Latest news with #whiteSupremacy
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Daily Mail
The death row inmate's last meal that sparked such fury prisoners are no longer allowed to choose what they eat before execution
While many American prisoners awaiting the death penalty are able to choose their final meal before execution, inmates in Texas no longer have this privilege thanks to the actions of one man. White supremacist Lawrence Brewer was executed in 2011 after he was convicted of helping to kill a black man by dragging him behind a truck in what some call the most notorious race crime of the post-Civil Rights era. Brewer, 44 - who was convicted of capital murder along with two other men also found guilty of taking part in the kidnapping and slaying of James Byrd Jr. in 1998 - was given a lethal injection of drugs on September 21 and was pronounced dead shortly after. He had no final words, but he did put in a request for his last meal - two chicken steaks, a triple bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, three fajitas, a pizza, a pint of ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge. Guards did their best to bring Brewer his favourite foods before his death. But as his dinner was plated up and presented to him on a table, Brewer refused to eat a single bite. His refusal to eat the multi-course meal angered Texas senator John Whitmire, prompting him to put an end to the tradition, saying 'it's long overdue.' 'Enough is enough', the senator declared, stating that the last meal request is an 'extremely inappropriate' privilege, 'one which the perpetrators did not provide to their victim.' 'Mr Byrd didn't get to choose his last meal. The whole deal is so illogical', he added. Executive director of the Texas criminal justice department, Brad Livingston, agreed with Sen. Whitmire. He said: 'I believe Senator Whitmire's concerns regarding the practice of allowing death row offenders to choose their last meal are valid. 'Effective immediately, no such accommodations will be made. They will receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit.' Brewer had been on death row for 12 years before his 2011 execution. Speaking to local media before receiving his lethal injection, he said death would be a 'good out' and that he was 'glad it's about to come to an end.' Asked if he had any last words, he replied: 'No. I have no final statement', as a single tear rolled down his cheek. Brewer was executed for his part in the 1998 killing of Byrd in Jasper, East Texas, after Brewer and two friends offered him a lift along a remote country road. Byrd, aged 49 at the time, was beaten unconscious and urinated upon before being bound to the vehicle by his ankles with a heavy logging chain and driven for three miles. Forensic evidence showed that he was alive for much of the ordeal but was killed when the vehicle hit a concrete drainage channel causing his head and arm to be ripped from his body. John William King, 36, was also convicted of capital murder and sent to death row. The third man, Shawn Berry, 36, received a life prison term. After dumping his remains in an African-American cemetery his killers drove off to a barbeque. In an interview from death row, Brewer told KFDM that he participated in the assault on Byrd but had 'nothing to do with the killing as far as dragging him or driving the truck or anything'. Before receiving his lethal injection, Brewer's family was allowed to see him one last time. He was then taken from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston to an isolation cell in Huntsville where the sentence was carried out. Byrd's brutal killing led to the 'Federal October 22, 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act', commonly known as the 'Matthew Shepard Act'. Then-President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on October 28, 2009. The horrific death put Jasper, a typical East Texas town with a Dairy Queen, Walmart and a handful of fast-food places some 60 miles from the nearest interstate highway, under a national spotlight. 'Everywhere you went, anywhere in the country, once people found out you were from Jasper, Texas, they wanted to ask you about it,' said Mike Lout, mayor and the town radio station owner. 'Everybody first was shocked and appalled and not proud of it. They talked about it so much in the days past it, I think most people wanted to put it out of their minds.' 'It's heartbreaking,' said Billy Rowles, who was sheriff at the time of Mr Byrd's murder. 'A lot of effort and hard work and soul-searching went into trying to live down the stereotype. It's so easy to get back into that mode.' His huge last meal had echoes of that enjoyed by Robert Harris in 1992, who killed two teenage boys. He had a chicken bucket, two large pizzas, a Pepsi six-pack, jelly beans and Camel cigarettes. The subject of last meals before execution has thrown up some interesting results over the last few decades, with infamous killer James Smith being refused a request of dirt in 1990 and instead eating yoghurt. While not a mandatory requirement for prisoners on death row in countries where the death penalty still exists, the request is often granted in the US, with the final meals written into public records of executions. Despite Texas' decision to no longer allow prisoners to choose their last meals, other states continue to give inmates the option to. Some states, however, have a final meal price limit, while others require the meal to be served within a specific time. It is not uncommon for prisoners to order nostalgic meals that offer them a last flavour of happiness before they face the most extreme punishment possible for their heinous crimes. While extensive, Brewer's request was far from the largest or most bizarre death row meal orders. Back in 2011, prisoner Cleve Foster's requested two fried chickens, French fries and a 19-litre bucket of peaches. In 2000, Odell Barnes Jr. from Texas, who was sentenced to death for the 1989 murder of Helen Bass, requested 'justice, equality and world peace.' In 2002, Robert Anthony Buell, from Ohio, was executed by lethal injection for the 1982 murder of 11-year-old Krista Lea Harrison. For his final meal, he requested a single, black, un-pitted olive.
