MARISSA ALEXANDER IS FINALLY FREE

Feeling Rebloggy 

Marissa Alexander, the Jacksonville, Florida woman jailed in 2012 over a warning shot she fired to defend herself from an attack by her abusive husband, was freed from house arrest Friday.

According to the anti-violence initiative Survived and Punished, Alexander, a mother of three, has completed two years of court-ordered home confinement, after she served nearly three years in state prison on weapons and assault charges. In 2014, following an appeal of her conviction in a jury trial, Alexander accepted a plea deal to avoid [Prosecutor Angela Corey's threatening her with] a potential 60 year sentence behind bars...

Her case drew national notoriety in 2012 because of another case in Florida — the shooting and death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida — in which self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman claimed self-defense as the reason he shot the unarmed black teen. Furthermore, activists say Alexander's case accentuated a persisting inequity for women of color who are disproportionately victims of domestic violence and who decide to fight back....

Former* state attorney Angela Corey, the same prosecutor who charged Zimmerman, said she didn't believe that Alexander meant to defend herself against her admittedly abusive estranged husband Rico Gray.

~MIC.COM

Read More:
https://mic.com/articles/166955/florida-woman-not-allowed-to-claim-stand-your-ground-against-abusive-husband-is-freed#.66Z4VL0Kf


* IT WASN'T LONG AFTER COREY FORCED ALEXANDER INTO A PLEA DEAL THAT BLACK ACTIVISTS GOT THE VOTES TOGETHER TO 
FIRE PROSECUTOR ANGELA COREY  
 (BLACK VOTES ALWAYS MATTER)

Read More:
http://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2016/08/fired-by-voters-prosecutor-angela-corey.html

15 YEAR OLD BRESHA MEADOWS WILL NOT FACE LIFE SENTENCE

Feeling Rebloggy

Bresha Meadows, a 15-year-old Ohio girl accused of killing her allegedly abusive father, no longer faces the prospect of life behind bars. 

On Thursday, her lawyer Ian Friedman announced that her case will remain in juvenile court. 

If her case was transferred to adult court ― an option that was looming until the prosecutor decided to take it off the table ― Bresha faced a possible life sentence in prison.

On July 28, police say Bresha picked up her father’s gun and shot him in the head, killing the man who she said brutally beat her mother and terrorized her family for years. 

~HUFFPOST

READMORE
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bresha-meadows-remains-juvenile-court_us_58406f63e4b09e21702d6297

DR. DRE FORGOT MICHEL'LE BUT MICHEL'LE DOESN'T FORGET DR. DRE IN "SURVIVING COMPTON"

“Everybody keeps asking me, ‘Girl, why you ain’t in they movie? You was there. You was down with Ruthless Records right along with them boys,’”

Michel’le Toussaint's intro in her Lifetime Movie 
on her time associated with the members of N.W.A, 

"Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge and Michel’le"

Feeling Rebloggy

"Once Michel’le formally introduces the film, it gets real immediately, going all the way back to when she was a little girl growing up in a neighborhood where police brutality and the physical assault of women surrounded her.

Police brutality and brutality against women are purposely linked. By doing so, it is clear that Michel’le’s story isn’t unique but instead a cycle. When she, as a little girl, proclaims that no man will ever put his hands on her when she grows up, her grandmother, whom she calls Meme (played quite ably by Donna Biscoe), essentially tells her that black men hitting black women is just how things are. As lofty as it may seem, Surviving Compton aims to raise awareness of that cycle without ever sacrificing the core story...."

Read More: 

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/10/michelles-surviving-compton-doesnt-forget-about-dre/

x

Once again, I love how the NFL, men, and too many women pretended they didn't know Ray hit Janay until the 2nd video came out.

I love how people pretended they didn't know Trump hadn't actually tried to grab women by the p*ssy long before that 2005 video resurfaced. Trump has announced exactly what he is on many a television and radio show.

And now people are pretending not to know Dr. Dre beat that women when he's said he did it.  The reason a male public figure like him gives a public half-ass apology to a woman he's beaten is because he was trapped into doing so. The thing that made Dr. Dre's I-was-young-then apology even more worthless --beyond the misgynor lyrics he and Ice Cube defended when the misgynoir reflected in their lyrics-- was the fact that he erased Michel'le from that movie Straight Outta Compton

But Michel'le didn't forget Dr. Dre in her movie Surviving Compton. And Dr. Dre tried to stop the movie from airing and for "good reason" apparently. When the movie showed Dr. Dre beating Michel'le in the movie, apparently this violence became more real because people started tearing Dr. Dre apart on Twitter.  

http://www.bet.com/music/2016/10/16/twitter-erupts-on-dre.html

As I've said before, the best thing about #OscarsSoWhite Part II was that "Straight Outta Compton" didn't win a thing. Every once in a while white supremacy tosses black women a silver-lining.

