Black Lives Matter and the Mall of America.

Today people who were too young for the civil rights era have a golden opportunity to participate in a historic movement for equality that will make their grandchildren proud. Hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country have made that decision in the last four months, including 3,000 who held a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest at the Mall of America on December 20, 2014. Unfortunately there are other Americans who seem bent on playing the part of the Jim Crow era angry white mobs and power elites who upheld the status quo. Mall of America in Bloomington Minnesota decided to join the latter when it prohibited a Black Lives Matter gathering, amassed a police force in riot gear to meet the protesters and shut down part of the mall. Now MOA is talking of suing participants for lost revenue that resulted from those actions. This will not only increase their demonic profile in the history books, it is suicidal. The revenue lost in one afternoon will be nothing compared to a wide-scale boycott of the mall. It didn't have to be like this. The MOA could have embraced the event, individual stores could have made the decision to put Black Lives Matter signs in their windows, ( or participate like the employees of Lush did) and three thousand protesters would have become three thousand more shoppers. The economic costs could multiply, affecting not just Mall of America, but businesses across the state. If a Minnesota court decides in favor of the MOA, we could see a statewide boycott like happened to Arizona in 2010, when they passed SP 1070, the law that made racial profiling imperative, giving police the right to stop anyone they thought looked undocumented. The boycott was devastating to the Arizona economy, which is why it is now in the process of being dismantled. A court decision in favor of MOA would only highlight Minnesota’s abysmal statistics for racial inequality in arrest, incarceration, police harassment and brutality, as well as gaps in education, employment, housing, and other social and economic indices, worse than Arizona or any other southern state. It is not too late for the Mall and politicians to declare a truth and reconciliation and reparation conference, to forgive the trespassing charges, to apologize for misunderstanding the meaning of a peaceful protest, and to recognize that a business that receives huge tax subsidies is not private.

Fight Ignorance not Immigrants: Ethnic Studies Week October 1-7

Fight Ignorance not Immigrants: Ethnic Studies Week October 1-7 Fight Ignorance not Immigrants: Ethnic Studies Week October 1-7
Dateline June 21 2010: The first day of summer looking back on a springtime of outrage.
There was much to be outraged about during the spring of 2010: Twenty nine miners died at work in West Virginia, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to take lives here and there, oil spilled and spilled and spilled into the gulf of Mexico, President Obama signed a law increasing the severity of punishment for government whistle blowers, just as brave soldiers unveiled truths of massacres by U.S. troops, Israel attacked and killed people on a flotilla bringing goods to Gaza, successful Tea party candidate Rand Paul declared that the 1964 Civil Rights, and 1990 Americans with Disabilities Acts represented excessive government intervention, while the governor of Arizona governor passed a law making it legal to racially profile brown people.
Then on May 21, the Arizona governor signed another law making ethnic studies in the public schools illegal and just a week later the Texas State Board of Education passed their new social studies standards and , it seemed to me, these were the outrages that connected all the other outrages together. For if we can’t learn about the lives of people who are not white, if we don’t learn about the history of mine workers and their struggle for safe working conditions, if we don’t learn about wars and the courageous whistle blowers past and present , if teachers can not address issues of the day that directly impact the students, like immigration, race disparities in health, employment, and education, if students don’t learn about how social change happens, if teachers and students are muzzled, if learning about critical race theory and Chicano, African American, Asian American, American Indian studies is a privilege only available to college students, if a tiny group of right wing zealots somewhere in Texas can tell the nation’s children what they can and cannot know, if critical thinking remains an elite pursuit, then blood and oil and hatred will continue to spill. We need to stop and talk and study and think and talk some more about where we are going.
So let’s start the conversation. Join the 155 (and growing) group of educators from around the United States who have come together to let people like Gov Jan Brewer (and unfortunately she has clones in local government around the country)know that if you try to ban ethnic studies , it will spread. We have proclaimed October 1-7 Ethnic Studies Week. All over the country, in schools and communities, people will engage in what would amount to civil disobedience in the Arizona public schools. They will be talking about the issues and people censored by the Texas State Board of Education. To see who we are go to the initiators page of the website ethnicstudiesweekoctober1-7.org You can interact with this website, reporting plans for the week, providing testimony, resources, etc.