Eastern University staff said they did not see the man on campus after the incident, according to the OPC, and all the commissioners to the General Assembly were present and accounted for.
The three other incidents that the OPC had characterized as “racially disparaging interactions” were deemed to be misunderstandings.
One commissioner—who has not been named—was reportedly trying to make a joke about the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in America.
He confessed it was “a clumsy and misguided attempt at friendly humor” and expressed a desire to reconcile with the students who were offended.
The final incident was reportedly confusion over self-serve pizza in the cafeteria. The OPC has determined that the “interaction that was misunderstood by those present.”
An Eastern University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) apologized Friday for four racist incidents at its annual gathering.
In a statement of “sorrow and regret” passed without dissent, the General Assembly said “there is no place in the church for such conduct” and “we repudiate and condemn all sins of racism, hatred, and prejudice, as transgressions against our Holy God, who calls us to love and honor all people.”
The 126 commissioners from the Reformed denomination’s 296 congregations gathered in Philadelphia at Eastern University on Wednesday.
The annual meetings do not normally involve much controversy and could even be considered boring when compared to the dramatic conflicts within the Presbyterian Church in America or Southern Baptist Convention.
The OPC commissioners came prepared to hear two amendments to the Book of Discipline, receive reports on giving and Sunday school attendance, and vote on a resolution of thanks to Richard B. Gaffin Jr., a Westminster Theological Seminary professor who is retiring from the Committee on Foreign Missions after 52 years.
Starting in 1932, government medical workers in rural Alabama withheld treatment from unsuspecting Black men infected with syphilis so doctors could track the disease and dissect their bodies afterwards.
For almost 40 years starting in the 1930s, as US government researchers purposely let hundreds of Black men die of syphilis in Alabama so they could study the disease, a foundation in New York covered funeral expenses for the deceased.
The payments were vital to survivors of the victims in a time and place ravaged by poverty and racism.
Altruistic as they might sound, the payments – $100 at most – were no simple act of charity: They were part of an almost unimaginable scheme.
To get the money, widows or other loved ones had to consent to allowing doctors to slice open the bodies of the dead men for autopsies that would detail the ravages of a disease the victims were told was “bad blood”.
Fifty years after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study was revealed to the public and halted in 1972, the organisation that made those funeral payments, the Milbank Memorial Fund, is publicly apologising to the descendants for its role.
The apology and an accompanying monetary donation to a descendants’ group, the Voices of our Fathers Legacy Foundation, will be presented on Saturday in Tuskegee during a gathering of children and other relatives of men who were part of the study.
The current president of the fund, Christopher F Koller, said there was no easy way to explain how its leaders in the 1930s decided to make the payments, or to justify what happened.
“The upshot of this was real harm,” Koller told The Associated Press in an interview.
Generations later, some Black people in the US still fear government healthcare because of what’s called the “Tuskegee effect”.
Endowed in 1905 by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, part of a wealthy and well-connected New York family, the fund was one of the nation’s first private foundations.
The work of Michael Woodley, a Briton racist researcher who was cited by the teenager who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, included pseudoscientific theories that have been used to justify racism.
The researcher claims there has been an I.Q. decline in France linked to large-scale migration from North Africa. He has co-written a book about the global decline of intelligence, stating a relationship between ethnicity and cognitive abilities. And he argues that humans can be divided into subspecies, a cornerstone of white supremacist ideology.
He was also cited, among other academic references, in a manifesto written by the teenager motivated by racist views who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo last month.
Despite his own extreme views, the researcher, Michael Woodley — a 38-year-old British man — has been affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, one of Belgium’s leading universities, and his controversial work was originally undertaken as he studied at some of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions.
The discovery that the gunman had cited Mr. Woodley’s work shocked many academics, who said they hoped it might now force institutions to confront questions about their responsibility toward society, academic rigor and the space they give to extremist ideas.
Alex Mas Sandoval, a Spanish researcher in population genetics at the University of Bologna, said he was “appalled” when he heard that the Buffalo gunman had tried to use science to justify his actions.
Scientists involved in the field of population genetics and other related areas were “concerned about the misinterpretation of our findings,” he said, adding that he had scrutinized the manifesto for all references to his field.
“In most cases, the killer decontextualized scientific conclusions,” he said. But, he added, one person cited by the gunman stood out for his extreme views: Mr. Woodley, whose expertise is in plant ecology, but whose work also includes research in human genetics and intelligence.
Tarrytown, N.Y.: I’m so sick of hearing my upper-class neighbors tell me about how their immigrant ancestors Johnny Depp “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and made it in America.
While they describe critical race theory as being racist, the idea is to educate those who have no idea what prevented the Black population from attaining the benefits offered to white immigrants coming into this country — not to mention that many Black early Americans were kidnapped from their own countries to become slaves.
The Civil War brought most to sharecropper status, which didn’t prevent them from segregated living, lynchings and having their land taken away from them, which forced them to move to the urban centers into what became slums.
Because Black veterans returning from serving our country were kept out of everything the GI Bill had to offer, they were prevented from receiving subsidies to go to colleges of their choice, as well as from receiving subsidized mortgages to be homeowners, resulting in the creation of what we call “the projects.”
