service is open to anyone.
Though he was silent in court, Sylvester opened up in a jailhouse interview with 11 News Tuesday evening.
He told 11 News reporter Jeremy Desel that his children died as “part of the game” of drug dealing.
“They gone because of me. Not because I killed them. I thought they would come after me.
Not the children,” Sylvester said. “I didn’t do it.”
He claimed the killer is a drug dealer who he owed money to. Sylvester would not say who the drug dealer is, because he will kill again and hurt more of his family.
“Tell my family that I should have listened to them and left the drugs alone,” Sylvester said.
He is trained as a plumber, but when work went scarce several years ago, he said he turned to drug dealing. He claims his kids were killed because he owed $4,500 for about four ounces of cocaine.
During the interview, Sylvester showed the same volatile personality he did when he confronted reporters last week and threatened to fight them. Those same flashes of anger resurfaced when pressed to explain how it is a drug dealer would kill Randy Jr. and Denim.
Why would anyone kill two helpless children over money?
“I guess money is more important than human life. Don’t people get killed for $2? This is nothing new,” Sylvester said. “This happens you know? This is all part of the game. How do you think I feel knowing that I am responsible?”
Sylvester said he can explain all the fruitless trips he took detectives and community activist Quanell X on as they searched for the kids. He claims they were all places he had done drug deals.
Sylvester said he was shocked when they finally found the bodies near the railroad tracks in southeast Houston near Old Galveston Road.
“I wished that was me instead of them. It could have been me. I didn’t expect them to do this,” he said in a flat voice, void of emotion. “All part of what was going on… A plan to get me. They set me up.
“They killed my kids, now they are killing me.”
Throughout the entire interview, the only thing missing from Sylvester’s face was any semblance of grief. He was very matter of fact about the experience.
“I know it is hard to believe. It’s hard for me to believe that they killed my kids over this,” he said.
The only moment of the interview that seemed to catch Sylvester off guard was when he was told that the charge of capital murder could mean a death sentence.
After a long pause, he said, “Then simply all I can do is respect it. I can’t change it.”
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FOR PFC. LAVENA JOHNSON: SALUTARE
The website for the petition for Pfc. Lavena Johnson has been closed by the petition site owner:
THE PFC. LAVENA JOHNSON PETITION IS NOW CLOSED.
On July 19, 2005, a nineteen-year-old soldier named Pfc. LaVena Johnson died in Iraq – the first woman soldier from Missouri to die while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army ruled LaVena’s death a suicide, despite evidence to the contrary and strong protests from those who knew her best. On February 28, 2007, I launched a petition addressed to the Armed Services Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives, asking those bodies to compel the Army to reopen the investigation of LaVena’s death.
The name-gathering phase of the petition ended on May 24, 2008. The next phase consists of preparing the document for delivery to the two Armed Services Committees.
Information on the status of the petition effort and related news will continue to be posted on the LaVena Johnson website.
I’d like to thank everyone who took a moment to lend their names to the petition, or who devoted time and effort to spreading word of LaVena’s story. I deeply appreciate your support.
Very best,
Philip Barron
St. Louis
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My thanks to all of you who visited my blog and signed the petition in honor of Pfc. Lavena Johnson who gave her life in the ultimate sacrifice to protect her family and nation.
Mr. Barron will now take the signatures he has received from his petition site to the Armed Services Committees. Godspeed to him for all his endeavors and for his unwavering solidarity in remembering and acknowledging Pfc. Lavena Johnson.
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U.S. GI WOMEN IN FEAR OF THE ENEMY IN THEIR ARMY
I received an e-mail from a commentor on Pfc. Lavena Johnson. The article addresses the disrespect and mistreatment that the United States military apparatus has dealt to its women inductees, all the while being victims of rape, and murder, as they strive to serve and protect their country. The egregious disregard that has been shown towards U.S. military women is callousness in its worst form in the case of Pfc. Johnson. Reporter Tracey Barnett speaks of Pfc. Johnson’s family, their anguish in seeking answers to her tragic death, and the cold response of a military that shows its contempt in actions that exemplify, “We don’t do body counts”, at least as far as U.S. women military are concerned. Here is the article courtesy of the New Zealand Herald:
5:00AM Wednesday June 25, 2008
By Tracey Barnett
When Dr John Johnson finally brought himself to look at the slain body of his beautiful 19-year-old daughter flown home from Iraq, he knew immediately he was looking at murder.
This was no suicide from a self-inflicted M-16 wound, as the military would later claim.