Mail & Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- Mail & Guardian
Put an end to four centuries of corporate plundering of Africa
Cecil John Rhodes epitomised the consolidation and expansion of white supremacy, corporate interests and state power. For the past four centuries, corporations have exploited — butchered — the African continent, leaving behind scars, open wounds and entrails which can be seen from space. The history of the continent could be told as one of corporate rule briefly interrupted by colonialism or, as the late novelist and scholar Ngugi wa Thiong'o put it, of 'corpolonialism'. South Africa's past and present exemplifies this. The Cape was colonised by a corporation, which then imported enslaved people to provide labour and enable the Dutch East India Company to lay the material and symbolic foundations for the regime of white supremacy and racial domination that culminated in apartheid. When slavery was no longer profitable, and so the British decided to 'abolish' it, the empire 'expropriated' enslaved people across it colonies and formally freed them — but not before paying £20 million pounds in compensation to white slaveholders and their creditors in the name of 'justice and equity'. These 'reparations', paid to white people for the end of slavery, were then reinvested through the new corporate vehicle of the joint-stock company. They were used to finance further colonial expansion and consolidate white domination over land, labour and lives, globally. In the Cape colony, for example, white compensation for black 'emancipation' quintupled the money in circulation in the economy; more than doubled imports and exports; financed the violent settler expansion on the colony's eastern 'frontier' and led to the establishment of its first private bank in 1837. The number of joint-stock companies in the Cape doubled, as white beneficiaries of 'emancipation' pooled their compensation to generate more wealth. White former slaveholders leveraged their land, capital and credit to re-subordinate the newly freed 'apprentice' labourers and become rent-seeking slumlords. The greatest beneficiary of the trade in compensation claims — the London-based merchant house of Phillips, King & Co. — financed the exploration of copper in Namaqualand, drawing a line from 'compensated emancipation' to the mining and extractive monopolies that emerged after the discovery of diamonds and gold. The consolidation and expansion of this three-headed hydra of white supremacy, corporate interests and state power throughout the latter half of the 19th century is epitomised in the figure of Cecil John Rhodes. This race-state-company nexus was also central to the system of colonial apartheid that emerged over the course of the 20th century. Rhodes's successors — who controlled as much of the economy as the apartheid state — were joined by the various corporations established under the volkskapitalisme, many of which dominate the continent today. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded: 'Business was central to the economy that sustained the South African state during the apartheid years. Certain businesses … were involved in helping to design and implement apartheid policies … Most businesses benefited from operations in a racially structured context.' This unholy trinity of white supremacy, corporate interest and state power is not unique to South Africa. Its global articulation was on full display in the White House two weeks ago as the world's most powerful statesman, the world's wealthiest man and rich white men who chase white balls around for a living put on a spectacular performance of ignorance, entitlement and victimhood. One after another, US President Donald Trump invited each of these unelected white men to roll back the years and weigh in on the present conditions and future prospects of the majority of people in South Africa, who were once again being held hostage to the delusions of a white minority. The ball-hitters obliged, literally speaking over Cyril Ramaphosa, the democratically elected president of South Africa, and Zingiswa Losi, the leader of the country's largest trade union federation, Cosatu. It was all too much for golfer Ernie Els, who momentarily forgot which side he was on and thanked the US for its support in maintaining apartheid. It was the most honest moment of the whole spectacle. President Trump's corporate handler, Elon Musk, loomed large but said nothing. Rather, his ransom was delivered by South Africa's second richest man, Johann Rupert, who declared that he had opposed apartheid from birth — as long as he had benefited from it. He said South Africa must abandon its insistence that corporations operating in South Africa — which for centuries have worked hand-in-glove with colonial apartheid to advance the interests of a white minority — should include a mere 30% ownership stake for the majority of South Africans. This would allow Musk's Starlink — a central part of the US