The Post About Beyonce's Formation and Kendrick Lamar's Grammy Performance

I have to say in all honesty that this month is going pretty well for black people. I know I'm late in posting this, but there is a good reason why.

Beyonce released a new video for her new single "Formation" which is basically just a celebration of her blackness. It features a cop car from New Orleans that is in flood water, a group of people in church, some young girls with beautiful Afros, and a line of ladies who are all dancing in formation. The song talks about how people attribute Beyonce's success to Illuminati, black love, taking her man to Red Lobster, and celebrating her blackness. Many love the song to death and this new song was a follow up to announce Beyonce's new Formation tour which has sold out tickets in the UK in under 30 minutes. Following her Formation single, Beyonce performed at the Super Bowl and killed it. Her dancers paid tribute to the Black Panther party and to 26 year old Mario Woods who was shot 20 times by San Francisco police. Of course, many white people were outraged by Beyonce's performance saying that it was racist and that the Super Bowl is not the platform for a political statement. Many white people are holding rallies against Beyonce and against Red Lobster because of her reference to the restuarant chain. These white people obviously think that Beyonce's song is racist and the fact that Red Lobster has not completely shamed Beyonce's for referencing them in her song that in turn they are also racist. So now there are white people who are boycotting Red Lobster and Beyonce. Good luck with that.

Kendrick Lamar was nominated for 10 Grammy's and won 5. He also had a performance that used as a platform to promote the Black Lives Matter movement. He started with his song The Blacker The Berry with him chained to other black men in jumpsuit representing the mass incarceration of black men in our society. This is correct by the way because African Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated than White Americans are. He then went into his song Alright which has become an anthem of hope for the Black Lives Matter platform. His dancers switch from depressing jumpsuits to neon painted jumpsuits while dancing to African style music. He goes into rapping the song Alright and goes into rapping his new verse "Untitled" coming up on his new album. His whole performance was very relevant and amazing and it made me happy that I am black.

Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar are using their influence to promote change and impact others. They are bringing forward issues that many people will not discuss in their everyday lives, but these issues affect millions of others. So when they see this strong representation of issues that directly affect African Americans, it is important. Like in his performance, Kendrick rapped "On Feb 26, I died too." February 26, 2012 is the day Travyon Martin died. He also rapped "2012 set us back 400 years" because 400 years ago is when we think about when black people had no rights, but unfortunately, that's still relevant today. Also, during his performance, CBS bleeped out his line in his rap lyric referencing to police brutality.

All in all these two events has made this Black History Month lit. 

The Post About The Chicago Police

The Chicago Police department have been under fire for quite some time. Maybe it's over the shooting of Laquan McDonald, a 17 year old teen who was shot 16 times in 13 seconds by police officer Jason Van Dyke after being seen that he was armed with a 3 inch knife.
For more on that story:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/us/laquan-mcdonald-video-records-comparison/

There have also been more killings by the Chicago Police Department. Quintonio LeGrier, 19, called police three times Dec. 26 to ask for help. During one of the calls, the dispatch operator hung up on the teen, who was later fatally shot by police. According to ABC News, audio of the 19-year-old's 911 calls made Dec. 26 were released late Monday by Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority, which is investigating both LeGrier's death and the death of his neighbor Bettie Jones. Jones, 55, was also shot and killed by police after she opened their apartment building door to let police in. Earlier that day, LeGrier called 911 asking that a police officer be sent to his address. The first call was made at 4:18 a.m., and the last call was made three minutes later.

"There's an emergency, can you send an officer?" LeGrier can be heard saying on one of the calls.

During one call, LeGrier didn't respond to the 911 operator's questions and the dispatcher hung up on the teen, ABC reports.

When the dispatcher asked the teen what was wrong, he responded, saying, "Someone is ruining my life."

ABC reports that LeGrier's father, Antonio LeGrier, called 911 at 4:24 a.m. and asked for an officer to be sent to the same address.

"My son has freaked out. I need an officer," Antonio LeGrier said on the call. "He's got a baseball bat in his hand right now."

accident and say that LeGrier was charging them when he was shot. According to autopsies by the Cook County medical examiner on both victims, LeGrier was shot six times and Jones, a mother of five, was shot once, ABC reports.

"Upon arrival, officers were confronted by a combative subject resulting in the discharging of the officer's weapon, fatally wounding two individuals," police said in a statement released shortly after the shooting.

But there is something more to the stories here. This post may not be related to LeGrier, but I felt it was essential to update you on what happened there. That story is important for the public to see. Now onto to the issue that I dearly wished to address.

Police dashcams. These devices were put into police vehicles in order to prevent instances like Laquan McDonald from happening. However, new evidence has risen to show why these events keep happening.

Police officers have been destroying their dashcams on purpose. Maintenance records reveal that Chicago police officers have been involved in routine destruction and sabotage of dashboard cameras and microphones. This troubling revelation sheds light on what happened the night of Oct. 20, 2014, when Officer Jason Van Dyke — who was recently released on bond after being charged with first-degree murder — shot and killed a 17-year-old black boy named Laquan McDonald. The incident was recorded by multiple police dash cameras, but many of them did not record audio, including Van Dyke's.

