Not everything is awful by @BloggersRUs

Not everything is awful

by Tom Sullivan


Angela Frase's Sterling, OH house fire is under investigation as a hate crime. (Still image: 19 News)

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in Mississippi left children parentless and huddled together in school parking lots waiting for parents who were not coming to pick them up. The raids at food processing plants swept up nearly 700 workers:

“They were crying. They were shocked. They’re just worried,” Dianne said of her fiancé’s children. “I’m just trying to stay strong for them. I’m trying to remain as calm as possible. It’s one thing to know this could happen but it is another to see it happening. This is heart-wrenching. They are scared.”

Children of those arrested in Wednesday’s #ICE raids near Forest, MS. are being put up in a local gym tonight by neighbors/strangers. Many are left scared & crying after coming home from school & being locked out without their parents. Donated food & drinks are being provided. pic.twitter.com/d2juMdK1Vj

— Alex Love (@AlexLoveWJTV) August 8, 2019
Luis Cartagena, a pastor in Morton, Mississippi, saw dozens of agents, buses and hovering helicopters. “It looked like an invasion in a war.”

Moving on.

Some jerkwad choke-slammed a 13-year-old's head into the ground at a Mineral County, Montana rodeo. Curt James Brockway, 39, told a witness the boy was "disrespecting the national anthem" by not removing his hat during its playing. The child, bleeding out his ears, sustained injuries so severe he was airlifted to a children's hospital in Spokane for treatment. Is choke-slamming a popular pastime in Montana?

Authorities in Ohio are investigating a home explosion as a hate crime after the owners found racial slurs and a swastika spray-painted nearby. An interracial couple had lived in the Sterling, Ohio home for 23 years. They were not home at the time. An earlier attempt to burn the home on Tuesday had failed, WOIO reports.

"I got sick twice. That is what happened. It was like, 'This didn't just happen. I don't understand it,'" Angela Frase said.

In non-awful news, historian Barbara Ransby, examines how the four women of color of The Squad represent the future of the Democratic Party. Representatives Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) are not just there to "add color to the room," but to give voice to historically marginalized communities — just the sort of cultural change over which others firebomb homes.

Ransby explains (New York Times):
The squad understands that “diversity” is meaningless if the measure of success is “sameness.” The congresswomen are choosing to do politics a different way because they recognize that Congress has never worked for their communities.
Ransby, a University of Illinois (Chicago) professor of history, gender and women’s studies and African-American studies, applauds the group's protocol-breaking and refusal to wait their turn before moving to advance the interests of the communities that sent them to Congress. Plus, they bring a fighting spirit back to a party more accustomed to go-slow incrementalism:
Over the past nine months, the squad’s members have made good on their promises to be agents of change, not just fresh faces. Radical inclusivity means that people from different communities, backgrounds and ideological traditions will do their jobs differently and will bring new sensibilities, commitments and understanding with them when they sit at the tables of power. If they are doing their jobs, they will be accountable to people who sent them there, not maintaining the status quo. Anything less is merely cosmetic.

One outcome of exclusion and white privilege is that people of color don’t see ourselves reflected in positions of power often enough. That is the least of it. A more consequential outcome is that our communities are underserved, our children racially profiled by the police, unfairly pushed out of schools or locked up in disproportionate numbers. “We expect elected officials to fight hard for a progressive agenda, and we are not cutting anyone slack simply because they look like us,” argues Chinyere Tutashinda, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 150 black-led organizations across the country.
The women, Ransby writes, are the future of the Democratic Party. They behave "as if they represent the demographic majority that their generation will become."

Faster, please. But watch your backs.