“I’ve been talking about my abuse for many, many years, but it has not gotten any ears until now,” Michel’le told the Times. Well Lifetime must have been listening and turned the spotlight all the way up on her, and we may all be the better for it. Surviving Compton, directed by Janice Cooke, a veteran TV director and producer and written by Dianne Houston, a Howard alum who comes from theatre, is much more entertaining and deeper than most would expect. It has real gravitas. Michel’le narrates the film and even pops into its narrative from time to time, giving it an air of both herstory and a cautionary tale..."

Read More:  

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/10/michelles-surviving-compton-doesnt-forget-about-dre/

ON THE ACCURACY OF THE MOVIE

"The question many viewers will have after their viewing: is the film accurate?

I would say, for the most part, yes. I extensively interviewed Michel’le and other survivors of Dre’s alleged abuse for my new book Original Gangstas: the Untold Story of Dr Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap, and investigated their claims.

The film largely echoes Michel’le’s accounts to me, though she never went to police with her allegations – unlike other women including television host Dee Barnes and Lisa Johnson, the mother of three of Dre’s children who alleged he beat her many times, including while she was pregnant. (Dre pled no contest to beating Barnes, and received probation, while Johnson was granted a restraining order against him. A Ruthless rapper named Tairrie B also maintains that Dre beat her.)"

READ MORE:  

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/17/surviving-compton-nwa-michelle-dr-dre-beating

BEATS by DR DRE should leave a whole new image in your head. 

Current Kings Of The Half-Assed Apology

THE SOURCE OF HER POWER

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness

her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes

the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends 

till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds

came from the same source as her power

~Adrienne Rich

Many,

maybe half of all women

deny their wounds,

deny that their wounds

came from 

the same source as

their power. 

Do they die feeling successful 
or feeling that they've failed?

When a woman dies denying wounds,
feeling successful or feeling a failure, 

what does that mean for daughters?

~DebLynn

BLACK MAN CALLS ON BLACK WOMEN TAKE A PUNCH FOR RACE SOLIDARITY

Post slavery black people were trying on white society ideals for fit, one of which was "a woman's place is in the home," which didn't fit black couples well all. During slavery men and women worked side by side - providing women of expectations of equality. Post slavery both man and woman in family needed to work for wages for the family to survive--again providing women with expectations of equality.

That is, black women were rather used to being treated as equals, and unlike white women, they were in relationships by choice not because they could not work and take care of themselves.

So as black people moved away from slavery and toward wanting the man of the house having the same upper-hand (domination) that white men had over white women --based on the fact that the white man was the only one bringing in wages-- things became stressed.

Some black men recognized and honored equality between genders somewhat, more than white men. But some black men really didn't recognize...Those are the black men that tried to beat black women into a new kind of gender based slavery. There was a great big struggle over race in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Yes, there was. But there was also a huge struggle over class and gender within the black community as well.

Based on stats I've read on decades past, I'm wondering if black women didn't used to wind up killing their abusers a lot more often than they do nowadays. I don't think just-outta-slavery black women went for the okey-doke race solidarity to the point that they were willing to trade a white abuser for a black abuser. Black women that had experienced slavery knew what physical abuse really was before a black man could land the first punch. And I'm thinking that even the dominant morons knew better than to say something like this out loud.

Nowadays, 92% of black female homicide victims are dead due to domestic abuse. And I've read more than one half of the women that die of domestic abuse die while they were trying to leave the man beating them. The article below says getting a weapon to defend yourself makes things worse. But I can't see going out as a sitting duck either. Then again, a friend of mine simply ran from her ex for two years until he got bored and married someone else. But, in the meantime, her little 7 year old daughter told her therapist that her worst fear was that her father would kill her mother and she'd be stuck with his crazy behind. I don't think the answer really lies in personal solutions. We need men and women who leave marks on others, like the photo above, with blood on their fist to go to jail for a decade or more the first time it happens. We need law changes. Right now, some of the laws we've passed trying to protect (mostly women) have back-fired into cops arresting the one doing the punching and the one with the black eye at the same time. Cops love victim blaming whether the victim be black against white or man against women. We need to take the next step forward. For the black community that means calling out idiots like this out and kicking him and his foulness out of our collective presence.

http://www.vpc.org/studies/wmmw2014.pdf http://time.com/3313343/ray-rice-black-women-domestic-violence/

Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Until last year, I did not know that 50% of women that die of intimate partner violence do that dying while trying to leave their abuser. Did you?

READ MORE BLACK WOMEN AND DOMESTIC ABUSE: 
http://mic.com/articles/98324/7-devastating-realities-facing-black-domestic-violence-victims-in-america