Rania Khalek Dispatches from the Underclass
/ December 21, 2012 / 22 Comments

Missing from the gun control debate: Police shootings of unarmed people of color

Gun violence is rarely discussed except for when a horrific mass shooting takes place. Still, even with the nation’s eyes focused on this particular issue, there is one kind of gun violence that is continually ignored: Police killings of unarmed citizens.

In my experience, liberal gun control advocates are the most silent on this issue. I’m not sure why but if I had to guess I’d say it’s because they are predominantly white middle and upper class folks, so for them, police are good guys who they trust to protect them.

It’s quite the opposite in poor communities of color. Just ask Rekia Boyd, Ramarley Graham, Sean Bell, Alan Blueford and Manuel Diaz, all people of color who were unarmed when killed at the hands of police officers.

In June of this year, I attended a panel at Netroots Nation titled, “Gun Politics after Trayvon and Tuscon: New Life for a Deadly Issue.” Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) was one of the panelists. Read More

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/ December 21, 2012 / Leave a comment

Disaster Capitalism Alert: NRA proposes armed security as the answer

“[W]e need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work —and by that I mean armed security,” declared NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre at this morning’s press conference, breaking his organizations week-long silence following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that left 20 children and 6 adults dead.

After blaming gun control, violent video games, Hollywood and political opportunists for America’s latest mass shooting, the LaPierre argued that the solution to school shootings is armed guards. Not just any armed guards, but special NRA-approved, security industry armed guards.

It sounds to me like the NRA is trying to exploit the legitimate fears stoked by last week’s horrific massacre to expand the market of the private security industry. This is disaster capitalism 101 (thank you Naomi Klein for giving us the tools to recognize the “Shock Doctrine” in action). Read More

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/ December 20, 2012 / Leave a comment

Dear Media: Quit ignoring black and brown victims of gun violence in Oakland, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Chicago

Yesterday evening, a 49-year-old woman in Oakland, California was shot and killed by a stray bullet while walking to the store, marking the city’s 124th homicide of 2012. Thus far, a google news search of “Oakland woman shot” has produced just four articles about this particular shooting.

As I wrote earlier this week, the media usually pays little, if any, attention to gun violence in what Susie Cagle has dubbed  “urban sacrifice zones“, despite shootings taking place with disturbing regularity. In stark contrast, the media obsesses over increasingly frequent suburban mass shootings. That’s not to say that massacres in the suburbs shouldn’t garner airtime, they certainly should. But the disparity between suburban vs. urban gun violence—or to put it more bluntly, middle class white vs. poor brown and black gun violence—implies that shootings are only important when white suburbanites are affected. Read More

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/ December 19, 2012 / Leave a comment

From Newtown to Pakistan: Violence against children is inexcusable no matter where it happens

When I watch the media coverage of the six and seven year old’s mercilessly slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I tear up. Like most everyone else around the country, I begin to wonder about their last moments, the sheer horror they must have felt seeing their teachers and friends gunned down, the agonizing screams and cries, a kind of terror that no one should have to encounter especially children.

But, unlike most Americans, I get a knot in the pit of my stomach over the routine violence my country perpetrates against children abroad that is frequently dismissed as acceptable and even necessary. I’m of course referring to the countless little ones killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. Read More

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/ December 18, 2012 / Leave a comment

Conn. Gov. Dan Malloy once said teachers get tenure just for showing up. No one at Sandy Hook was just “showing up.”

Diane Ravitch has a must-read blog post about the heroic actions of the six teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School who died protecting their children. You’ve probably already heard the heart-wrenching stories about teachers using their bodies to shield their little ones from the gunman as almost every news outlet has covered this at length.

But Ravitch adds some much-needed insight, reminding us that these teachers were “career educator[s]” who “worked in a school that was not obsessed with testing but with the needs of children.” Furthermore, all of these teachers, who the media are rightfully calling courageous heroes, belonged to a union and have faced countless attacks from Connecticut’s Governor and his teacher-bashing friends. According to Ravitch: Read More

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/ December 17, 2012 / Leave a comment

Do white children have to die for lawmakers to give a shit?

The trauma being faced by the surviving children of the Newtown school massacre is a daily reality for their mostly poor black and brown counterparts in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

That’s because gun violence is most prevalent in America’s impoverished inner-cities, where researchers say the PTSD rate could be as high as 40 percent, similar to war zones like Afghanistan. That means just under half of the people living in urban poor communities are suffering from “intrusive, upsetting memories; nightmares; chronic anxiety and fear; memory loss; diminished interest in life; emotional numbing and angry outbursts.”