In Van Dyke's case, the reason for this is now clear: He'd intentionally made his camera not work. The 15-year veteran took the camera from his patrol car to the department's maintenance team in June 2014, three months after reporting it broken. Repairs were completed June 17. The next day, the camera was "suddenly" broken again. Then, on Oct. 8 — 12 days before Van Dyke killed McDonald — the maintenance team fixed it for a second time, citing "intentional damage" as the reason for its malfunction.

The night of Oct. 20, the same camera wasn't recording any audio. Investigators decided this was because the microphone hadn't been synced.

The camera's repeated breakdowns and failure to record sound appear to be part of a systematic issue in Chicago. Technicians have identified 90 cases between September 2014 and July 2015 where Chicago Police Department officers had actually hidden their dashcam mics in the glove compartment of their cars. While in 30 other instances, there was evidence that recording devices were "intentionally defeated" or not activated by police personnel, DNA Info reported.

Meanwhile, another audio recording — this time from a cellphone camera — played a key role in helping people understand the circumstances around 43-year-old Eric Garner's death in July 2014. "I can't breathe," Garner said, repeatedly, as police officers in Staten Island, New York, wrestled him to the ground and choked him to death.

Interim Chicago Police Supt. John Escalante responded to the revelations by formally reprimanding some officers, and by suspending others for up to three days. "To boil this down, the police department will not tolerate officers maliciously destructing equipment," police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told DNA Info.

For more information

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/28/laquan-mcdonald-shooting-jason-van-dyke-dashcam-mic-destroyed-chicago-police

The Post About Mass Deportation and Immigration Reform

We have all heard Trump's comments on Mexicans and how he feels about them. We all know these comments are extremely harmful towards those are of Hispanic descent. Only he never truly specified if he was talking about illegal immigrants or people who had immigrant parents. Now if we were to deport 11 million immigrants, what would really happen? The 11.3 million immigrants that would be deported spell a $1.6 trillion loss for the United States' economy.Trump's comments insinuate that the majority of these people in this specific ethnic are dangerous and without morals. Moreover, the fact that he is saying this to a cheering crowd is a bit frightening. 
Just think about it. If there are millions of people who agree this man's crazy and obviously racist speech, then that means that these people have been walking among us all this time. May be they are openly racist or low key racist or maybe they just like the fact that there someone who's screaming the crazy things they think on a daily basis on national television. Then they feel like their opinions have been validated if this man of power believes this then surely it has to be true. 

Only it is not true and it is extreme harmful talk to be happening during election season. 

But many of the things politicians are saying can be proven false with these statistics.

• Immigrants (both legal and unauthorized) are statistically immigrants (both legal and unauthorized) are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans (White American).
• Immigrants start small business at almost twice the rate of those born in the US. 
• Out of the 11 million immigrants that currently live in the US, only 10,000 of them have been convicted of a crime. Out of that 10,000, 130 of them were convicted of a violent crime and/or felony

All in all, these politicians are talking about a culture and community that they know nothing about. They're comments are invalid in my eyes because no one should feel intimidated in their own home.

This post will be updated shortly.

For more information:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/beckycatherineharris/what-it-feels-like-to-hear-trumps-speech-as-a-mexican-americ#.vrwoQDJ4M

http://mic.com/articles/133601/this-is-what-the-harrowing-future-of-mass-deportation-may-look-like#.g6y25yIVt

The Post About The Water In Flint, Michigan

Flint, Michigan is a majority black town with a man-made water crisis. In 2013, officials found out that someone switched out the Flint water supply from Lake Heron to a local lake. However, the pipes were old and caused lead to infiltrate the town's water supply. Soon the water was turning yellow and a blue/green color. Officials told the town's citizens that it was safe to drink. It has gotten national attention. President Obama has declared state of emergency for the town and no one has yet to suffer consequences for what happened.It has gotten strong attention from celebrities. The list of celebs who've now got Flint, Michigan, on their radars — and in their bank accounts — is long and growing: Sean "Diddy" Combs and Mark Wahlberg's co-owned water company AQUAhydrate promised to donate 1 million bottles; Eminem and Wiz Khalifa have also joined their effort. Madonna matched Jimmy Fallon's $10,000 donation

Rapper The Game went on Instagram and announced his personal connection to the crisis. "My younger sister and her children live there," he wrote, before criticizing other celebrities "on here faking using the word 'pledge' in their so-called donations." He then wrote that on behalf of his charity he donated $1 million.

Lead poisoning is irreversible and causes a host of developmental problems in kids. These include poor motor skills, learning delays, difficulty articulating speech and problems controlling behavior. While the extreme government neglect and deceit in Flint made what's happening there its own unique horror story — residents have been exposed to toxic drinking water for more than a year.

