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richardmurray

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  1. @Chevdove glad you enjoyed:) to africans...of course not, the british empire like the statian empire is an empire, it has many well earned enemies. Maybe they don't get revenge but they aren't going to lie to themselves are they? @Cynique your choice of words is very gentle... ireland has a strained relationship with england... england's dominion over the indian subcontinent which inclued pakistan and bangadesh was not particularly honorable you do like to speak very gently. @ProfDand generational wealth. many black people talk about generational wealth in the usa context, but generational wealth historically is mostly through generals or warlords putting crowns on their head and with their power anointing their bloodlines owners of all under that crown , thus they own all, generational wealth
  2. now0.png

    Students pour out of a Jewish school, known as a yeshiva, in Brooklyn, June 8, 2022. (Jonah Markowitz/The New York Times)

     

    New York Lawmakers Call for More Oversight of Hasidic Schools

    Eliza Shapiro, Brian M. Rosenthal and Nicholas Fandos

    Tue, September 13, 2022 at 7:51 AM·5 min read

     

    NEW YORK — Top New York officials voiced grave concerns about the quality of education in Hasidic Jewish private schools on Monday, a day after The New York Times revealed that many of the schools taught only rudimentary English and math and virtually no science or history.

    Two Democratic congressmen — Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Hakeem Jeffries, chair of the House Democratic Caucus — said they had serious concerns, with Nadler saying it was clear that some of the Hasidic schools were “utterly failing.”

    “It is a paramount duty of government to make sure that all children — whether it’s those educated in parochial, private or public schools — are provided a quality education,” said Nadler, the senior Jewish member of the House, whose current district encompasses a major Hasidic neighborhood and who was himself yeshiva-educated. “It is our duty to all New York students to ensure that the law is enforced.”

    Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

    Jeffries, who represents parts of central Brooklyn, called for “a rigorous inquiry in order to make sure that the health and well-being of all children is protected.”

    Daniel Goldman, who recently won a contested Democratic primary for a new congressional seat that includes Hasidic areas in Brooklyn, said he hoped the schools would work to comply with the law, adding that the Times report “paints a damning picture of an inadequate secular education that does not comply with state law.”

    At the state level — where politicians routinely court the cohesive Hasidic voting bloc — the state Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said she was concerned about the lack of secular education in the Hasidic schools.

    “The allegations in the story are deeply disturbing and must be addressed,” she said.

    State Sen. Julia Salazar and Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher, both Democrats who represent heavily Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said they were particularly alarmed by accounts of corporal punishment in the schools and would introduce legislation to ban such punishments going forward.

    Other leaders, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and members of a powerful state education board, showed less willingness to criticize the Hasidic schools.

    Hochul, a Democrat who has sought to appeal to Jewish voters before this fall’s gubernatorial election, declined to take a position on the Hasidic schools. She is ahead in polls, but, only a year after taking office, is still forging relationships with key groups across the state.

    “People understand that this is outside the purview of the governor,” Hochul said Monday at an event in Harlem.

    Although the state Board of Regents, not the governor, controls the state education department, Hochul is the most powerful politician in New York and can have significant influence over education issues.

    For their part, members of the Board of Regents made no mention of the Times report in discussions Monday before an expected vote on new rules that would hold private schools, including the Hasidic schools, known as yeshivas, to minimum academic standards.

    An attorney who has represented many Hasidic yeshivas, Avi Schick, recently said that Hochul’s chance of being reelected this November could be threatened by the Regents vote, even though the governor has not taken a public position on the rules.

    Other New York Democratic officials either did not respond to inquiries or declined to comment Monday about the Hasidic schools, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, the majority leader; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand; and Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, chief of the House Democratic campaign committee.

    New York Republicans, including Rep. Lee Zeldin, defended the schools and criticized the Times report. At a campaign event outside City Hall on Monday, Zeldin, who is running for governor against Hochul and is Jewish, suggested that public schools ought to be emulating “the values” of Hasidic schools, not the other way around.

    Other state Republicans said they believed the government should not interfere with private religious education or parents’ ability to choose where their children are educated.

    Benine Hamdan, the long-shot Republican candidate challenging Goldman in Brooklyn, said she opposed the state regulations, taking a shot at critical race theory. “While public schools are teaching CRT and sexuality, Hasidic schools should continue to have the right to teach Judaism,” she said.

    “At my core, I believe all parents have the right to choose the educational setting they think is best for their children,” said Mark Martucci, a state senator who represents a district just north of New York City and added that he had toured yeshivas and had been impressed by the students.

    In a state where Republicans are largely locked out of power, the party has been increasing its outreach to Hasidic voters who have consistently voted for Democrats in local elections but have begun favoring Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, in national races.

    Published on Sunday, the Times investigation showed that Hasidic schools appear to be operating in violation of state law by denying thousands of students a basic education. The community operates more than 100 all-boys schools across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, which have received more than $1 billion in government money over the past four years alone.

    The schools typically provide only 90 minutes a day of secular instruction, just four days per week, and only for boys ages 8 to 12. As a result, the students are failing to learn secular subjects at extraordinarily high rates, the Times found. More than 99% of students who took standardized tests in 2019 failed, according to state data.