My intention is to leave out events like the Tulsa massacre and the many other killings of Black Americans over some 200 years and only focus on the opportunities they were prevented from being part of (think of Levittown, L.I.). To this day, they experience racist policies.
So ask your relatives if they pulled themselves up under the same conditions. Jaime Geiger
Big deal
Brooklyn: Re Thursday’s front page (”Amber loses big,” June 2): She’s ordered to pay $10 million, he $2 million. Why not just give him $8 million and call it even? Besides, who cares so much that this was front-page news?
Adjudicated
Syosset, L.I.: OK people, before knee-jerking into the conclusion that the Johnny Depp verdict is some kind of internally inconsistent split verdict, please look at what the jury actually said. Amber Heard lost on two of the three statements about which she counterclaimed.
Welcome to your evolving Miami-Dade GOP — from spying Watergate burglars in the 1970s to racist Proud Boys in 2022.
How low can today’s Florida Republicans go? Pretty far down the road of normalizing racism, according to the alarming but not shocking report from The New York Times, “How the Proud Boys Gripped the Miami-Dade GOP Republican Party.”
It chronicles the newfound political stock of members of the male, white-supremacist hate group in what’s supposed to be a mainstream political party.
Current and former Proud Boys not only serve on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee “seeking to influence local politics from the inside,” the national newspaper reports, but have sought public office.
It’s not exactly breaking news. The Miami Herald has covered the Proud Boys incursion into GOP politics, but what’s stunning now is how GOP leaders are justifying the radicalization of the party — and accepting the prevalence of racist people, known for hate speech and acts of political violence, as worthy of inclusion.
This is how René García — county commissioner, former state senator, and chairman of Miami-Dade’s Republican Party — rationalized to The Times the infiltration of Proud Boys who are radicalizing the party and possibly rising to power in local leadership positions.
VALIDATING RACISM
“Yes, we have fringe elements,” García said. “Yes, we have different points of view in our party. That’s how we are. And my job as Republican chairman is to protect everyone’s First Amendment right, however wrong they may be.”
But, since when is the embrace of racists a political virtue in modern times?. According to García, outright racism is merely a point of view in need of protection — and the radicals who spew hate speech and practice political violence are to be embraced and accepted into the fold of the mainstream.
Poor little orphaned infants, they need their casa, too. This couldn’t possibly be the same young man I met while reporting a sweeping piece on 1990s Hialeah.
The origins of the Windrush scandal lay in 30 years of racist immigration legislation designed to reduce the UK’s non-white population, according to a leaked government report.
The stark conclusion was set out in a Home Office commissioned paper that officials have repeatedly tried to suppress over the past year.
The 52-page analysis by an unnamed historian, which has been seen by the Guardian, describes how “the British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function”, and sets out how this affected the laws passed in the postwar period.
It concludes that the origins of the “deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal” lie in the fact that “during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK”.
It finds that the scandal was caused by a failure to recognise that changes to British immigration law over the past 70 years had a more negative impact on black people than on other racial and ethnic groups.
“As a result, the experiences of Britain’s black communities of the Home Office, of the law, and of life in the UK have been fundamentally different from those of white communities,” the report states.
“Major immigration legislation in 1962, 1968 and 1971 was designed to reduce the proportion of people living in the United Kingdom who did not have white skin.”
It was not clear why officials were reluctant to release the document. Diane Abbott MP, who attempted without success to have the paper released through the home affairs select committee, said the Home Office appeared to be “unwilling to acknowledge the racism that has disfigured British immigration policy for decades”.
The report was commissioned by the Home Office as part of a commitment to educating civil servants about the causes of the Windrush scandal, which saw thousands of people wrongly classified as illegal immigrants by the department.
Sixty-five Minneapolis city employees signed a letter calling the City Coordinator’s Office (CCO) a toxic and racist workplace. The CCO provides administrative and management services for the city.
That letter led to a strong push from city employees and others on Tuesday against Mayor Jacob Frey’s new pick to run the CCO, Heather Johnston.
Several former and current employees of the Mineapolis city coordinators’ office gathered outside their offices at city hall to raise awareness of what they call a decades-long toxic and racist culture.
“It’s exhausting and dehumanizing,” said Gina Obiri, a current employee with CCO. “The fact that Black staff and our allies have had to come this far just to maybe have our humanity uplifted by the institution that we give so much of ourselves to is crushing.”
Last summer, Mayor Frey appointed Johnston as the interim city coordinator, where she inherited the workplace culture as it was. Tuesday, the staff is accusing her of not taking any direct or transparent action to change that culture.
“Not only has she not addressed it, but she has also contributed to it by being stagnant,” said Angela Williams, a current employee with CCO.
Tuesday afternoon, the Minneapolis city council listened to public comments from dozens of people both in support and opposition.
Those who oppose Johnston’s appointment say they want to start over with a new search for a city coordinator that is transparent and rooted in equity. They were clear that they expect Johnston to be part of the search process.
