racism

Racist Neighborhood WFOR-TV – YouTube.

TOP 31 Racist Tweets Against Obama After Re-Election – YouTube.

12-04-2013 Racism in the Netherlands – My experiences long video – YouTube.

A woman accusing her former employer of racial discrimination says a lynching comment was “the last straw.”

Garnetta Cromwell testified Tuesday before the province’s Human Rights Commission. Her complaint is filed against Leon’s Furniture Store, her employer from October 2004 to May 2008.

Cromwell, an African-Canadian, alleged the word “lynching” was used before she went to a performance review meeting at the beginning of May 2008. She said four supervisors were in the office inside its Burnside location when one of them made a discriminatory comment.

“As I was coming to the office he said, ‘Everyone out, it’s time for a lynching,’” she testified Tuesday. “I was speechless.”

Cromwell resigned from Leon’s three weeks later, and filed her complaint with the commission at the end of the month.

Cromwell also alleged she was called racial names during her tenure at Leon’s, including Condoleezza Rice, Contessa and “sunshine,” a derogatory word her mother told her meant “you’re so black that it shines,” she said.

In another instance, Cromwell testified a supervisor touched her hair and said, “it felt like wool.”

During her testimony, Cromwell welled up with tears as she described the anxiety disorder she developed from the discriminations she faced.

“Everything was falling, crashing down on me,” she said.

An independent adjudicator for the commission will determine whether or not discrimination occurred.

Lisa Teryl, counsel for the commission, told reporters discrimination doesn’t need to be the main factor in determining an employment disadvantage under the Human Rights Act.

“If any part of that disadvantage is connected to race, it contaminates everything, and so we find that’s discrimination,” said Teryl.

Cromwell is seeking loss of income and general damages from Leon’s Furniture.

The hearing will resume Thursday morning.

Racial discrimination case involving Leon’s Furniture focuses on alleged ‘lynching’ comment | Metro.

CFPB Director Richard Cordray; official photo

Claiming racial discrimination in auto lending, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking aim at one of the sacred cows of auto retailing, where dealerships in effect mark up the customer’s interest rate on an auto loan and share the profits with the lender, potentially to the tune of hundreds of dollars per loan.

It’s a sensitive topic for auto dealers and lenders, who vehemently deny discriminating against legally protected classes of borrowers, like minorities or women.

From the CFPB’s perspective, lenders open the door to discrimination when lenders allow dealers to set retail rates. Part of the thinking is that dealerships have a built-in incentive to push rates as high as possible because the higher the rate, the more they get paid for their share of the final interest rate.

The CFPB warned auto lenders in March that it is using the so-called “disparate impact” theory to look for racial discrimination in auto loans. A disparate impact means lending practices have the effect of charging protected classes higher interest rates. The discrimination doesn’t even have to be intentional, said CFPB Director Richard Cordray.

The two sides of the argument could scarcely disagree more. For starters, dealers object to the term “dealer markup.” Industry insiders call it “dealer reserve.” From the dealer point of view, the term “markup” implies the dealer is simply tacking on an additional cost to the consumer without doing any work.

In fact, dealerships typically distribute a customer’s credit application to several lenders, who compete for the business. That’s a major convenience for the customer, and the competition among lenders keeps interest rates low. Even with a dealership as a middleman, rates on so-called “indirect” loans negotiated at dealerships routinely beat rates on direct-to-consumer loans from a bank, according to dealer advocates. The National Automobile Dealers Association claims that changing the existing system could stifle competition and end up costing consumers more.

The CFPB says it accepts that dealerships add value, and the bureau agrees dealerships should be compensated for negotiating loans. What the CFPB objects to is the discretion dealerships have – within ceilings imposed by the lenders — to charge what the market will bear.

That can result in two customers being quoted two different rates, even though they have similar credit histories and the same likelihood to pay, the bureau says. Instead of dealer discretion in setting rates, one suggestion from the CFPB is to substitute a flat fee for dealers for negotiating loans. The big question for all parties is whether flat fees on average would be equivalent to dealer reserve.

This isn’t the first time auto lenders and dealers have been accused of having a disparate impact. Most auto lenders joined a series of legal settlements in class-action lawsuits in the mid-2000s, which imposed voluntary ceilings on dealer reserve. Depending on loan terms, the maximum dealerships can add to the rate is around 2.5 percentage points. In practice, due to competition dealer reserve rarely reaches the ceiling and often averages less than 1 percentage point, according to the dealer association.

The ongoing CFPB actions could result in an even lower ceiling, or else flat fees.

Feds Scrutinize Auto Loans For Racial Discrimination – Forbes.

[Editor's note: This week The Final Call features a special guest editorial written by Student National Spokesperson Ava Muhammad. In addition to her role as Nation of Islam spokesperson, Ava Muhammad is also a student minister and an attorney.]

I recently  purchased  a  book  titled “African Americans in  Chicago.”

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan with his son Mustapha Farrakhan.