Private LaVena Johnson’s nose was broken, teeth were loose, one eye was concave and there were abrasions over her body. The supposed M-16 hole to the head was far too small for the revolver-sized exit wound, and was on the wrong side of her skull for a right-handed woman to have pulled the trigger. Her genital area showed evidence of acid, perhaps used to destroy DNA evidence. She had white military gloves glued to her burned hands.
When I asked LaVena’s mother if she felt her daughter’s case was being covered up by the US military, she replied without hesitation: “Absolutely. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Three years after her daughter’s body had been flown home from Iraq, it was still too painful for Linda Johnson to describe the first moments when she realised her daughter had been raped, shot, burned with acid, then dumped in a contractor’s tent and set on fire.
“I’m telling you there is no pain like it – there is no pain like it in this world. My daughter, the way they took her and what they did to her – it’s inhuman. I did not believe my daughter was placed among a group of predators. They treated her like an animal … ” Linda Johnson said, then added quietly: “And she was fighting for this country.”
When the coroner ruled her death a suicide and failed to include any of the physical trauma in his report, Dr. Johnson told him, “Somebody murdered my daughter and you picked the wrong person to **** with.”
It reads like next year’s Oscar-winning screenplay, but there’s no real-life ending in sight.
The death was initially taped off as a crime scene but the investigation was shut down by a general’s order.
The Johnsons are still fighting for answers. It was only recently, when they met anti-war activist Retired Colonel Ann Wright, that there has been a flicker of movement. Her contacts got Dr Johnson an audience with Congress. Since then, he’s received word that LaVena’s case may make it on to the congressional agenda.
Tragically, the Johnson family are not alone.
This is no single aberrant case. John Johnson has discovered far more stories that have matched his daughter’s than he ever wanted to know. Ten other families of “suicide” female soldiers have contacted him. The common thread among them – rape.
Meet today’s US military – sign up for the armed services and become almost one in three women who are raped or sexually assaulted by their own colleagues, according to Department of Defence statistics. Not exactly the kind of recruitment slogan that fills empty boots.
Upon returning home, these same women will be nine times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress.
A Rand Corporation study noted that returning women veterans are suffering from more such stress than men, but no one thought to ask how much of it is from being raped by the comrades who are supposed to be watching your back.
Women Veterans’ groups describe how some women are coerced by higher-ups to use their bodies to obtain food or generators out in the field, as part of “command rape”.
In 2003, three women died in their beds of dehydration because they had stopped drinking in the 50-degree heat late in the day for fear of going to the latrine at night. Camp generators were so loud they would muffle the sound of women’s screams as their own soldiers jumped them and dragged them to the Port-a-Johns to be assaulted.
Fathers like John Johnson sent their daughters off to war assuming that the enemy was on the other side of the divide – and for the vast majority of recruits it is.
But Colonel Wright points to specific Army units and bases that have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of “non-combat related injuries” or “suicides”, both of which are never counted in the US official death toll.
Dr Johnson has told the US Senate the name of one of the men who he believes murdered his daughter. A high-ranking officer was kicked out of Iraq two days after his daughter was found dead. He said: “If this had been a private, they would have thrown him under a bus a long time ago.”
All he wants is justice for his daughter.
As a third generation military man he knows only too well; know your enemies. The real tragedy today is that almost one-third of American female soldiers can’t begin to answer that question.
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ALBANIA CUSTOM FADES: WOMAN AS THE FAMILY MAN
Johan Spanner for The New York Times
Qamile Stema, 88, a woman in Barganesh, Albania, who took an oath of virginity to live, and be treated, like a man. More Photos >
KRUJE, Albania — Pashe Keqi recalled the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.
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Johan Spanner for the New York Times
Pashe Keqi, 78, took an oath of virginity when she was 20 to become the family patriarch after her father’s death in a blood feud. More Photos »
For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.
She says she would not do it today, now that sexual equality and modernity have come even to Albania, with Internet dating and MTV invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to be boys anymore. With only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the sworn virgin is dying off.
“Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” said Ms. Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of raki. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”
The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than 500 years. Under the Kanun, the role of a woman is severely circumscribed: take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same: 12 oxen.
The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and death. If the family patriarch died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.
They dressed like men and spent their lives in the company of other men, even though most kept their female given names. They were not ridiculed, but accepted in public life, even adulated. For some the choice was a way for a woman to assert her autonomy or to avoid an arranged marriage.