Though African American children represent just 15 percent of the nation’s child population, they made up 45 percent of child gun deaths in 2008 and 2009, according to an analysis by the Children’s Defense Fund. In Chicago, nearly 700 children were shot in 2011. Between March 2011 and March 2012, 107 Chicago children and youths under the age of 20 were killed by gun violence. Yet, these children’s short lives, personalities and dreams are rarely given nationwide coverage like the victims of the Sandy Hook mass shooting. Instead, they’re subtly referenced in local news headlines as nameless statistics. Read More

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/ December 17, 2012 / Leave a comment

America's 300 million guns concentrated in fewer and fewer hands

By now, you’ve probably heard that there are nearly 300 million privately owned guns in the United States, almost one gun per person. As disturbing as that is, what’s even scarier is this: A minority of Americans own all of these weapons and just 20 percent are hoarding the majority of them.

Following the massacre at an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre over the summer, CNN conducted an analysis of US gun ownership that revealed that “the number of U.S. households with guns has declined, but current gun owners are gathering more guns.”

A decreasing number of American gun owners own two-thirds of the nation’s guns and as many as one-third of the guns on the planet — even though they account for less than 1% of the world’s population, according to a CNN analysis of gun ownership data.

Read More

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/ December 14, 2012 / 10 Comments

How many school children need to be slaughtered for our spineless political class to aggressively push for gun safety?

As of this writing, at least 27 people are reported to have been killed, among them 18 children following the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I don’t know about you, but I’m not just sad or horrified. I’m fucking outraged.

I’m furious at policymakers for failing to enact gun control legislation. I’m disgusted at the NRA for holding our nation hostage to their psychotic obsession with making sure every American, even the most violent among us, has access to military grade weaponry. And I’m pissed at the Obama administration for saying they don’t think “today is that day” to talk about gun control legislation.

Close to 30 people, at least 18 children, were massacred by a twenty-something man armed with up to four weapons and wearing a bullet proof vest. Witnesses say they heard at least 100 rounds fired. In spite of all this, now is not the right time to talk about gun control? If not now, then when? How many school children under the age of 10 need to be slaughtered for our spineless political class to aggressively push for gun safety? Read More

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/ December 12, 2012 / Leave a comment

Progressive children's books that make fantastic holiday gifts!

Christmas is one of my favorite times of year, which might seem a bit strange since I’m an atheist who’s adamantly opposed to the consumer culture that’s destroying the planet. Nevertheless, I really enjoy spending time with my family (we actually like each other) and Christmas is one of the few times throughout the year when we can all hang out without work, school, errands, appointments and so on getting in the way.

I also love picking out special, meaningful gifts for my nieces and nephews (I have four of them, ages 8, 6, 3 and 2). For us progressives, it can be a challenge to navigate through the endless supply of crap toys laced with toxic chemicals, not to mention the gendered nature of just about every product designed for kids (superheroes and cars for boys, pink princesses and baby dolls for girls).

While there are a growing number of eco-friendly and (sometimes) gender-nuetral toy brands out there, I find myself increasingly turning to books for birthday and holiday gifts. Not just any books, but informative, empowering, progressive books geared towards children. And so far my nephews and nieces have loved them! Read More

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/ December 10, 2012 / Leave a comment

Black mother of two shot dead by Walmart security guard for suspected shoplifting

Warning: Stealing from Walmart can get you killed.

Last week, an off-duty Houston police officer shot and killed Sherry Frey, a 27-year-old black mother of two, for suspected shoplifting at a North Houston Walmart.

According to police, it all started when Deputy Louis Campbell, who worked an extra job as a Walmart security guard, was told by two Walmart employees that Shelly and her friends were stuffing merchandise into their purses. When Campbell confronted them at the store’s exit, police say one of the women hit him with her purse and ran. Campbell chased them into the parking lot and held their car door open to stop them from leaving, but the driver sped off, at which point Campbell fired at the car, striking Shelly Frey in the neck. She died shortly thereafter at a nearby apartment complex.

Police have unsurprisingly tried to pin blame on the victim, saying that when the car sped off, Campbell fired his gun out of fear for his life because the women were trying to run him over. Harris County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, Deputy Thomas Gilliband, said, “[The Driver] threw it in reverse and tried to run over the deputy” which “knocked him off balance and, in fear of his life and being ran over, he discharged his weapon at that point.” Gilliband also highlighted that one of the women hit Campbell with her purse when he tried to stop her at the store’s exit, as though being hit with a purse is somehow equivalent to shooting indiscriminately into a car. Read More

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