Tag Archives: Dylann Roof

US Government Lists Non-Violent ‘Valve Turner’ Climate Activists as Threat on Par With Murderous Neo-Nazis

“Apparently DHS hasn’t gotten the memo that pipeline protesters are working non-violently to ensure that the children and grandchildren of DHS employees—and everyone else—have a habitable climate to live in.”

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 1-13-2020

Fifty-two-year-old Michael Foster, one of the “Valve Turners” pictured here on the day of the group’s action, was among the climate action advocates classified as a threat to domestic safety in a Department of Homeland Security document. (Photo: Shutitdown.today)

Climate action advocates on Monday condemned reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has placed non-violent environmental activists on a list of domestic terrorists alongside white supremacists and mass murderers.

Citing documents received by the non-profit group Property of the People, The Guardian reports how the Climate Direct Action members who shut off tar sands pipeline operations in an act of civil disobedience in October 2016, were called “suspected environmental rights extremists” by DHS. Continue reading →

Stop Making Excuses for Hateful White Men

Racism—not mental illness—was behind the killings on the Portland train. Let’s call it what it is so we can deal with it.

By Zenobia Jeffries. Published 6-5-2017 by YES! Magazine

Austin, Texas, USA – November 19, 2016: ‘White Lives Matter’ demonstrators display an American flag at a protest just south of the Capitol grounds. The ‘White Lives Matter’ demonstrators, numbering about 20 people at the most, came from Houston with the message that the hate crime law is unfair to white people.

A Somali-American Muslim woman was attacked and severely beaten in Columbus, Ohio, over the weekend, after coming to the defense of another Muslim woman who was being verbally assaulted.

Portland, Oregon, is still reeling after the previous weekend when two black teenage girls, one who is Muslim and was wearing a hijab, were verbally abused on a commuter train. Their attacker cut the throats of the three men who came to their aid, killing two. Continue reading →

Racism is not a mental illness

Racism isn’t all in individual heads; it doesn’t just reveal itself in interpersonal relations. History, politics, and economics matter.

By Jeremy Adam Smith. Published June 26. 2015 at openDemocracy.

Little Rock, 1959. Rally at state capitol, protesting the integration of Central High School. Photo by John T. Bledsoe [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Last week a young white man named Dylann Roof killed nine black people at prayer in South Carolina. Some have called it racism. Others say it was a crazy, isolated act. “He was one of these whacked out kids,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. “I don’t think it’s anything broader than that.”

Does Graham have a point? After the news of Charleston broke, many of my Facebook friends referred to racism itself as a “sickness” or “disease,” and some described Roof as “insane.” A great deal of research suggests that racial discrimination can harm the physical and mental health of its targets, mainly due to the increased stress racism can cause.

But are mentally ill people more likely to embrace and express racial prejudice? Could racism itself be a mental illness?

Probably not, says the research. Even proponents of this view, like psychiatrist Carl C. Bell, argue that mental illness is associated only with certain forms of prejudice, as when people with paranoid disorders “project unacceptable feelings and ideas onto other people and groups.” Prejudice becomes pathological only when it interferes with functioning in daily life, which is part of the definition of mental illness provided by the DSM (the diagnostic manual used by psychiatrists). Continue reading →

Occupy World Writes

The Movement Continues – Globally

Tag Archives: Dylann Roof