       EDITORIAL      

It was a photographic history and included beautiful images of attractive, well -dressed Black families, such as that of Emmett McBain, who became a major figure in the advertising industry.

Another featured Hiram Revels, the first Black member of the United States Senate, with his daughter and grand-daughters. On the last page was a lovely portrait of President Obama, the First Lady and their children. The author noted his effort to include the “visage of the entire family” which is usually ignored in the mainstream media’s stereotypes.

Wealth, power and the building of human potential cannot happen without families. Family is not a project, it is a process. It takes generations to achieve the level of stability essential to the development of a nation. The institution of slavery could never have existed without the destruction of the Black family unit—again, we are looking at a process—which took generations (1555-1619) to complete. From the beginning, the agenda of White America has been the destruction of the Black family unit. The special relationships between husband and wife, father and son, sisters and brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, are essential and irreplaceable. Destroy the family, you destroy the community and with it any hope of a nation.

The survival of this world in its present structure, depends entirely on Black people and all people of the Earth accepting fundamental philosophy of White supremacy. The Teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, through his National Representative, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, pose a formidable threat to this world. He is preaching a system rooted in belief in and the worship of One God; the sanctity of marriage and family; freedom, justice, equality and economic independence.

Minister Farrakhan is in the midst of a 52-week lecture series, “The Time and What Must Be Done,” airing weekly over the internet, accessible to virtually every living person on the Earth. He is making bold declarations in an environment that provides the viewer with a calm, relaxed, person-to-person experience that can be had in private.

“And now we have reached, as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad said, ‘The end of this world and its system of things… the world in which we are presently living is a world that was ‘doomed’ from its very beginning. And this world, now, is in peril; it is perishing, it is going down…God has come, and has chosen for Himself the despised, the rejected, the unloved, the unwanted Black Man and Woman of America to be the Cornerstone of His New Kingdom of Righteousness.”

The corporate-owned United States government has a violent history of assassinating, incarcerating, deporting or ruining the reputation of every Black leader who dares speak truth. What can it do about one man who will not bow to the forces that have crushed our people for centuries? This is a man not restricted by fear, who challenges them in front of the world, “Don’t let up on me, because I surely am not going to let up in the preaching of this word. So come against me, then, with all you have, because it won’t be enough to stop what God has in store for you.”

The media has a policy of keeping the Nation of Islam out of the news, because press coverage, positive or negative, tends to increase our ranks. But desperate times call for desperate measures. So the Chicago Sun Times, in the April 22nd edition, ran a front page story with the Nation of Islam’s Student Supreme Captain Mustapha Farrakhan as the subject. Mustapha Farrakhan is the third son of Minister Farrakhan and has been the head of his security detail for decades. He has been at his father’s side at venues all over the globe. The significance of his work cannot be overstated, since there has never been a time when his father was not a target for assassination. The Sun Times is a vehicle for rolling out a fresh propaganda campaign against Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. The ultimate target, however, is the poor, oppressed Black man and woman of America, whose only path to salvation is to repent of the evil we practice that we have learned from our open enemy.  If the enemy can get between us and the one guiding us to our salvation, we will perish with the enemy.

The story is textbook propaganda, a powerful form of  psychological warfare.  In the midst of  a growing wave of love and acceptance of the man and the message,  this story  was written and published to produce a negative emotional response from the Black community in general and the believing community specifically. The desired outcome is to create a negative view of Minister Farrakhan and reinforce it with an assault on the second and even third generation of his family.

A separate report being published in the Final Call will inform the public of  facts which the Sun Times deliberately omitted or presented in a selective and misleading way. Both the front page and inside story banners are cloudy, loaded messages—designed to arouse negative thoughts in the reader,  but falling short of assertions that would bring about a lawsuit. The enemy is initiating a deliberate and systematic effort to shape not only the perception, but the behavior of Black people. Why?

The  white  power  structure  recognizes a danger to itself that you and I don’t necessarily see.  They know that Black people have the capacity  to return to their natural state at any moment. They are keenly aware that with the Minister talking to us in the way that he is, the probability that we will transform in an instant increases every day. This is but one move in a desperate attempt to save White supremacy. It exposes the enemy’s hatred of the son’s love and respect for the father; it exposes their bitter desire to insure the work of the father does not continue through that son or any of the sons, or the daughters, or the followers. Having found no way to even calculate how to defeat Farrakhan, they are committed to making sure his power and influence is limited to his lifetime.

Referring to  Minister Farrakhan  as “the country’s leading radical Black Muslim”, the reporter writes he was unable to get answers to “detailed questions” about the relationship between the police department of a predominantly Black suburb of Chicago and the Nation of Islam’s head of security. The Sun Times wants readers to know that the mayor of Harvey, Illinois is a friend of the Farrakhan family—a matter of grave concern. Do you think that a positive relationship between Black officials over a city—even a small, struggling one— and the Nation of Islam, is not a serious problem for White people? Think again.