military-industrial complex — to not only colonise space but recolonise the continent. Another demand, made explicit in Trump's recent executive order, is that white beneficiaries of centuries of racial domination who have amassed an absurdly disproportionate amount of the privately owned land (and wealth) should — like their slave-owning forebearers — once more be compensated in the name of 'justice and equity', regardless of whether the land was 'justly' acquired and is being 'equitably' used, or even used at all. Social movements, activists and affected communities have been working to hold corporations to account for their depredations on the continent since the 1900s. An early and instructive example is the work of South Africa's own Alice Kinloch, a pathbreaking pan-Africanist and pioneer of the field of business and human rights, who was born in the Cape in 1863 and moved to Kimberley in the 1870s. In the final years of the 19 th century, Kinloch pointed out that: 'The handsome dividends that a certain company pays are earned at the price of blood and souls of … black men. Shareholders may be in happy ignorance of this, so we would remind them that there are several thousands of fellow-men kept under lock and key for their sole benefit, and that the gems on their wives' hands, and the finery bought by their 'profits' are, to 'seeing' eyes, bespattered with human gore.' Kinloch proceeded to set out 'the state of affairs in South Africa, for which the bloody, brutal and inconsiderate hands of avarice and might are answerable', where '[f]or more than a quarter of a century Kimberley has been the stage for the worst forms of undisguised inhumanity' at the hands of 'their master the Company'. In doing so she pointed to the race-corporation-state nexus, noting that De Beers was 'a company as ostentatiously 'colour-hating' as its chief, Cecil Rhodes'. Kinloch established the African Association in 1897, which organised the first Pan African Conference in 1900. The resolutions of that conference included a call for direct action in respect of 'the situation of the native races in South Africa', including the 'degrading and illegal compound system of native labour in vogue in Kimberley'. The work of Alice Kinloch and her fellow pan-Africans should serve not only to inspire us but instruct us. Last week, social movements, activists and affected communities met in Johannesburg for the 7 th African Regional Indaba on a Binding Treaty on Business and Human Rights organised by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, the Alternative Information & Development Centre and Lawyers for Human Rights. The treaty negotiation process began in 2014 following a resolution by the Human Rights Council — co-sponsored by South Africa — to 'elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises'. The future of the treaty is uncertain, as efforts towards corporate accountability more generally are backsliding everywhere. Both the US and the EU are rolling back what little controls they had in place to regulate the actions of corporations. Countries of the Global South are being put under immense pressure to ease regulations to facilitate the second 'scramble for Africa' under the banner of a 'green transition' that relies on minerals the West has declared 'critical'. In South Africa, the Competition Commission is appealing a decision of the competition appeal court which effectively neutered the commission's capacity to hold companies operating beyond our borders accountable for the negative impact of illegal activities in the republic. The appeal arises from the commission's efforts to prosecute the largest banks in the world — whose market capitalisation exceeds $2 trillion, some of which were founded with the compensation paid to white slaveholders — for the coordinated manipulation of the rand. The competition appeal court's 2024 decision threw out the case against 17 of the 28 banks before they had even responded to the allegations. When the Centre for Applied Legal Studies requested permission to intervene as an amicus curiae to place the banks' conduct within the framework of domestic and international human rights law, the constitutional court refused our application. In the face of these challenges, we must continue to hold the line on corporate accountability for what Kinloch rightly described 'handsome dividends … earned at the price of blood and souls', including through defending the treaty process, which has been led from the outset by the Global South. Like Kinloch, we must also insist on a continental response, including by supporting the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights' efforts to draft an African regional treaty to regulate the activities of transnational corporations. Four centuries of impunity for corpolonialism is enough. Professor Christopher Gevers is the director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies and an associate professor at the School of Law, Wits University.