    At a news conference Monday, Mayor Eric Adams of New York City said he was “not concerned” about the Times’ findings but stressed that his administration was continuing a long-delayed city investigation into some Hasidic schools.

    “I’m not going to look at a story. I want a thorough investigation. I want an independent review, and that’s what the city has to do. And we’re going to look at that,” Adams said. The mayor added that any instances of child abuse in the schools should be reported and investigated.

    Over the past few years, Hasidic leaders have made keeping government out of schools their top political priority and have relied on officials elected from their community to help block the regulations.

    One Hasidic politician, David Schwartz, a Hasidic district leader in Brooklyn, disputed reports of problems in the schools, including regular use of corporal punishment, saying, “I and my community — tens of thousands of caring parents and educators — are unfairly being paint-brushed due to the accounts of a few.”

    © 2022 The New York Times Company

     

    ARTICLE

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/york-lawmakers-call-more-oversight-115132238.html

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    I want to first restate the key points in the article. 

    • The white jewish schools are operating with some level of illegality for an extended time
    • government officials at the federal level <senator chuck schumer> new york state <governor hochul> or new york city level <mayor adams>are so frightened of the white jewish voting block aside the white jewish financial power that none have accepted the findings as true publicly while all want an extended time of deliberations which they would not give the black community or any part of the black community
    • The defenders of the white jewish schools say parents have the right to place children where they want and to preserve the heritage in their community, in this case jewish. I think of the Black descended of enslaved MOVE movement in philadelphia and how a black mayor treated them for wanting to preserve their own culture.
    • The white jewish schools , over one hundred all boys schools at least, received over one billion dollars in four years while providing per week only four days with ninety minute secular instruction. 
    • More than ninety nine percent of students in the white jewish private schools who took standardized tests failed in 2019, this is 2022. 

    Now what is my position. I don't care aboutthe white jewish schools whether committing illegality or not, the financial power of the white jewish community in New York City, the influence by the white jewish community on government officials<federal, state, city>, the white jewish community's heritage or culture being preserved or maintained, or the failure of white jewish students. 

    What I care about is the Black community all throughout humanity and in particular, the black community in New York City.

    The Black community in New York City doesn't have a large private school system internally and yet Black teachers in public schools have been removed for the crime of disagreeing with administrators, on a first time offense, not for years of neglect doing their job. 

    I know the black community in NYC is fiscally poor, it started that way for enslaving black people was legal when new york was new amsterdam before the creation of the United States America. Sequentially, the Black community in NYC doesn't demand the trepidation from elected officials even though it historically votes as a block too. 

    From the Black Panthers to The Nation of Islam to the Rastafarians the Black community in NYC tends to have the loudest opposition internally to heritages or cultures from within a community. I can see a Black newscaster in New york city asking, what does it mean to have a Black school. 

    The black children of New York City have a financially impotent Black adult community, which includes me, who in majority, I am part of the black adult minority, continually preaches to them about merit or equality or voting while providing black children in new york city nothing. The black adult community in new york city, includes me, have failed the black children of new york city hiding behind a cheap veil of individual decency or merit when in truth we black adults are just flat broke and are too proud to admit it. Any Black adult who reads this, stop telling black children about the need to be more educated and start making money and giving it to black kids regardless of their scholastic quality. Any Black adult who reads this, stop telling black children about competitive spirit and start making sure governments give money for black kids to enjoy life more regardless of their demeanor. Any Black adult who reads this, stop telling black kids what they have to do and start telling black kids what you can't do, admit your impotency your weakness your poverty and tell the truth of you to black children.

    I feel sorry for Black Children in new york city. I was once one, and while I was fortunate in the time span of  my childhood from a homelife perspective or communal perspective, I despised local media in new york city which was and is ninety nine percent white owned. White owned new york city media never stopped reminding black children how they needed to do better in my childhood days, comparing black children to various children anywhere with one thing in common. At the time of comparison they are better than black children in New York City. While the same white owned news media of New York City, couldn't find time to discover how the French don't count the schools in the Balieues as part of their main surveys to the world , the japanese don't count the children who don't come to school at higher rates, the schools in the white towns or villages in the midwest where the curriculum is lower isn't admitted in the assessment to comparing the black children in new york city. Black children in NYC have been falsely attributed as consistent failures when in truth it is a mere trick of statistics. Any thing can be proven statistically, anything, the key is in the details. Black children in education have been attacked by statistical warfare and black adults, like me,let it happen.

     

     

    1. Show previous comments  3 more
    2. richardmurray

      richardmurray

      @Chevdove Education is a part of life:) I will never deny the need to keep an open mind, to want to keep learning... but when it comes to scholastic achievement in the USA. Black adults, to be blunt, have to change tact. We have to stop suggesting our children whom we can not provide for like White adults can to white children must overcome Black adult inability. I am not suggesting Black Adults tell Black Children to stop dreaming or working or desiring. But, this story not only confirms what many in NYC already knew. I can speak to that. But the story also exposes how unfair Black adults, who can't provide the kind of financial or environmental scenario for black children as a community, are to black children in asking them to overcome those walls. White children failing 99% with an average scholastic test, are going to a school getting billions. That is the power of the white adults. What are we black adults actually asking our children to to? 

    3. Chevdove

      Chevdove

      Yes. How can Black children overcome our inabilities without help?

