Portside

Frank Serpico, who testified against NYPD police corruption in 1972, joined more than 100 African American uniformed officers who demonstrated at a rally supporting NFL player Colin Kaepernick's objections to police abuse and inequality. "Kaepernick was not disrespecting the flag or our vets. I believe that Kaepernick was protesting a corrupt system of justice that allows some police to use excessive force, even the taking of innocent life, without consequences"

Amid protesting in St. Louis over the acquittal of a white police officer accused of murdering a black man after a car chase, a youth football team decided to take a knee during a pregame rendition of the national anthem. The team's coach said that the decision was made by the eight-year-olds following "a good teaching moment" about what was happening in the nearby city, and why.

Abolition of the carceral state is a fundamental political goal for the Left today: specifically, abolishing the carceral state’s logic and institutions. . Abolition is both a goal and a discourse: it informs the strategies we adopt, as well as the framework we use to critique the carceral state and describe alternatives.

Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, is being blackballed — itself a revealing phrase — from the National Football League with the collusion of the all-white owners. He is ostracized because a year ago he exercised his First Amendment right to free speech by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem, as a symbol of protest against police shootings of unarmed African-American men.

As long as white children are constructed as innocent, we must continue to demand that children of color are as well. The idea of childhood innocence carries so much political force, we can’t allow it to be a whites-only club. We argue that black and brown children are as innocent as white children, we assume that childhood innocence is purely positive. The idea of childhood innocence itself is not innocent: It’s part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy.

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The truth is ugly as sin. The NFL is denying Colin Kaepernick employment not because he isn’t “good enough” but because he is being shut out for the crime of using his platform to protest the killing of black kids by police. NFL owners don’t make pariahs out of players who beat women or face accusations of murder. Kaepernick’s pariah status is about sending a shot across the bow at every political athlete—particularly black athletes—that they better toe the line.

A call for solidarity for justice for Walter Scott from Black Lives Matter-Charleston, South Carolina in response to the trial of former South Carolina police officer, Michael Slager, who shot and killed Scott ended in a mistrial this week.

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Before this year, we basically weren’t even able to really provide a very effective number of how many people with mental illness were killed by law enforcement officers. We know, across the country, that people with a mental illness are languishing in jails and emergency rooms, because we simply don’t have enough hospital beds for them.