The Independent
6 days ago
- General
- The Independent
Homeland Security hits back at claims ICE agent at Martha's Vineyard has ‘white supremacist' tattoo
The Department of Homeland Security has hit back at claims that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has a 'white supremacist' tattoo after footage circulated online during an arrest operation in Martha's Vineyard. An ICE officer was spotted on the Massachusetts island last week with what appeared to be a Valknot tattoo, a Nordic symbol of the god Odin. Charlie Giordano confronted the ICE agents and posted the footage on Instagram, the Martha's Vineyard Times first reported. 'When reviewing the images I made of 'ICE Agents' on Martha's Vineyard yesterday, I noticed several had the 'Valknot' tattooed on their arms,' Giordano posted on Instagram. 'It's a symbol often used by white supremacy groups.' DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin characterized the claim as a 'smear' in a post on X Tuesday and said the officer was 'a combat veteran.' 'His tattoo is a tribute to fallen warriors —a pretty common tattoo in the military among combat veterans who embrace the Nordic Viking warrior culture,' McLaughlin said. 'Attempting to smear this ICE officer and pretend his tattoo is meant to be a tribute to White Supremacy is false, pathetic, and insulting to veterans.' The symbol has been appropriated by white supremacists, the Anti-Defamation League says on its website. 'Some white supremacists, particularly racist Odinists, have appropriated the Valknot to use as a racist symbol.' However, the organization also noted that 'non-racist pagans may also use this symbol,' so it should be 'carefully examine[d] it in context rather than assume that a particular use of the symbol is racist.' Jacob Chansley, dubbed the ' QAnon Shaman ' for his role in 'spearheading' the January 6 Capitol riot, has the symbol tattooed on his chest. ICE acknowledged the symbol had been 'co-opted by racist organizations,' according to the Martha's Vineyard Times, but a spokesperson said that the agent is 'absolutely not connected with white supremacism in any way.' According to the outlet, an ICE spokesperson said that the officer had the tattoo before joining the agency, and that he was a combat veteran. Last week agents arrested 40 people on the popular vacation island, which has a large Brazilian population. The incident surrounding the agent's tattoo follows previous concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's 'Christian motto' tattoo, which some perceived as a white nationalist dog whistle. Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran, has the words 'Deus Vult' tattooed on his bicep, which has been associated with white supremacist groups. 'Deus Vult' is a Latin phrase meaning 'God Wills It,' and was a rallying cry for Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages. Vice President JD Vance said the uproar over the tattoo was 'disgusting anti-Christian bigotry' at the time.
News.com.au
03-06-2025
- General
- News.com.au
White supremacists gather outside Melbourne shopping centre
A group of white supremacists have gathered outside a busy shopping centre in Melbourne. The incident took place in the early hours of Sunday morning at Northland Shopping Centre, only a week after a violent brawl broke out between rival gangs at the complex. Model and diversity advocate Jeff Kissubi posted an image of the shocking scene to Instagram, saying it highlighted 'Australia's racism problem'. The images showed the group holding signs and chanted racist slogans. Mr Kissubi said there were 'no police in sight' at the shopping centre. Victoria Police confirmed it was investigating an 'offensive banner' outside a Preston shopping centre. 'There is absolutely no place for antisemitic, racist or hate-based behaviour in our society and police will not tolerate such activity,' police added. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen said the behaviour had 'no place' in Australia, describing it as 'hateful' and 'extremist'. 'This is disgusting behaviour by a group of cowards who seek to do nothing more than intimidate and spread hatred – we will not stand for it,' she told The Guardian. The latest incident comes a week after a brawl broke out at the centre on May 25. Crowds fled the area after a fight in the food court, that left a young man with serious head injuries. That incident prompted the state government to bring forward a ban on the sale of machetes. 'In Victoria, community safety comes first. We must never let places we meet become places we fear,' Ms Allan said on Monday. 'I hate these knives, and I will keep introducing as many laws as it takes to get them off our streets, out of our shops and out of our lives.'
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘Hard for me to understand': grappling with the Charlottesville tragedy eight years on
Deborah Baker's new book, Charlottesville, is about her home town in Virginia, where in summer 2017 white supremacists marched, violence erupted and a counter-protester was murdered. In dizzying detail, Baker charts and reports the chaos. In interludes, she examines the dark history of a city long linked to racist oppression, from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Robert E Lee and slavery to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and resistance to civil rights reform. Putting it all together was a new challenge for a writer whose books include In Extremis, a biography of the 20th-century poet Laura Riding, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India. 'As a literary biographer, a narrative nonfiction writer, I mostly work out of archives and libraries and letters and diaries and things like that,' Baker said. 