That was a question that had certainly been on my mind when I contrasted the response to this mass shooting to other mass shootings in more recent memory. Where was the outrage? Where was the massive media coverage? Where were the heightened conversations on gun control?
The FBI’s announcement that it was adding Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorist List and doubling the bounty for her to $2 million is cause for alarm for the peace and justice movement as a whole. Though Assata has been living in exile in Cuba since 1984, the ramifications of Washington’s recent move are far-reaching and dangerous. Here are some of my thoughts as to the whys in no particular order:
1. This is an attempt to rewrite the history of Black liberation and freedom movements and discourage those who organize today. The 1960s and 70s were rich with struggles against racism and injustice. It’s no secret that the FBI put Black liberation movements like the Black Panther Party in their crosshairs, literally. Local police joined forces and COINTELPRO expanded, also targeting movements in other communities of color – the Chican@ movement, Puerto Rican Independentistas, the American Indian movement, Asian American militants, anti-war and civil rights activists and leaders.
“We can be going about our lives - good and decent people. And this is the nature of terrorism. We don’t do anything to provoke them. They simply hate us for who we are and our way of life.”— Nicolle Wallace, political commentator speaking on the Katie Couric Show, April 17, 2013
The Boston Marathon bombing was a horrific event that has touched people’s lives well beyond that city. The families of Martin Richard, Lu Lingzi, Krystle Campbell and Sean Collier, as well as the dozens of wounded, have been deeply affected and will never be the same. The outpouring of sympathy and human solidarity across this country and the world is inspiring.
As for the motives of the alleged perpetrators, that’s still to be determined. Perhaps we’ll ultimately learn what drove these young men to carry out such a heinous attack. What we can be pretty certain of is that if they had been white and Christian, the response would have been different. If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was Christian, there is next to zero likelihood of an immediate call, as many Congressional Republicans are making, for him to be tried as an enemy combatant.
In the context of recent events, however, people who make statements like the one above seem oblivious to the overwhelming evidence that points to why we, the good and decent people of this country, might not be universally loved.
When I heard about the bombing at the Boston marathon, I did not say to myself, "Oh please don't let the bomber be a white person or our community will suffer a backlash just like after the Oklahoma City bombing." Say what? If there was ever a glaring example of white privilege, this is it.
Because we well know, ever since 9/11, millions of Americans of Muslim or Arab descent (or those who might "look" like them) are de facto suspected terrorists. Such racism has been lethal for a number of citizens whose skin color or clothing sparked knee-jerk violence. Other survived the violent attacks while some Muslim mosques and schools did not.
The Right, hours after Monday's bombing, was already casting the blame on Muslims. As Steven Rosenfeld notes in AlterNet, "Almost immediately predictable hysterical right-wing voices jumped into the debate — and surprisingly were featured on liberal Salon.com — including the anti-Muslim media hound Pam Geller, who immediately blamed a Jihadi for the bombing."
Indefinite detention without charges or trial. It goes against all our notions of legal rights and due process. Yet, our government is into its 12th year of operations at the Guantanamo Bay prison where 166 men are still being held, 86 of whom have been cleared for release but remain in detention, including 56 from Yemen.
Jody Sokolower was teaching 9th grade social studies on September 11, 2001. “Progressive teachers at my school and around the country were deeply involved in figuring out how to engage students in critical thinking and social justice issues raised by 9/11,” she pointed out.
“The same was true before the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. We had meetings, we planned curriculum, we talked with students about going to demonstrations,” Sokolower said.
Sokolower is the editor of a new curriculum, Teaching About The Wars, published by Rethinking Schools to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Rethinking Schools is a nonprofit, independent publisher of educational materials and curricula with a strong emphasis on equity and social justice.
What inspired this collection? Sokolower says that as the wars in the Middle East ground on, she noticed a deafening silence.
“Teachers who wouldn't dream of ignoring the Underground Railroad or the Spanish American War weren't teaching their students about the roots of the U.S. wars against Iraq or the current use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen,” she said. “It's almost as if we have accepted endless war as inevitable, as part of the wallpaper.”
Teaching About The Wars also counters the ways textbooks are addressing the U.S. War in Iraq. Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Schools’ Curriculum Editor, authored the article, “Ten Years After: How Not to Teach About the Iraq War,” that examined one of the textbooks commonly used in school districts around the country, Holt McDougal’s Modern World History.
“The section in Modern World History on the U.S. war with Iraq might as well have been written by Pentagon propagandists,” Bigelow writes.
“In an imitation of Fox News, the very first sentence of the Iraq war section places the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein side by side. The book presents the march to invasion as reasonable and inevitable…”
Bigelow told War Times that textbooks like this are “one of the many ways that students are mistaught the realities of war and fed the myth that the United States is a force for justice in the world – already planting ideological seeds for future wars.”
Tim Wise is one of the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States. He is the author of six books including Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority and his highly acclaimed memoir, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. His forthcoming book is Culture of Cruelty: How America's Elite Demonize the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future (City Lights Publishers). Wise sat down with War Times to talk about the book’s focus that builds on his fierce critique of racial privilege to discuss a related issue: class disparity and a culture of cruelty that demonizes those in need.
Felicia Gustin: Tim, much of your work has focused on racism and white privilege though you've often looked at how these intersect with class inequities. Talk about how the idea for this book came about.
Tim Wise: In some ways, I think I’ve been moving towards this in the last three books I’ve done for City Lights (Dear White America, Colorblind and Between Barack and a Hard Place) that included a fairly heavy element of class analysis. The argument that I’ve been making is that in many ways the problem now confronting white America is the indifference that white America has had toward economic injustice because it was perceived that the only people getting hit by that were people of color. So there was a certain ambivalence and that is now starting to catch up with white people with the financial crisis and the housing meltdown.