“Stripping off their sexuality by pledging to remain virgins was a way for these women in a male-dominated, segregated society to engage in public life,” said Linda Gusia, a professor of gender studies at the University of Pristina, in Kosovo. “It was about surviving in a world where men rule.”
Taking an oath to become a sworn virgin should not, sociologists say, be equated with homosexuality, long taboo in rural Albania. Nor do the women have sex-change operations.
Known in her household as the “pasha,” Ms. Keqi said she decided to become the man of the house at age 20 when her father was murdered. Her four brothers opposed the Communist government of Enver Hoxha, the ruler for 40 years until his death in 1985, and they were either imprisoned or killed. Becoming a man, she said, was the only way to support her mother, her four sisters-in-law and their five children.
Ms. Keqi lorded over her large family in her modest house in Tirana, where her nieces served her brandy while she barked out orders. She said living as a man had allowed her freedom denied other women. She worked construction jobs and prayed at the mosque with men.
Even today, her nephews and nieces said, they would not dare marry without their “uncle’s” permission.
When she stepped outside the village, she enjoyed being taken for a man. “I was totally free as a man because no one knew I was a woman,” Ms. Keqi said. “I could go wherever I wanted to and no one would dare swear at me because I could beat them up. I was only with men. I don’t know how to do women’s talk. I am never scared.”
When she was recently hospitalized for surgery, the other woman in her room was horrified to be sharing close quarters with someone she assumed was male.
Being the man of the house also made her responsible for avenging her father’s death, she said. When her father’s killer, by then 80, was released from prison five years ago, Ms. Keqi said, her 15-year-old nephew shot him dead. Then the man’s family took revenge and killed her nephew. “I always dreamed of avenging my father’s death,” she said. “Of course, I have regrets; my nephew was killed. But if you kill me, I have to kill you.”
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Johan Spanner for The New York Times
The tradition of virgin women in male family roles is fading in Albania, even in rural Barganesh. More Photos >
In Albania, a majority Muslim country in the western Balkans, the Kanun is adhered to by Muslims and Christians. Albanian cultural historians said the adherence to medieval customs long discarded elsewhere was a byproduct of the country’s previous isolation. But they stressed that the traditional role of the Albanian woman was changing.
“The Albanian woman today is a sort of minister of economics, a minister of affection and a minister of interior who controls who does what,” said Ilir Yzeiri, who writes about Albanian folklore. “Today, women in Albania are behind everything.”
Some sworn virgins bemoan the changes. Diana Rakipi, 54, a security guard in the seaside city of Durres, in west Albania, who became a sworn virgin to take care of her nine sisters, said she looked back with nostalgia on the Hoxha era. During Communist times, she was a senior army officer, training women as combat soldiers. Now, she lamented, women do not know their place.
“Today women go out half naked to the disco,” said Ms. Rakipi, who wears a military beret.
“I was always treated my whole life as a man, always with respect. I can’t clean, I can’t iron, I can’t cook. That is a woman’s work.”
But even in the remote mountains of Kruje, about 30 miles north of Tirana, residents say the Kanun’s influence on gender roles is disappearing. They said erosion of the traditional family, in which everyone once lived under the same roof, had altered women’s position in society.
“Women and men are now almost the same,” said Caca Fiqiri, whose aunt Qamile Stema, 88, is his village’s last sworn virgin. “We respect sworn virgins very much and consider them as men because of their great sacrifice. But there is no longer a stigma not to have a man of the house.”
Yet there is no doubt who wears the trousers in Ms. Stema’s one-room stone house in Barganesh, the family’s ancestral village. There, on a recent day, “Uncle” Qamile was surrounded by her clan, dressed in a qeleshe, the traditional white cap of an Albanian man.
Pink flip-flops were her only concession to femininity.
After becoming a man at the age of 20, Ms. Stema said, she carried a gun. At wedding parties, she sat with the men. When she talked to women, she recalled, they recoiled in shyness.
She said becoming a sworn virgin was a necessity and a sacrifice. “I feel lonely sometime, all my sisters have died, and I live alone,” she said. “But I never wanted to marry. Some in my family tried to get me to change my clothes and wear dresses, but when they saw I had become a man, they left me alone.”
Ms. Stema said she would die a virgin. Had she married, she joked, it would have been to a traditional Albanian woman. “I guess you could say I was partly a woman and partly a man,” she said. “I liked my life as a man. I have no regrets.”