      Black adults do need to give children more than just words.

      But then, another problem, I believe, is that many Black adults become parents at too young of an age and part of our failures has to do with maturity. 

      I believe we need elders, a community of elders to come together, and pool resources to help young 

      parents as well. 

       

    4. richardmurray
  3. Day 11 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Sage-11-Witchtember-2022-929182261
  4. Many millenial knows the former regnum of england https://luvmesumme.tumblr.com/post/695070752799670272
  5. @Pioneer1 thank you for answering my query. To bad you can't recall a black mermaid tale. Some black people may be referring to the new film as the gifs in my status suggest.
  6. @Pioneer1 no in NYC.... NYC has always been full of homeless people, the problem is the location of the homeless has adjusted. NYC under adams already did away with many havens for the homeless, in his campaign against what he considers a crime riddled city, under bridges or overpasses and other places. The flood and the response to sars-cov-2 got homeless people out of the sewers or subways. but with all these administrative changes, homeless people simply settle where they find themselves and thus all over the city. To home ownership another no, the problem is NYC has a large percentage of people who still owe rent. Circa over a billion dollars and most of those people are not black.
  7. Day 10 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Ghost-10-Witchtember-2022-929077403
  8. What is the most memorable while also original mermaid story you know of from a Black writer? https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2063&type=status
  9. wait0.gif

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    Halle Bailey as Ariel in the Little Mermaid 2023

     

    beautiful sister, I wonder if a natural black woman's hair will behave that way in the water. I saw black women with a beautiful unmanicured afro in the water... it wasn't like this but anyway. Glad she has a job. I wonder what is the best mermaid story written by a black writer you know in your knowledge? 

  10. @Troy Because I want to hear what others think without something to reply too. I find one of the biggest problems with communication online is the replying nature. PEople feed off of replies. They read an article then go to the replies. And then spend so much time on the replies. I sometimes don't want to be the starter. A work of art shouldn't require anyone to speak first for anyone to have a comment.
  11. @Troy Not just the creators of star trek but the house of the dragon or Rings of power shows are similar in presenting a multiracial populace in a fantasy world on par with somewhere in NYC. you know why they are doing it Troy, you are not ignorant. the simple reality is, many people in humanity, want to see an image of complex multiraciality, and they don't care about plot to get it. The problem with the shows, is the writers have failed to provide the multiracial casting or visage, the producers want through their accountants determinations through electronic assessment on the viewers desires WHILE also provide a story whose plot or characters are as qualified or natured as the source material. But to me the problem is the one word you used... mainstream. I never use that word. I use the word white. When I see Hollywood, TV stations, Cable stations, streaming platforms. I don't see a mainstream, a word that suggest a minor stream exists and people are possibly being kept in the minor stream or excluded from the main stream. I see white media. I see white firms in white broadcasting channels presenting white stories and providing opportunity for white artists/thespians to be apart of it. Now, white firms have the freedom to hire blacks but that doesn't make a show black. And doesn't mean black people must herd to that show or honor that show as a symbol of growth in the black community. Again, as with my Black wood argument. The black community in the USA has a long history of its own media. YEs, not as well known even by black people. Yes, absent the financing for the most glamorous. but it exists. It exists. Black people in the USA value being apart of white media because they want white media to become the mainstream. But private financing isn't the government. Judging by content of character, not color of skin is functional in government, but a white owner of a firm has the right to give their dumb child the vice presidency of the firm over a black man with twenty matriculations and more recommendations. And the reason is simple, they own the firm. The whole point of owning is to be above merit. You own, you do what you want. thus why nothing is too big too fail. My blackwood position goes into this Searched for 'blackwood' in Status Updates (aalbc.com)
  12. congrats to Megan Piphus Peace, first black female puppeteer on Sesame Street https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2062&type=status
  13. @Troy No I placed the text and source of the poem , no need for that image. Fair enough, e e cummings in my view is making a statement, but if you don't see a statement being made then fair enough. MAybe my assessment is to self contained
  14. now0.jpg
    Photo Courtesy of Megan Piphus Peace/Vanderbilt/Sesame Street

    MEET THE FIRST BLACK WOMAN PUPPETEER ON SESAME STREET
    29th August 2022 by BOTWC Staff

    The “Vanderbilt Ventriloquist’ has now made history as the first Black woman puppeteer on Sesame Street, Vanderbilt University reports. 

    Megan Piphus Peace was first introduced to puppetry at the age of 10, attending a puppetry conference in Illinois with her Vacation Bible School teacher. She fell in love with the artform and ventriloquism, relating it to her favorite childhood TV programs like Sesame Street and Lamb Chop’s Play-Along. Her mother saw Peace’s passion, supporting her with VHS tapes of ventriloquists to study and a doll from famous entertainer Edgar Bergen so Peace could practice. It all paid off and Peace began performing when she was just in elementary school. By the time she was 15, she was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. 


    “What I consider the magic of ventriloquism is getting to share that experience with someone else and have them believe that our conversations are real. I realized what an impact the writing could have on the audience, and that every age could learn something from the show. From then on, my goal was to have a theme…woven into every performance,” Peace explained.