But why did they let this crisis go as far as it did? Does something else factor into this environmental emergency?
We must ask this question: Was the city neglected because it is mostly black and about 40% poor? 
Several advocates say yes. They charge that Flint residents are victims of "environmental racism" -- that is, race and poverty factored into how Flint wasn't adequately protected and how its water became contaminated with lead, making the tap water undrinkable. 

"Would more have been done, and at a much faster pace, if nearly 40 percent of Flint residents were not living below the poverty line? The answer is unequivocally yes," the NAACP said in a statement.

Others go further.

"While it might not be intentional, there's this implicit bias against older cities -- particularly older cities with poverty (and) majority-minority communities," said Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, who represents the Flint area.

"It's hard for me to imagine the indifference that we've seen exhibited if this had happened in a much more affluent community," he said.

For the record, Flint is 57% black, 37% white, 4% Latino and 4% mixed race; more than 41% of its residents live below the poverty level.

In an interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow this week, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder repeatedly said that he was taking responsibility for the crisis even as she reminded him that his then-chief of staff sent an email in July 2015 to a health department official warning of lead in the Flint drinking water.

The result is a crisis the state of Michigan has spent millions of dollars trying to solve. Believe it or not, their methods — including varying approaches to lead abatement — have led to a significant drop in lead levels in children's blood across the state over the last few years, according to the Center of Michigan.

But things are still bad. The cities where lead poisoning remains the most common vary in terms of their demographic makeup — some, like Detroit and Highland Park, are overwhelmingly black; others, like Lansing and Grand Rapids, are majority white — but most, unsurprisingly, have poverty rates well above the state and national averages. 

And as Gov. Rick Snyder scrambles to clean up his mess, it's worth remembering the problem is much bigger than Flint. The children of Michigan — and in other parts of the country — remain among its biggest casualties.

For more information:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/us/flint-michigan-water-crisis-race-poverty/

http://mic.com/articles/133777/lead-poisoning-in-other-parts-of-michigan-is-even-worse-than-it-is-in-flint#.6GJQC6eGk

The Post About The Heavily Edited Planned Parenthood Videos

Last summer, pro life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt released videos of undercover Planned Parenthood employees planning on selling fetal tissue for profit, which caused rapid backfire towards the woman's healthcare facilities organization. When releasing the video, many Republican presidental candidate hopefuls, such as Carly Fiorina, Donald Trump, and Mike Huckabee spoke up about it. Then when the shooting happened in Colorado Springs, they went back to the reports of Planned Parenthood reiterating false claims that the organization sells babies’ body parts.

Now all they have said has turned to shit since Texas has dropped the charges against Planned Parenthood and chose to issue indictments against the two journalists. A grand jury in Harris County, Texas has found the claims for the healthcare facility illegally selling fetal tissue to be completely baseless and false, they are sending Daleiden and Merritt to jail for 20 years for falsifying government documents, identification, and other documents in order to gain access to out of limits space at the Planned Parenthood.

This story will be updated

Stacey Dash and Why She's Wrong

So Stacey Dash went on Fox News and said that she believes that we need to cancel BET and the BET Awards because they only showcase black actors and not white actors. She also went on to say that we shouldn't have a Black History month.

For those of you who do not know who this is, that's fine because she is basically irrelevant. Stacey Dash is an African American actress who was a star in the film Clueless and in spin off series with that name.

Here is the interview below. 

Here's what I think: Stacey Dash's internalized racism is showing. Internalized racism is loosely defined as the internalization by people of racist attitudes towards members of their own ethnic group, including themselves. This can include the belief in ethnic stereotypes relating to their own group. Stacey Dash believes that black people shouldn't have their own channel because it is unfair to white people. However, there are plenty of channels on television that showcase white talent without even a single smudge of diversity. Stacey Dash also believes that having a Black History month is a disadvantage to white people. But she must have forgotten that all students of every race must learn all about white people in this class called history. Stacey has this idea that Black people have too much screen time and need to cut back for the white people to shine. But white people always shine! The reason why BET was made was because there wasn't enough representation of minority actors so they made a channel for them. That is also why there is Univision for those of Hispanic and Latino descent, Centric for African American women, and KBS World for those of Korean descent.

In order for there to be segregation of white and black people in the entertainment industry, Black people would have to be over represented in film and media. However, they are not. 

For instance, #OscarsSoWhite was trending because it was the second time where all of the nominees where majority white actors. Even for Creed, Sylvester Stallone was nominated instead of the lead actor Micheal B. Jordan. This has more to do with just BET or #OscarsSoWhite but with Hollywood's problem with casting more people diversity.

Too many times in a movie script it will call for an actor of color and instead the character will be played by a white actor. Emma Stone played a Chinese/Hawaiian women in the movie Aloha. Ben Affleck played a Mexican American in the movie Argo. In the superhero film featuring Batman, white actor Liam Neeson plays Ra's al Ghul, who is traditionally depicted in Batman comics to be of Arab descent. 

If you want me to talk more on this, please let me know.
That's what I think.