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3 IN 10 AMERICANS ADMIT TO RACE BIAS
Survey Shows Age, Too, May Affect Election Views
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 22, 2008; Page A01
Sunday, June 22, 2008; Page A01
As Sen. Barack Obama opens his campaign as the first African American on a major party presidential ticket, nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice, according to a new Washington Post–ABC News poll.
Lingering racial bias affects the public’s assessments of the Democrat from Illinois, but offsetting advantages and Sen. John McCain‘s age could be bigger factors in determining the next occupant of the White House.
Overall, 51 percent call the current state of race relations “excellent” or “good,” about the same as said so five years ago. That is a relative thaw from more negative ratings in the 1990s, but the gap between whites and blacks on the issue is now the widest it has been in polls dating to early 1992.
More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as “not so good” or “poor,” while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination. There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: Thirty percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.
At the same time, there is an overwhelming public openness to the idea of electing an African American to the presidency. In a Post-ABC News poll last month, nearly nine in 10 whites said they would be comfortable with a black president. While fewer whites, about two-thirds, said they would be “entirely comfortable” with it, that was more than double the percentage of all adults who said they would be so at ease with someone entering office for the first time at age 72, which McCain (R-Ariz.) would do should he prevail in November.
Even so, just over half of whites in the new poll called Obama a “risky” choice for the White House, while two-thirds said McCain is a “safe” pick. Forty-three percent of whites said Obama has sufficient experience to serve effectively as president, and about two in 10 worry he would overrepresent the interests of African Americans.
Obama will be forced to confront these views as he seeks to broaden his appeal. He leads in the Post-ABC poll by six percentage points among all adults, but among those who are most likely to vote, the contest is a tossup, with McCain at 48 percent and Obama at 47 percent.
His campaign advisers hope race may prove a benefit, that heightened enthusiasm among African Americans will make Obama competitive in GOP-leaning states with large black populations. But to win in November, Obama most likely will have to close what is now a 12-point deficit among whites. (Whites made up 77 percent of all voters in 2004; blacks were 11 percent, according to network exit polls.)
This is hardly the first time a Democratic candidate has faced such a challenge — Al Gore lost white voters by 12 points in 2000, and John F. Kerry lost them by 17 points in 2004 — but it is a significantly larger shortfall than Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton encountered in their winning campaigns.
Many think Obama has the potential to transform current racial politics. Nearly six in 10 believe his candidacy will shake up the racial status quo, for better or worse. And by nearly 3 to 1, those who think Obama’s candidacy will affect race relations said it will have a positive impact. (Four in 10 said it probably will not make much of a difference.)
African Americans are much more optimistic than whites on this score: Sixty percent said Obama’s candidacy will do more to help race relations, compared with 38 percent of whites. Two-thirds of those supporting him for president think it will improve the situation.
But sorting out the impact of these and other racial attitudes on the presidential election is not straightforward.
About a fifth of whites said a candidate’s race is important in determining their vote, but Obama does no worse among those who said so than among those who called it a small factor or no factor.
Nor are whites who said they have at least some feelings of racial prejudice more or less apt to support Obama than those who profess no such feelings.
Putting several measures together into a “racial sensitivity index” reveals that these attitudes have a significant impact on vote preferences, independent of partisan identification. Combining answers to questions about racist feelings, perceptions of discrimination and whether the respondent has a close personal friend of another race into a three-part scale shows the importance of underlying racial attitudes.
Whites in the top sensitivity group broke for Obama by nearly 20 percentage points, while those in the lowest of the three categories went for McCain by almost 2 to 1.
A similar pattern holds among Democrats. Obama scores more than 20 points better among nonblack Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in the “high” group than he does among those in the “low” group.
Obama has some convincing to do among the 29 percent of whites who fall into the scale’s lowest category. (Twenty-one percent were in the top grouping, 50 percent in the middle.) Almost six in 10 whites in the low-sensitivity group see him as a risky choice, and a similar percentage said they know little or nothing about where he stands on specific issues. Nearly half do not think his candidacy will alter race relations in the country; 20 percent think it will probably make race relations worse.
But McCain’s challenges are also an important part of the equation.
Numerous polls, for example, have indicated that McCain’s age may be a bigger detractor than Obama’s race. And more are now concerned that McCain will heed too closely the interests of large corporations than said so about Obama and the interests of blacks.
The poll was conducted by telephone June 12 through June 15 among a national random sample of 1,125 adults. The results from the full poll have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. The error margin is larger for subgroups; it is four points among whites and seven points among African Americans.
Assistant polling analyst Kyle Dropp contributed to this report.
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Ann