    She continued her work through highschool and when she started college at Vanderbilt University, she became known as the “Vanderbilt Ventriloquist,” performing on major platforms like the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and America’s Got Talent. Peace graduated in 2014, subsequently earning her master’s in finance from Vanderbilt as well and beginning a professional career in real estate finance. 

    Peace continued doubling as a puppeteer, continuing performing across the country and abroad, working on various television shows and collaborating with the University of Cincinnati in 2019 on a musical series that taught children basic financial literacy. For her work, she received two Emmy awards for best composition and best children’s short. Now Peace has landed her biggest deal yet, joining the cast of Sesame Street in 2020 and making history last September as the first Black woman puppeteer, playing the role of 6-year-old Gabrielle. 

    The puppeteer said she had no idea the role was historic and she is so grateful for the opportunity. 

    “I would have cried like a baby on the 123 steps if they had told me beforehand…The sets of Sesame Street are like walking into a fantasy. To be there is really something,” said Peace. 

    The process to be on the show was arduous, Peace submitting her first audition tape in 2017. She wouldn’t get a call back from Matt Vogel, the show’s puppet captain, until March 2020. He suggested she enroll in a virtual workshop to learn Muppet-style puppetry. She did and it paid off. 

    “It takes time to go through video submissions, but once we do, we earmark people that we’d like to invite to a workshop where we see their skills as a puppeteer and actor in person. Zoom is not an ideal way to conduct a workshop, but we made the best of it and Megan was game to learn,” Vogel explained. 

    During that time Sesame Workshop was working on their racial justice initiative and Vogel, who voices Big Bird and Kermit the Frog, said Peace was on a shortlist to play Gabrielle. 

    “Megan was our choice from the beginning. She already had lip sync skills from her abilities as a ventriloquist,” said Vogel. 

    Once Peace perfected her monitor work, it was a perfect match, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, another puppeteer on the show calling her “incredible.”

    “We needed authentic representation, and Megan is incredible. She’s got a light inside her,” said Carrara-Rudolph. 

    Congratulations Megan! Because of you, we can!

     

    ARticle URL

    https://www.becauseofthemwecan.com/blogs/botwc-firsts/vanderbilt-ventriloquist-makes-history-as-first-black-woman-puppeteer-on-sesame-street

     

  15. Day 9 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Eye-09-Witchtember-2022-928971787
  16. No @Troy no one suggested anything outside Cynique who didn't offer any artistic take, more a snide on its content, which is fine, so I left it alone. yeah the image is the other poem which i placed in the linked status in the original post. But I will ask you, what do you think? I posted this to get replies to the poetry from others, to chime in if needed. Not to be the center of multilog.
  17. @Pioneer1 Thoughtful strategy, from a historical point of view your strategy has already shown its challenge in being implemented in the black community in the usa. While history also shows it is warranted based on the, unbridgeable, positions of various black tribes to each other in the black community in the usa. The challenge is black leaders of most tribes in the black community in the usa historically find it very difficult to tell their tribal members to be about their tribe and stop proselytizing or condemning other tribes and wish the other tribes fare thee well with love. It is not historically unprecedented, but it is rare from the 1500s to today.
  18. @Michel Montvert but your not seeing my point,... I have never joined a gang in the usa and probably, never will. but, some, and I dare say most, people in one see positive value in it, and not all for the same reasons. My point is gangs can change or can have various function. You concur to that. Yes, I didn't say all in a gang want it or desire it or feel everybody should do it, though some do. antisemites. Being jewish is a religious affiliation. in the same way being Christian. But when I speak of phenotypical concerns it is important to say White jews. Because whites jews or not black jews. When I say white or black I am speaking of phenotype or appearance, and specifically or usually skin color. A white person isn't different to me because they are female or jewish or young or latino. Said whites are to me no different than white people who are male, chrsitian , old , anglos. I am negatively prejudiced to whites. Yes I AM. Does this mean I have killed somebody or attacked somebody white? no it does not and no I haven't. Hitler's views on white jews have no bearing on me. I know he thought black people, whether they be yoruba/christian/buddisht/jewish ala falashas of ethiopia/ atheoist/spiritualist/agnostic/ or other were second to whites. Now I do care about that. do you? And your right, nature only knows humans are human. In the same way nature only knows birds are birds. it is humans who make the variances amongst us in the same way the pidgeon in NYC is no where to be found when one of the local eagles is flying above.
  19. @Pioneer1 yes, but the point is , comparing the success of a group with significantly smaller quantity to a group with significantly larger quantity failings in fiscal or structural affairs is unfair. A small group in fiscal capitalism has to be persecuted strongly, meaning through the government, by a larger group to have more failings. In the USA , white jews are not persecuted strongly, thus. Blacks are persecuted strongly in the USA, but, that is all blacks thus, the tinier Nation of islam can operate easier. It is the same like the blacks at martha's vineyard. or the blacks in various pocket communities in the south. In the end, are you suggesting the black community in the USA break up into groups? For , example, the Nation of islam is approximately a floor of 55,000 people. the black population in the usa is approximately a floor of 45,000,000 so if you are saying the black community in the usa needs to break up into more effective groups then based on the nation of islam that is circa one thousand groups. Possible? of course. It is doable. It will be a process. In my mind it isn't complicated to see where to start or the path. But as this is based on your words, what will you do?
  20. Day 8 https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Cat-08-Witchtember-2022-928829613
  21. @Michel Montvert Help? well, maybe if the mexican government would help them, they can make more possible. At the base level, they are refuting wanting to live in the USA as their parents and more like their forebears who lost that war at the end. When one loses a war, it is a gang like scenario. Well, the history of gangs is violence. The irish /white jewish/italian mobs mostly terrrorized their own as well, all gangs do The gang is never for the other, but a gathering of those who are not convinced by the system, which doesn't mean all have to be that way. yes, some mexicans kids, think like their parents, like you but my simple point is that those who don't have the right to. The KKK was a gang no different in nature. The KKK killed or hurt many white people as well. Not all gangs have the same level of power. But that connects to outside sources. Maybe the mexican government needs to aid the mexicans gangs more? I know the southern governments aided the KKK. NYC's government was a partner to the irish/white jew/italian gangs. So...
  22. When you can imagine dragons but not imagine Black people in fantasy stories, your racism is showing
    OPINION: White people are once again up in arms about Black characters appearing in their favorite fantasy series. You know why. 