'And of course, for this, there wasn't anything like that in a library or institution. So I had to make my own archive, which involved the interviews I did with around 100 people but also old Twitter streams.' Many such streams were shot by progressive protesters and citizen journalists who rallied with local clergy and citizenry against the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, militiamen and alt-right provocateurs who descended on their town. They came because the city government had voted to remove statues of Lee and Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson, slave-owning Confederate generals who lost the civil war – a reminder that national debate over racism and US history long predated the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and the turmoil that followed. As Baker shows, tensions flickered and spat in Charlottesville for months, the town riven by internal disagreements, democracy playing out its messy truths in endless rallies and meetings about what to do with the statues and the version of history they told. Then came the night of 11 August, when khaki-clad white men carrying tiki torches chanted 'Jews will not replace us' as they marched to the Lee statue. The next day, a 'Unite the Right' rally produced hours of frenetic face-offs and the awful moment when a white supremacist used his car to drive into counter-protesters, injuring 35 and killing one, Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal. 'The prospect of talking to not just living people, and asking them questions about this deeply traumatic event in the center of their lives just made me quail,' Baker said. 'It's one thing reading people's private letters and diaries, and especially dead people. It's completely different when you're actually faced with a person, someone who's half your age, who's grown up in a world that's as foreign to you as India might be to an American.' Baker is 66. Many of those who marched against the right in Charlottesville, if by no means all, are 30 years younger or more. Writing their stories meant understanding their worldviews. 'I was just learning about the parameters of an online existence that was very unfamiliar to me,' Baker said. 'Luckily, I had people who were very patient with my learning curve. 'I didn't know what this historical period was. It was very hard for me to understand the present. I thought certain things were assumed. You know, that Nazis were bad. We figured that one out, I thought. I guess you have to keep refreshing that narrative.' Married to the writer Amitav Ghosh, Baker lives in Brooklyn and India. But as the subtitle to Charlottesville says, in writing about her hometown she also set out to write 'An American Story', particularly about the rise of the far right under Donald Trump. When she started work, in the first days of 2021, Trump had been beaten by Joe Biden. It seemed the far right had reached its high-water mark: the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. But many traced paths from the Capitol back to Charlottesville, particularly to the moment when Trump failed to disown the rightwingers who marched in his name. Baker writes: 'For those watching around the world, Charlottesville's fate as the global synonym for 'white supremacy' and 'white nationalism' was sealed when the president of the United States declared there were 'very fine people on both sides.' 'He doubled down several days later to describe the violence of an imaginary 'alt-left' … Trump's remarks seemed to open the gates of hell. The next 18 months saw a surge in white supremacist violence across the country.' Trump left office but far-right violence continued. Trump didn't leave the stage either. Seven years after Charlottesville, he is back in the White House, attacking anything in government seen to even acknowledge the US's racist past, using claims of 'white genocide' to import white Afrikaners. 'American democracy was failing the whole time I was writing,' Baker said, 'and I didn't realize that it could fall that much further. And obviously it's falling very fast now.' She notes how police violently broke up pro-Palestinian protests at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville last year, aggressive behavior in stark contrast to restraint shown to the white supremacists who marched eight years ago. She wonders about the effect her book might have on people 'that didn't quite register what happened in Trump's first term, and about the sense of deja vu not only with 2017 but also these other periods of history which we have conveniently forgotten or swept under the rug, whether it's the Klan or the White Citizens Councils', groups that sprang up in the 1950s, in opposition to attempts to end segregation. In the historical sections of her book, Baker considers famous figures including Lee, Jackson and particularly Jefferson, who lived at Monticello above Charlottesville and designed the UVA campus. She also provides studies of some now forgotten. Prominent among them is John Kasper, an esoteric young demagogue, close to the fascistic poet Ezra Pound, who staged cross burnings in Charlottesville in the 1950s. Kasper died in 1998, long bypassed by history. But as Baker studied the resurgence of a far-right threat she had thought long buried, so she sensed echoes including something of Kasper in the polished figure of Richard Spencer, the 'alt-right' leader who achieved a sort of national prominence around events in Charlottesville in 2017. 'They're like doppelgangers,' Baker said. 'You know: knee-jerk contrarianism, superficiality, really just hunger for fame and attention.' Spencer also saw his star fade. The Lee and Jackson statues, and other contentious Charlottesville monuments, finally did come down. The statue of Lee and his horse, Traveler, is 'the only one that has been actually destroyed,' Baker said. 'The rest of them are all in storage rooms, or they've been moved to battlefields. I'm glad this one is gone. It really is due to this group of Charlottesville women who were very set on not just melting it down and destroying it but set out to make some new kind of art and give to the city.' One day soon, via the Swords Into Plowshares project, the bronze once used in the statue of Lee will form something new. Baker is under no illusion that the far right is defeated. Four months into Trump's second White House term, she is 'surprised that I haven't seen more violence already'. 'I think there was a kind of giddiness when he was first elected,' she said, describing 'a sense that they had their presence. They did these marches for Trump. They had their boat rallies. They had their truck rallies. They had their guy. 'There hasn't been as much of that so far this time. That isn't the form that it's taking. Maybe they just don't feel like they have to be so active.' Charlottesville is out now