Throughout the story, the reporter complains bitterly that the son uses a police squad car with a Harvey sticker on the plate to lead “Minister Farrakhan’s imposing, presidential-style motorcade of matching, black Hummer SUV’s to several impromptu ‘walkabout’ appearances on the South and West sides.”

How dare a Black man have a motorcade? A Chicago police spokesman said they have no record of a request for a motorcade. A White Republican police chief from Elmhurst, Illinois is interviewed. He wants to know, who is Louis Farrakhan to have a motorcade? Remember, this world operates on a philosophy of white supremacy.

It is inconceivable that Black people dare to befriend one another, pool their resources, protect their leadership from harm, and never seek permission from white authority. It is alarming that last summer, without seeking their permission, Minister Farrakhan led the Fruit of Islam among our people in the so-called ghettoes of Chicago where the murder rates are among the highest in the country. The people poured out in droves to look at him, listen to him, be near him. And unless something is done about it, they will follow him.

No, the Minister did not seek approval for a motorcade. He did not ask permission to call the Million Man March, either. The writer gratuitously offers that while his “national influence has greatly diminished”, Minister Farrakhan“remains a charismatic figure to many African-Americans in the Chicago area”. Actually, anyone who possesses influence in Chicago tends to be influential elsewhere. President Obama. Oprah. Reverend Jesse Jackson. If you know history, you know that Chicago is Black America.

The Sun Times is the number one newspaper in Chicago and ninth in the country. On any given day of the week, it has a circulation of more than 250,000 (450,000 when you add the suburbs). You cannot achieve those numbers with “has-beens” and “wannabees” on the front page. Indeed, when a man is of such interest that his children receive front page coverage on the ninth largest newspaper in America—I would venture to say his influence is growing, rather than diminishing. And you can rest assured that with P. Diddy calling for his millions of  Twitter followers to watch The Time and What Must Be Done, and  Erykah Badu calling him a

“Superhero” and a “brave and beautiful being,” we are witnessing a meteoric rise in the numbers of young people, who are being influenced by Minister Farrakhan.

In the Holy Qur’an, Allah calls upon us to use our reasoning powers. Let us obey Him when the enemy strikes in madness.

I close this writing with an excerpt from Closing the Gap, by Brother Jabril   Muhammad.

Brother Jabril poses a question:

“…Whenever God intends to do something through His servants or have His servants accomplish something, Satan runs ahead and puts out something that looks right but it’s not. How can the new Believer in God’s Truths distinguish between Satan’s move and the Divine Move?”

Minister Farrakhan: “The Divine Move is perfect. Satan’s move is so far from perfection, that running ahead of God to try to produce something always leaves holes that create dissatisfaction, which then leads to perfection…I am watching the enemy trying to make one world, one political reality, one currency; one this, one that. That is God’s Idea. So the move that Satan makes, God is directing it. God says, ‘Oh you forgot something. Checkmate.’”

Saving White Supremacy: Propaganda in the War Against Black Independence.

Ken Burns, Central Park Five, & Black Rapists – YouTube.

Darziel Hall assists at the scene of an accident on the Southfield Freeway last week. He is suing the State Police for $1 million in damages over claims of discrimination for being removed from a firearms examiner program. State Police denies the allegations of discrimination. / Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press

On Dec. 17, 2010, Michigan State Police Troopers Darziel Hall and Lamarr Johnson were presented certificates at a public ceremony for “successfully completing” the department’s firearms examiner training.

Two months later, both were removed from the program for poor performance in the course.

Hall and Johnson are black.

Both scored better than white applicants who, rather than being removed from the program, were promoted to sergeant as firearms examiners, records show.

The two troopers are now suing the department for racial discrimination in Wayne County Circuit Court, each seeking more than $1 million in damages.

“This case is an all-too-familiar reminder that bias is alive and well in the personnel decision making … of our law enforcement agencies,” said Leonard Mungo, the Detroit attorney representing the troopers.

State Police denies the allegations.

The department said in a court filing that the documents presented to Hall and Johnson certified successful completion of only part of the required training.

The troopers were removed from the program because they received negative evaluations after performing poorly in a mock courtroom session, Assistant Attorney General Jeanmarie Miller said in a Feb. 5 motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

“Race was not a factor in the decision to remove plaintiffs from the training program,” Miller said in the court filing, which noted that one black trooper who completed the program was promoted to firearm examiner.

On April 17, Wayne County Circuit Judge Annette Berry denied the state’s motion to dismiss, and the case could be headed to trial.

John Collins, who was head of forensic sciences for the State Police when the course was conducted, testified in a deposition that receiving the certificates “suggest(s) very strongly” that Hall and Johnson successfully completed the training.

But completion of the training, conducted by an outside contractor, was separate from any employment decisions such as promotions and appointment of firearms examiners, which was solely up to the State Police, Miller reported in a court filing.

via Michigan State Police Troopers sue, claim discrimination | Lansing State Journal | lansingstatejournal.com.