    Monique Judge
      |  
    Sep 8, 2022

    now1.png

    Wil Johnson, left, and Steve Toussaint in HBO's "House of the Dragon." (Photo by Ollie Upton/HBO)
    Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own.

    Before I even get into this, let me (re)state for the record that when I say “white people,” I do not mean, all white people. It is more of the general you versus the specific you type of reference. I know y’all like to get your panties in a bunch about this; I have the inbox messages to prove it, but I want you to know that if it doesn’t apply? You are more than welcome to let it fly. Please and thank you. I am currently on a white tears diet, and I don’t need yours. 

    Speaking of white tears, have you seen all the white tears all over the internet because both the new Game of Thrones series and the new Lord of the Rings series have dared to cast Black actors in primary roles?

    If you have not, please allow me to get you caught up a little bit.

    The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an am*zon Prime series that is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings franchise, and House of the Dragon, an HBO series that is a prequel to Game of Thrones, both debuted recently to rave reviews. Even as fans rave daily about both series, there is a rumbling in the background of disgruntled “fans” who are upset that Black actors are in roles that they believe should be played by white people because there were actually no Black people during the time of dragons and wizards and magic and stuff. 

    Seriously, that is indeed the logic of some arguing against the Black cast members. Some have been straightforward with it and made outright racist remarks. I have also seen others say on Twitter that they think the shows are being too “woke” (remind me to talk about the bastardization of that word at another time) and interjecting “politics” into their fantasy stories. 

    Because putting make-believe Black characters in make-believe stories about make-believe people in make-believe lands that do not even exist is totally political and woke and beyond the pale. 

    This comes from the same group of people who read the Bible, know Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jewish man and still made him white with blonde hair and blue eyes in all of their iconography. I guess it’s totally OK to play loose and fast with the “word of God,” but absolutely offensive to do so with fantasy characters written out of someone’s imagination. 

    We’ve seen this before, of course. 

    It really bothers (some) white people that Black people get cast in their favorite make-believe stories. Maybe we are infringing on their ability to make believe that we don’t exist. Whatever the case may be, it’s seriously time to get over it, like Whoopi said. 

    If you can believe that fire-breathing, flying dinosaurs not only exist but will allow certain individuals—from a certain family with thousands of generations of inbreeding and some genetic mutation that makes a portion of them come out with dragon-like qualities themselves—to hop on their backs and order them to breathe hellfire on command, it really should not be that difficult to imagine that some of those inbred individuals might have dark skin, violet eyes and that weirdo lacefront hair color. Please. 

    In summation, I want y’all to stop being so stingy with the ball. We want to play too, and let’s face it, we are good at a lot of these things just like (some) of y’all are, so calm down and enjoy the show. 

    Hey. At least it will be easier for you to know these characters by name. There aren’t that many of us in it. 


    Monique Judge is a storyteller, content creator and writer living in Los Angeles. She is a word nerd who is a fan of the Oxford comma, spends way too much time on Twitter, and has more graphic t-shirts than you. Follow her on Twitter @thejournalista or check her out at moniquejudge.com.


    Article URL
    https://thegrio.com/2022/09/08/when-you-can-imagine-dragons-but-not-imagine-black-people-in-fantasy-stories-your-racism-is-showing/

     

    MY THOUGHTS

    I completely oppose that title. There are already fantasy stories with black people. this isn't about Black people in fantasy stories, this is about characters being manipulated for no reason. I am a writer. Admittedly, no where near known or popular like Tolkien or George RR Martin but in most of my fantasy stories there are no whites. Does this mean black characters in my stories must be turned white? Its silly. Authors like Nnedi Okarafor or Octavia Butler or Nalo Hopkinson created fantasy stories with a plethora of black people. Even if Tananarive Due or  Steven Barnes or Jordan Peele don't have a fantasy work that may fit some theme, they damn sure can write one. Finance their work into shows and give the Black actors the Black roles. This isn't about negative bias. This is about forcing monoracial fantasy environments to reflect the USA.  I read the books. MArtin has black people, they are called summer islanders and far more Black people live in sothoryos. Tolkien has dark skinned Black people, they are in Far HArad. Both of those places aren't involved in the stories in the books in question in a major way. Cause if Corlys Valearyon can be played by a black thespian then why can't anansi be played by a white one? why can't John Henry? will I like it if John Henry is played by a white man? hell no. But, if a white fantasy character can be portrayed by someone not white then  black people can't protest when a black fantasy character is played by someone not black. The door swings both ways. I wrote in email to George RR Martin's publicist and the Tolkien estate. With no hope to reply, let me write a story about Sothoryos or Far Harad. I offer other black writers do the same. Then the black thespians can have even more roles in the Black places in the Map of MArtin's or Tolkiens world.  I oppose this line of thinking. IT isn't about negative bias, it is about getting fantasy worlds to reflect the multiracial reality of the USA. But, neither of Tolkien's or MArtin's fantasy worlds are based on the USA. Both are based on north western  Europe between circa 900 and 1300 after the death of jesus. Where Black people were not present in any noticeable form. I despise this line of thinking. 
     