Johnston promised going into Tuesday’s hearing that she would not retaliate or punish any current city employees who spoke out against the department.
The council will move forward with a final vote on Johnston’s appointment on Thursday. The council did not give any recommendation on that vote at the end of the day Tuesday.
Former Senator David Perdue ended his Trump-inspired campaign for governor of Georgia with racist remarks to Republican primary voters on Monday, accusing Stacey Abrams, the Black woman who is the presumptive Democratic nominee, of “demeaning her own race” in how she has described the state’s problems.
Speaking to an overwhelmingly white crowd, Mr. Perdue trained his ire on Ms. Abrams, who narrowly lost the 2018 governor’s race to Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican whom Mr. Perdue is vying to unseat in Tuesday’s primary.
Mr. Perdue’s remarks about Ms. Abrams transcended the typical Republican primary campaign fare about stolen elections and accusations of disloyalty to former President Donald J. Trump. In a state where segregationists once demonized civil rights leaders as unwanted interlopers, and where it remains contentious to discuss how to interpret the nation’s history of slavery and racism, Mr. Perdue cast Ms. Abrams as an outsider in a state that has been her home since high school.
“Did you all see what Stacey said this weekend?” Mr. Perdue said from the stage. “She said that Georgia is the worst place in the country to live. Hey, she ain’t from here. Let her go back to where she came from. She doesn’t like it here.”
Mr. Perdue also injected race into a 2018 remark Ms. Abrams made about her pledge to create jobs in the renewable energy sector.
“People shouldn’t have to go into agriculture or hospitality to make a living in Georgia,” she said in the closing weeks of her 2018 campaign. “Why not create renewable energy jobs? Because, I’m going to tell y’all a secret: Climate change is real.”
On Monday, Mr. Perdue said: “When she told Black farmers, ‘You don’t need to be on the farm,’ and she told Black workers in hospitality and all this, ‘You don’t need to be,’ she is demeaning her own race when it comes to that. I am really over this. She should never be considered material for governor of any state, much less our state where she hates to live.”
A woman among a group of anti-abortionist protestors has shared a video of herself on Instagram disrespecting black security guards in Riverside California.
Racist Anti-Abortionists calling black security guards "slaves" in Riverside, California from PublicFreakout
The group of protestors seem to have organized after an Abortion rights protest taking place along the Evansville riverfront.
The racist woman continues disrespecting members of the black community despite police arriving on the scene. The police rush toward the black men and ensure things do not escalate any further.
The leakage of the Supreme Court draft regarding the overturning of the monumental case of Roe v. Wade has caused a major schism in the United States. As many Americans have taken to the streets to protest for abortion rights, others are concerned about the legitimacy of the nation’s highest court.
On May 2, Politico broke an exclusive leak of a majority opinion in Dobbs v. Mississippi (2022), the case considering whether Roe v. Wade (1973) ought to be overruled. While there has been controversy surrounding abortion since the twentieth century, never in modern history has a draft decision of the Supreme Court been disclosed publicly while a case is pending.
On Sunday afternoon, pro-abortion protesters also gathered at the Four Freedoms Monument on the Evansville riverfront and then lined up along Riverside Drive, chanting and holding signs.
Protesters say women aren’t the only ones affected by Roe v. Wade, so they were happy to see that women weren’t the only ones participating in the protest. They say their message is especially important considering other things going on in the country.
“It’s definitely been a hot topic, especially with the formula shortage going on,” said Kendall March, one of the protesters who attended Sunday’s rally. “There’s actually plenty of lawmakers that are voting against helping with this formula shortage, while they’re also wanting to force people to continue their pregnancies.”
Protesters say they were happy with the turnout, and they encouraged people to vote to let their voices be heard.
Last Saturday, racist and horrifying violence took the lives of 10 people in Buffalo who were just trying to make a living for their families or to get some shopping errands done.
It injured three other persons as well, along with traumatizing many more. The trauma extends to the Diocese of Syracuse where this Saturday a funeral Mass will be celebrated at Assumption Church for one of our own parishioners and a victim of the shooting, Roberta A. Drury. Buffalo
Our hearts and deepest sympathy and prayers go out to Roberta’s family and friends, as well as, to all the victims’ families and loved ones.
We hold close in prayer also all those who were injured and all those who witnessed and are affected by such unconscionable violence.
As a local church, we are deeply disturbed also that the alleged perpetrator of this heinous crime is an 18-year-old from the Southern Tier of our diocese.
Where from or wherein is such hatred and violence being brought forth as to export such unconceivable crimes against the sacredness of the human person no matter gender, color or creed?
I wish to remind all Catholics of the grave sin that racism is and the ever present need to eradicate from both our society and nation.
In 2020, the US Catholic Bishops issued the document, “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love – A Pastoral Letter Against Racism.”
In it the bishops reiterated the Church’s teaching on racism: “Racism is evil because it attacks the inherent dignity of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God.
The persistence of racism demands our attention now. Racism emerges in the actions and inactions of individuals; and it is embedded in our institutions and public policies.
Our faith calls us both to personal conversion and to transformation of our society.”