Random Roundup

UPDATE (2007.03.20): In the comment thread, Yolanda brings us the good news about Tyrone Brown which I hadn't seen: he's free! More from Dallas Morning News:

Tyrone Brown came home Thursday to a place he'd never been and relatives he'd never met, 17 years after a single positive marijuana test while he was on probation led a Dallas judge to sentence him to life in prison.

Mr. Brown guffawed one minute and melted into tears the next. At every turn, he struggled to take stock of what freedom looked like: his face on T-shirts, a bedroom with a window that opens, a kitchen full of soul food, and well-wishers and camera crews from as far away as New York.

Also in comments, Blackamazon mentions Shaquanda Cotton:

Shaquanda Cotton, 15, of Paris Texas, is entering the second year of a 7-year prison term for pushing a hall monitor at her high school 2005. There were no injuries in the incident and this was her first arrest. Cotton is black. The same judge had recently sentenced a white teenager to probation for arson.

[end of update]

~ ~ ~

Since my forearms are still burning after having just spent a couple of hours chipping and scooping a thick sheet of ice that had trapped a car on the shoulder of the road near my cottage (it got stuck there during this weekend's storm, then got plowed in and embedded in ice), I'm gonna go easy on the typing right now, but will gladly offer a random medley of clips from today's web wanderings. Actually the ice-chipping was pretty fun, and the afternoon sun was doing its best to extend a warm hand through the thin cold air. Ah, the joys of northeastern winters... :-)

Kicking things off, CityNews reports on a story of partial justice long delayed:

Saturday was Ralph Lee's 107th birthday, but for the Canadian, who just happens to also be the oldest surviving subject of Canada's infamous Chinese head tax, it was also the day he finally got the compensation and apology he'd waited so many years for.

"Apart from the fact that I'm happy that grandpa's alive to receive the apology, it's a mixture of emotions," said grand-daughter Landy Anderson.

Fron 1885 to 1923 Chinese immigrants in Canada were charged a head tax. Lee himself paid $500, which at the time was two years pay for the young man.

"When he came over here he worked pretty hard to make a living," said daughter Faye Lee.

"He was only 12 years old and he had to work in a restaurant and wash dishes while going to school at the same time."

Lee was one of many in attendance last June in Ottawa when the Canadian government announced both the compensation and released an apology for the tax and the ensuing 24-year ban on Chinese immigration.

"On behalf of the people and government of Canada we offer a full apology to Chinese Canadians for the head tax and express our deepest sorrow for the subsequent exclusion of Chinese immigrants," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that day.

That apology came with a $20,000 settlement offered to surviving head tax subjects or their spouses, though for some of their descendents that's nowhere near enough.

"It's a wonderful thing that there was an apology, and that redress has been given to surviving head tax payers and spouses, but this really only represents 0.6 per cent of the people who really suffered," said attendee Colleen Hua.

Currently only about 500 Chinese Canadians are eligible for the compensation. If the offer were extended to the families of those who paid the head tax - 3,000 people would be eligible.

I also stumbled upon an older article from the Dallas Morning News telling the radically different stories of Tyrone Brown and John Alexander Wood, two men who violated probation in Texas:

First came the poor man, barely 17 years old – too young to buy beer or vote, but an adult under the Texas penal code. He took part in a $2 stickup in which no one got hurt. He pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery and was put on 10 years of probation.

He broke the rules once, by smoking marijuana. A Dallas judge responded in the harshest possible way: He replaced the original sentence with a life term in prison.

There Tyrone Brown sits today, 16 years later, tattooed and angry and pondering self-destruction. "I've tried suicide a few times," he writes. "What am I to make of a life filled with failure, including failing to end my life?" [ Pictured: Tyrone Brown, inset John Alexander Wood. ]

Now the flip side of the coin, also from Judge Keith Dean's court: A well-connected man pleaded guilty to murder – for shooting an unarmed prostitute in the back – and also got 10 years of probation.

The killer proceeded to break the rules by, among other things, smoking crack cocaine. He repeatedly failed drug tests. He was arrested for cocaine possession in Waco while driving a congressman's car, but prosecutors there didn't press charges.

Judge Dean has let this man stay free and, last year, exempted him from most of the usual conditions of probation. John Alexander Wood no longer must submit to drug tests or refrain from owning a gun or even meet with a probation officer. He's simply supposed to obey the law and mail the court a postcard once a year that gives his current address.

The judge's written court policies say that defendants who have broken the rules are not eligible for postcard probation. But no one can make him obey his own standards. Indeed, judges in Texas and most other states have few limits on possible punishments when defendants violate probation, which sets the stage for lawful but extreme disparities.

Here in progressive blogland, Sylvia at The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum links to an interview with Yuri Kochiyama about her friendship and experiences with Malcolm X, conducted by my favorite radio journalist Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about this. When Malcolm came back, he was also talking about an expanded attitude about human rights, something he had talked about before, as well. Not so much civil rights, but the rights of African Americans to be fully equal was an issue of international human rights.

