Not much we can do right now for college applicants of color, indebted graduates, or lgbt people facing discrimination from businesses, but we CAN donate to the Navajo water project https://www.navajowaterproject.org/
667 people were arrested last night. they are curfews in place. public transport is partially closed at night.
nahel, a 17-year-old, was shot tuesday by the police during a traffic stop. he wasn’t violent or armed, he wasn’t a threat. but he broke the law and tried to drive away, so the cops killed him.
and now france is rioting.
there is a video so the government isn’t trying to deny the facts for once. but the minister of the interior (in charge of the police) still insist that the police shot less people since the 2017 law on public safety.
but an analysis of police statistics by Le Monde, the most read newspaper in france, says otherwise. when the police shot on average 250 people each year in the five years prior to 2017, that number became 297 after 2017. for shots fired specifically on moving vehicles, the average used to be 119 and it’s now 150. before 2017, there was an average of 0.06 deaths per shot. now it’s 0.32.
more than ever, the police shoots to kill.
so france is burning.
One thing to note is that it’s extremely difficult (if not impossible) to get data to see if French police are targeting minorities more than others because it’s Literally Illegal for the French government to collect race and religion data. Egalité means everyone is French. There’s no such thing as the hyphenated nationality thing that we do in the US because apparently it’s racist (per the French government’s pov) for me to identify as a Jewish-Italian-Ethnic German American a friend of mine to identify as a Chinese-American.
The complete lack of demographic data due to Government Mandated Colorblindness enables french white supremacy. Cops in France routinely harass those descended from the former french colonies. And no matter how many generations someone’s family has been in France if your melanin isn’t an “acceptable shade” and/or your name is too un-French, many white french people will treat you like a foreigner and/or 2nd class citizen.
This murder of a child and subsequent attempted coverup has resulted in what’s basically Ferguson had it been nation-wide.
This is 100% true : what we call “ethnic statistics” are illegal (which is both a good thing and bad thing in my opinion but that’s a debate for another time). But we have some data still.
For example, the defender of rights (french independent administrative authority) published a study in 2017 stating that young men perceived as black or arab are 20 times more likely to be stopped by the police for identity checks.
And no one needs a study to know that know that the police disproportionately kills black and arab young men in situations like these. You just need to think of all the names we mourned : Zyed, Bouna, Adama, Nahel, Malik Oussekine… The list goes on and on and on and on
(oh and, about our current situation. 997 people were arrested last night. the increasing number makes sense as, even if things were just a bit quieter than the night before, 45 000 cops were deployed. so.)
it bears repeating in a more gentle manner but in the nicest way possible, there is a really issue with discrepancy when you talk about issues happening in different countries. when it’s anti-trans/gay laws in north america and western europe, it becomes “genocide”. when other countries, like mine, have jail and death penalties for being gay explicitly, it becomes a matter of “oh it’s illegal there” and sometimes, insidiously, “that’s just how they are, they’re less progressive.” and i need you all to know this is white supremacy talking and i, a gay person living in a country under the threat of death penalty, am as much of a victim as you are.
“Did you see the way that little girl looked at me? Kids. Little kids. They grow up believing that they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different. And I’m the monster? I don’t know what’s scarier. The fact that everyone in this kingdom wants to run a sword through my heart or that sometimes I just wanna let ‘em.” “We have to get you out of here. Over the wall. We won’t stop until we find some place safe, okay? We’ll go. Together. No matter what we do, we can’t change the way people see us.” “You changed the way you see me… Didn’t you?
NIMONA(2023), based on the comic by ND Stevenson, who came out as transgender in 2022
667 people were arrested last night. they are curfews in place. public transport is partially closed at night.
nahel, a 17-year-old, was shot tuesday by the police during a traffic stop. he wasn’t violent or armed, he wasn’t a threat. but he broke the law and tried to drive away, so the cops killed him.
and now france is rioting.
there is a video so the government isn’t trying to deny the facts for once. but the minister of the interior (in charge of the police) still insist that the police shot less people since the 2017 law on public safety.
but an analysis of police statistics by Le Monde, the most read newspaper in france, says otherwise. when the police shot on average 250 people each year in the five years prior to 2017, that number became 297 after 2017. for shots fired specifically on moving vehicles, the average used to be 119 and it’s now 150. before 2017, there was an average of 0.06 deaths per shot. now it’s 0.32.
last week would have been the 58th birthday of bernard baran, who was imprisoned in 1984 at the age of 19 after a pair of parents failed to get him expelled from his position as a teacher’s aide via a complaint about his uncloseted homosexuality and resorted to fabricating claims of pedophilia and sexual abuse. refusing a plea bargain for 5 years that demanded admission of guilt by maintaining his innocence, he received multiple life sentences and ultimately spent 21 years in prison. a scrawny boy of less than 100 pounds whose photo was published in the newspapers, he was beaten and sexually tormented, received threatening letters and a bounty was placed on his head. his conviction came in record time despite a total lack of evidence, countless contradictory and objectively impossible stories, and preschooler child witnesses outright asking for the “prize” they were “promised” after giving their testimony. his immediate appeal was denied, and afterwards his family was too poor to continue paying a lawyer. not a single lgbt organisation chose the side of a gay teenager being subjected to a kangaroo court in the middle of the satanic panic. ultimately, his release took until 2006, a few days after his 41st birthday, when a local advocacy group successfully proved the absurdity of his trial and the deliberate manipulation of evidence. he only got to live another 8 years in freedom, bearing mental and physical damage from years of abuse and negligent medical care. he needed a full set of new teeth to replace the ones that were punched out or broken and extracted. nevertheless, he enjoyed gardening and found work as a landscaper. his record has not been cleared to this day.