  23. @Michel Montvert fair enough, I want to add one thing, about people who complain about the next generations not continuing the style of life from the prior. ... People of color, defined as non white europeans, in NYC do that often. The children don't comprehend , the children are insulting their forebears. But, are the mexican children joining gangs in california for example, insulting their forebears? when the whites of the USA took the west by defeating mexico in a war? when the whites of the usa took all the land and resources mexicans had owned in that region for themselves? When the whites of the USA had made mexicans in the western states live on fiefdoms controlled by white landlords. In California and western states, what about the following? < https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2060&type=status > And let me not go into indigenous peoples history in the lands that are the western states, let alone the USA itself. The gang desires goes back to the violence of the past, which was 100% warranted. The children don't have to see the world the way we do, nor do they have to want what we want, for many if not most of our forebears didn't want what we want. If Mexico had won that war, the children who are gang members would be the land owners today. @Pioneer1 fair enough, that is your opinion.the black community in the usa or the european colonies that preceded it has always had people who speak like you do. Fully invest in the fiscal capitalism, become an owner, the american dream is yours. But most black people have always refuted it, based on the truth of their lives. Consistency has reason to be, it is never a choice. Yes, many white christians talk about the financial efficiency of white jews, many phong talk about the japanese americans, many black christians or non NOI talk about the financial prudence in the nation of islam as compared to the black tribes outside of it. yes, small subcommunities always are financially better than their larger counterparts in the USA and the reason is simple. The larger your community the more fiscal poor will exist for the nature of fiscal capitalism. Black people in the usa haven't figured out how to make the majority have positive business ownership but neither have whites in the usa so...
  24. now0.png

    Female Workers Face Rape, Harassment In U.S. Agriculture Industry

    June 25, 2013, 2:39 am ET by Bernice Yeung and Grace Rubenstein, The Center for Investigative Reporting

     

    SUNNYSIDE, Wash. – Esther Abarca said the foreman drove to parts of the apple orchard that she had never seen. Deep into the ranch, in what she could describe only as a “desolate place,” he parked the truck, reached over and tried to grab her.

    Weeping as she told her story, Abarca said the foreman got out of the truck when she resisted his advances. He opened the side door, climbed on top of her, and began to kiss and grope her. She called for help and tried to push him away, but he got her pants halfway off.

    “I kept screaming, but there was nobody there,” Abarca said.

    Abarca said she kept screaming as the foreman groped her. But then, as if suddenly chastened by her crying, kicking and pushing, she said he stopped. He told her that if she didn’t tell anyone what had happened, he’d give her $3,000 for a new car.

    Abarca, a mother of three, said she refused the money.

    “I told him that that was the very reason why I had come here to work, that I did not need him to give me any money at all,” she said.

    The foreman’s alleged first assault came in 2009, during the long days of the Yakima Valley apple harvest in central Washington. An immigrant from Mexico, Abarca was new to the Evans Fruit Co., one of the country’s largest apple producers.

    Nearly four years later, Abarca’s story was the subject of a federal court case testing whether the owners of Evans Fruit looked the other way as their workers claimed they were subjected to repeated sexual violence and harassment by an orchard foreman and crew bosses.

    It was a rare public accusation for an immigrant, many of whom fear retaliation and deportation if they speak up. Abarca was testifying in only the second case of a farmworker claiming sexual harassment to reach a federal court trial.

    Although the exact scope of sexual violence and harassment against agricultural workers is impossible to pinpoint, an investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism reveals persistent peril for women working in the food industry. An estimated 560,000 women work on U.S. farms.

    In partnership with FRONTLINE and Univision, CIR and IRP spent nearly a year reviewing thousands of pages of documents and crisscrossing the nation – from the tightly ordered orchards of the Yakima Valley to the leafy tomato fields of southern Florida – to hear workers’ stories of sexual assault.

    Hundreds of female agricultural workers have complained to the federal government about being raped and assaulted, verbally and physically harassed on the job, while law enforcement has done almost nothing to prosecute potential crimes.

    In virtually all of the cases reviewed, the alleged perpetrators held positions of power over the women. Despite the accusations, these supervisors have remained on the job for years without fear of arrest.

    At the trial, Abarca was among more than a dozen women who had accused a foreman, Juan Marin, and a handful of crew leaders at Evans Fruit of sexually assaulting or harassing them. For her part, Abarca said she had been topping off bins with just-picked apples when the foreman called to her from his pickup. He told her to get in the truck, she testified.