We’ve also noticed over the last year to 18 months in particular this very steady stream of dehumanizing, overly cruel rhetoric aimed at not just the poor but also the unemployed, people who are out of work for 26 weeks and need an extension on unemployment benefits, or 52 weeks. Sure, it’s been coming for a long time and we’ve certainly noticed it for years but we’re seeing more of this steady drumbeat of rhetoric, of the takers vs. the makers; there’s the Mitt Romney tape during the campaign about the 47% of the American public who just don’t want to work.
You can hear this rhetoric regurgitated on Fox and on talk radio. There’s this constant stream of critique, not just about social safety net programs which had been critiqued by conservatives for years, but a real critique of the core humanity of people who need those programs, whether it’s health care, unemployment insurance or food stamps. It’s people saying things like people should be ashamed to be on food stamps, we should drug test them, we should make them jump through all kinds of hoops, we should make it harder for them, we should make them feel pain. Literally people saying these things. Or saying the poor aren’t really poor after all because they have washing machines and color TVs and microwaves.
After hearing that for so long I just started to ask the question, why is it that the culture has come to this place when there was a period maybe 70 years ago, even 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th century, where it was understood that if there was any group that had bad values and pathological behavior, it wasn’t poor people and it wasn’t unemployed people, it was rich people. They were called robber barons for a reason. They were not venerated. They were not respected. They were despised.
He staved off attempted coups, survived a kidnapping and attempted assasinations, and endured an intense barrage of U.S. propaganda against him. But today, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez lost his battle with cancer and passed away at the age of 58.
Investigative reporter Greg Palast covered Venezuela for BBC Television Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine and met with Chavez on several occasions. To counter the anti-Chavez propaganda, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a FREE download based on Palast's several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, and filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available.
Writes Palast:
"Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: It’s the oil. And it’s the Koch Brothers – and it’s the ketchup.
Reverend Pat Robertson said, “Hugo Chavez thinks we’re trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.” It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush’s State Department. Despite Bush’s providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we’ll get there), Hugo remained in office, reelected and wildly popular.
Talk about being caught in a time warp. The antiquated U.S. embargo against Cuba has never looked so outdated, so illogical and so totally inexplicable to any of the other 179 nations that have relations with the island.
So you think it’s going to end anytime soon? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Sure, with the U.S. elections over, there is a cacophony of voices saying the opportunity is at hand.
Writing in the Havana Note, journalist Anya Landau French points out that “President Obama’s new Secretary of State, former senator John Kerry has long criticized U.S. Cuba policy. (Obama’s) nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has never minced words when it came to our “outdated” approach to Cuba. Both men walk in (or hope to walk in) to their new jobs with long and clear records opposing U.S. sanctions on Cuba.”
In a February 9th editorial, The Boston Globe said “the timing is ripe for a new diplomatic agenda with Cuba,” citing Cuba’s recent reforms to its immigration policies that allow Cubans to travel abroad freely and allow those who have emigrated or fled to return home.
“These changes, and the beginning of Obama’s second term,” says The Globe, “create an unusual opportunity to acknowledge Cuba’s gestures and respond in a substantive way. Rather than simply extend policies that, in five decades, have failed to dislodge the Castros, the Obama administration has a chance to drag U.S. policy into the 21st century.”
Last year, my daughter performed in and directed UCLA’s production of Eve Ensler's award-winning play "The Vagina Monologues." The show was part of a worldwide campaign to raise awareness and money for organizations working to stop violence against women and girls.
As I get ready to head to New Orleans for a conference, I came across this article by David Dennis in The Guardian – 
The FBI’s announcement that it was adding Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorist List and doubling the bounty for her to $2 million is cause for alarm for the peace and justice movement as a whole. Though Assata has been living in exile in Cuba since 1984, the ramifications of Washington’s recent move are far-reaching and dangerous. Here are some of my thoughts as to the whys in no particular order:
eeply affected and will never be the same. The outpouring of sympathy and human solidarity across this country and the world is inspiring.
When I heard about the bombing at the Boston marathon, I did not say to myself, "Oh please don't let the bomber be a white person or our community will suffer a backlash just like after the Oklahoma City bombing." Say what? If there was ever a glaring example of white privilege, this is it.
Indefinite detention without charges or trial. It goes against all our notions of legal rights and due process. Yet, our government is into its 12th year of operations at the Guantanamo Bay prison where 166 men are still being held, 86 of whom have been cleared for release but remain in detention, including 56 from Yemen.
“The same was true before the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. We had meetings, we planned curriculum, we talked with students about going to demonstrations,” Sokolower said.
History. 
oric aimed at not just the poor but also the unemployed, people who are out of work for 26 weeks and need an extension on unemployment benefits, or 52 weeks. Sure, it’s been coming for a long time and we’ve certainly noticed it for years but we’re seeing more of this steady drumbeat of rhetoric, of the takers vs. the makers; there’s the Mitt Romney tape during the campaign about the 47% of the American public who just don’t want to work.
After hearing that for so long I just started to ask the question, why is it that the culture has come to this place when there was a period maybe 70 years ago, even 100 years ago at the turn of the 20th century, where it was understood that if there was any group that had bad values and pathological behavior, it wasn’t poor people and it wasn’t unemployed people, it was rich people. They were called robber barons for a reason. They were not venerated. They were not respected. They were despised. 
Writing in the Havana Note, journalist Anya Landau French points out that “President Obama’s new Secretary of State, former senator John Kerry has long criticized U.S. Cuba policy. (Obama’s) nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has never minced words when it came to our “outdated” approach to Cuba. Both men walk in (or hope to walk in) to their new jobs with long and clear records opposing U.S. sanctions on Cuba.”