YURI KOCHIYAMA: Oh, yes. And that's why Malcolm thought that this civil rights thing was really nothing, because African people don't have to wait until some president of another country, even United States, would give civil rights. I mean, Africans already have human rights. And he felt, too, that it was too narrowed down when they would be using words that they were just fighting for civil rights. And I think what was so wonderful is that Malcolm taught his group, American – well, black Americans here, about the history of Africa, where they became colonized, and then he told the people in Africa what was happening here, how blacks were treated, and that many of the African young people didn't even know anything hardly about slavery, because this country never told them anything.

Sylvia adds:

I think this interview is particularly meaningful because of the beauty of people uniting despite the reservations, despite the differences — or even because of those reservations and differences.  I listened to the audio and I read the interview, and I thought, “Yes, this is what an alliance would look like, would sound like — this is what we’re striving for.”  This unity is what builds when we share our histories, when we air out our grievances, and when we collaborate against violence, against violation, against all of those forces that try to drive us apart as they beat us down.  When we unite against events like immigration attacks and forced starvation, against war-mandated rape and destruction of livelihoods, we’re fighting against these wedges in perception and these worries about what we can and cannot do.  We can do a whole fucking lot when we work together. This is never a one-person fight.  When we join hands in direct and indirect action, we’re sending a message that unity is not only possible, it’s required for getting things done and getting them done well.  And we have to continue striving.

Meanwhile on this weekend of Irish American festivities, Fire Witch scoffs at Patrick in favor of Bernadette. That is, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who describes coming to the US in the 1970s:

I was not very long there until, like water, I found my own level. 'My people' — the people who know about oppression, discrimination, prejudice, poverty and the frustration and despair that they produce — were not Irish Americans. They were black, Puerto Rican, Chicano. And those who were supposed to be 'my people', the Irish Americans who know about English misrule and the Famine and supported the civil-rights movement at home, and knew that Partition and England were the cause of the problem, looked and sounded to me like Orangemen. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home. In New York, I was given the key to the city by the mayor, an honour not to be sneezed at. I gave it to the Black Panthers.

Over at Women of Color, Brownfemipower brings us the words of Deborah A. Miranda:

Being an Indian woman in the Ivory Tower at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not just a financial drain, or an intellectual challenge. Academia is a soul-breaking endeavor. Every university in this country is built upon Native land that was stolen with great loss of indigenous life. Within those universities, Indian people are presented with professors, peers, and syllabi that accuse us of stealing someone else’s entitlement. In the library we are fantasies–vanished, invisible, quaint. When, by some miracle, a judge upholds the law and “allows” us our treaty rights, our acts are viewed as tantamount to treason, barbarous cruelty, savagery. [...]

What I have tried to communicate here are the dangers we face as members of a culture based on lies. Even within the “us” of the women of color communities, I still feel like a “Them,” and there are historical cultural reasons for this sense of alienation. Educated within anti-Indian institutions and U.S. culture, women of color learn the same deafnesses to Indian voices that white graduate students and professors absorb and pass on. There is a peculiar relationship between women of color and Indian women, with solidarity on the one hand, silence on the other.

And finally, The Unapologetic Mexican shows us via his cross-post at the rather pallid progressive watering hole Jesus' General that there's no better way to stir the bile of red-blooded blue-balled white-men than to satirically mock the saintly virtues of Angelina Jolie in the wake of her adopting a 3-year-old Vietnamese boy named Pham Quang Sang and promptly renaming him Pax:

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Actress Angelina Jolie picked up a new Baby of Color (BoC) from a Vietnamese orphanage Thursday. She arrived carrying her 5-year-old Child of Color, Maddox (whom she adopted from nearby Cambodia in 2002), and wearing a huge pendant sporting a photograph of 2-year-old Zahara, whom she adopted from Ethiopia. Together, Jolie and her Latest Brown Baby (LBB) went to a ceremony where Jolie was expected to detour to Laos, so she could adopt a third non-White child, officials said. When pressed, Jolie would not swear that she wouldn't "browse a bit" if she found any "exceptionally exotic-looking" infants along the way.

Careful there, Nez, your iconoclasm is starting to cross the line. I mean, it's one thing to satirize, oh say, Jesus Christ. But Angelina Jolie? Have you no sense of decency, sir? ;-)

Comments

[Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez]

they called me a TROLL! o, the hurt. :(

[Sylvia]

Should've done the blacklight test, Nez...

And I wouldn't joke so lightly about Ms. Jolie, Kai. Or as I like to call her, Holy Jolie.

[Eli]

So Angelina Jolie is turning into Crazy Cat Lady, only with Asian babies?

[Blackamazon]

I missed Shaquanda Cotton in the Dallas article cause I didn't click over . My urge to stab people is high enough already Ill say what I said last time.

FREE ZAHARA/PAX !

[Sylvia]

Is there something up with the Dallas News server? The link's not working for me. :(

[Yolanda Carrington]

Update: Tyrone Brown was freed by conditional pardon just a few weeks ago by Texas Gov. Perry. I'm still mad that he had to go through sixteen years of hell, but I'm happy he's free!

[Kai]

Yolanda, Thank God Almighty! That's great news! I just hope he'll have somewhere good and safe to land on the outside, it's not going to be easy for him, especially with the totally justified bitterness and rage he must harbor. He'll never get those 16 horrible years back, but still, this kinda makes my day.

Thanks for bringing the good news. :-)