    Marin said he never sexually assaulted or harassed Abarca or any of the other women, and he has not been arrested or prosecuted in criminal court for the allegations.

    At a federal civil trial this year featuring 14 women telling their stories, a jury found that whatever had happened at Evans Fruit, it did not create a sexually hostile work environment, which had to be established before the company could be held liable.

    Government attorneys who prosecuted the civil case have requested a new trial. In court filings, they called the verdict “unmoored from the actual evidence.”

    Marin, who had worked for Evans Fruit for more than three decades, said the claims are based on lies and rumors spread by “a bunch of jealous people” who are trying to win money from the company.

    “I’ve been accused of sexual harassment, and that’s completely a lie,” Marin said in one of several interviews. “Because I never bothered nobody. The only thing I’ve been doing in my life is work. To me it’s so unfair, because I never did nothing like that in my life.”

    Nevertheless, two complaints against Marin prompted owner Bill Evans to write him a letter in 2006, four years before Marin was fired for alleged embezzlement.

    “We don’t have the time or energy to continue dealing with the problems you are bringing down on us,” the letter said. “Any further incidents or complaints of sexual harassment and you will be discharged.”

    The company drafted its first sexual harassment policy in 2008.

    A National Problem

    Reports of harassment and sexual violence against female farmworkers span the U.S. map.

    In Molalla, Ore., a worker at a tree farm accused her supervisor of repeatedly raping her over the course of several months in 2006 and 2007, often holding gardening shears to her throat. If she complained to anyone, he allegedly told her, he would fire her and kill her entire family.

    The supervisor never was prosecuted, and a civil case against the tree farm was settled for $150,000 in 2011 without the company acknowledging wrongdoing. The payment went to the woman and three family members who said they were harassed or fired in retaliation.

    Three hundred miles away, in Lind, Wash., an egg farm manager forced a woman working alone in a hen-laying house to routinely give him oral sex to keep her job between 2003 and 2010, according to a statement she gave to the sheriff. In an interview with the sheriff, the manager denied the accusation. He did not return calls for comment.

    That case was settled for $650,000 this year – most of it to be paid to the woman and four other workers who claimed the company had fired them in retaliation for complaining. The manager no longer works at the farm.

    In a case pending in Mississippi federal court, dozens of women hired to debone chickens at a poultry processing plant said they were violently groped by a supervisor between 2004 and 2008. One woman who said she was grabbed between her legs had to seek medical attention, according to court filings.

    And a worker at a Salinas, Calif.-based lettuce farm accused a manager of raping her in 2006 – a charge he denied to company management, according to court documents. Maricruz Ladino sued the grower, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2010. She did not file a police report, and there was no criminal prosecution. He no longer works for the company.

    “There are supervisors who try to use their power to mistreat people or to abuse them,” said Ladino, who has since left the company. “And it’s very difficult to fight against that because we are working out of necessity, because we need to provide for our families.”

    Dan Fazio, director of the Washington Farm Labor Association, an employment firm that coordinates farm and seasonal employees in the Pacific Northwest, said similar problems exist in other industries, and he points to an example of workplace rape that involved a real estate company.

    “Harassment occurs in agriculture,” he said, “but there is no proof that it occurs more (often) in agriculture.”

    But a review of the 41 federal sexual harassment lawsuits filed against agricultural enterprises since 1998 – when the first federal lawsuit was filed against an agricultural company for failing to stop harassment or abuse – reveals a pattern of supervisors accused of preying on multiple workers.

    Among these were at least 153 people who alleged workplace abuses, the vast majority by their superiors. Of the lawsuits, 7 out of 8 involved workers claiming physical harassment, assault or rape.

    According to civil court documents, in nearly every case, workers made complaints to company management and, among those, 85 percent faced retaliation – such as being demoted, fired or further harassed. In their review of the federal cases, CIR and IRP could not find a single case in which the men accused of sexual assault or rape in the civil suits had been criminally prosecuted.

    Cycle of Silence

    An estimated 50 to 75 percent of U.S. farmworkers immigrated to the U.S. illegally, according to advocacy groups and government surveys. In interviews, more than 100 government officials, law enforcement officials, lawyers and social service providers said shame, fear of deportation or losing a job, language barriers and ignorance of workplace laws keep low-wage immigrant laborers silent.

    For government lawyer William R. Tamayo, whose father worked at sugarcane plantations in Hawaii, the first inkling of what was happening to women in America’s fields and packinghouses came when he visited with California labor advocates in the mid-1990s.

    “They said farmworker women were talking about the fields as the fils de calzón, or ‘fields of panties,’ ” said Tamayo, the regional attorney in San Francisco for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which files sexual harassment lawsuits on behalf of employees, including farm and food factory workers. “They referred to the fields as the ‘green motel.’ ”

    Without immigration papers or job options, many agricultural workers live the largely traceless lives that low-wage seasonal work demands. For some, it’s a shadow dimension of disposable phones, weekly visits to check-cashing chains and elusive last-known addresses.

    It’s a life based on the incessant search for the next job in whatever crop needs harvesting. Migrant workers can land year-round gigs at dairies or processing plants, but it’s not easy to forget their own financial instability – and supervisors know this.

    If a foreman wants to test the extent of his authority, here are the perfect victims, worker advocates said.

    “Sexual violence doesn’t happen unless there’s an imbalance of power,” Tamayo said. “And in the agricultural industry, the imbalance of power between perpetrator, company and the worker is probably at its greatest.”

    The combination of financial desperation and tenuous immigration status make agricultural workers vulnerable to workplace violence and less inclined to report crimes. The federal government estimates that 65 percent of all sexual assault and rape victims never report the crime.

    Immigrants, especially those who entered the country without authorization, are even less likely to complain, according to academic studies.

    The legal research and advocacy group ASISTA surveyed more than 100 women working at Iowa meatpacking plants in 2009. An analysis of these surveys shows that 41 percent said they’d experienced unwanted touching, and about 30 percent reported receiving sexual propositions.

    More than 25 percent of the women said they’d been threatened with firing or harder work if they didn’t let the aggressor have his way.

    It’s a similar picture in California, where a UC Santa Cruz study of 150 female farmworkers published in 2010 found that nearly 40 percent experienced sexual harassment ranging from verbal advances to rape on the job, and 24 percent said they had experienced sexual coercion by a supervisor.

    Many take sexual harassment as a job hazard, advocates said.

    When attorney Laura Mahr started talking to Oregon’s female farmworkers about sexual harassment and assault, some of them said, “ ‘Oh, that’s not just part of the job? You have laws about that?’ ”

    Many women, Mahr said, have risked their lives to cross the border, sometimes becoming indebted to human smugglers along the way. Coming forward means possibly losing their livelihood.

    “It’s an epidemic in the field,” said Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers. “It goes back to the vulnerability that women have … especially if they’re undocumented. And you know, the machismo culture of power and when you think of this type of sexual harassment or rape, it’s always about power of men over women.”

    Few Complaints Make It To Court

    The only federal agency actively and systematically pursuing on-the-job sexual violence and harassment cases on behalf of agricultural workers is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is responsible for enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace.

    In the past 15 years, workers have filed 1,106 sexual harassment complaints with the commission against agricultural-related industries. The allegations range from verbal harassment to rape.

    Only a fraction will make it to federal court. The commission declines to pursue about 50 percent of the sexual harassment complaints across all industries for lack of substance. Another portion is settled out of court.

    For the few cases in which the commission files a lawsuit in federal court – 130 cases last year out of about 11,000 sexual harassment complaints across all businesses in the U.S. – a handful will make it to trial.

    Some growers said they believe the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is too adversarial and aggressive through litigation. Brendan V. Monahan, an attorney for Evans Fruit, said the commission approaches farmers as the enemy rather than trying to work constructively with them.

    “The EEOC has imagined this adversarial relationship between farmers and laborers that I don’t think really exists, and they have chosen to champion labor in an imagined fight against farmers,” he said. “It should be a matter of conciliation and compliance rather than confrontation and coerced enforcement.”

    But David Lopez, general counsel for the commission, disagreed and said it files cases involving “egregious cases of discrimination” that warrant civil prosecution, and he warned against painting the entire agricultural industry as bad actors.

    Nevertheless, he said, “I do know that we do see very serious cases of discrimination and harassment in the agricultural industry.”

    Although agriculture is America’s oldest industry, the first sexual harassment lawsuit against a grower to reach a jury trial was in 2004. The Evans Fruit trial this year was the second.

    That landmark first case involved Olivia Tamayo, who worked for California-based Harris Farms, among the largest agribusinesses in the country. (Olivia Tamayo is not related to William Tamayo, the attorney for the federal commission.) She said a supervisor named Rene Rodriguez raped her three separate times after showing her he was carrying a gun. Rodriguez denied it.

    The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against Harris Farms on her behalf in 2002. After a 23-day trial, the jury found Harris Farms liable for sexual harassment and retaliation and awarded nearly $800,000 in lost wages and compensatory and punitive damages.

    In a statement, CEO John Harris said the company denies any wrongdoing. The workers had a consensual relationship that the company did not know about, Harris said in the statement. He said although the jury believed the accused employee was a supervisor, “we felt he was not.”

    Rodriguez retired in 1999. At an interview at his home in South Texas, Rodriguez insisted that he and Olivia Tamayo had been dating. She accused him of rape, he said, because she wanted money.

    “No, no, no, no,” he said when asked if he’d used violence against Olivia Tamayo. “If that was how it was from the beginning, I would have been jailed or something.”

    Olivia Tamayo’s lawyer, William J. Smith, a longtime civil rights advocate, said that when she won her case, he thought it would change the landscape for agricultural workers. He said he knows differently now.

    “Even though Olivia Tamayo stood up for her rights, people are still afraid,” he said. “I don’t think it caught on the way we thought it would because the fear is still out there.”

    Farmworkers’ vulnerability is compounded because a number of federal labor laws, ranging from minimum wage to underage work, don’t apply in agriculture. A handful of states, including California, Oregon and Washington, provide stronger legal protections.

    “If there’s violation of wage and hour laws, if there are children laboring in the fields, of course there’s going to be sexual harassment, because even the bread-and-butter issues aren’t being addressed,” said Ramón Ramírez, a founder and president of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, the farmworkers union based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

    This year, growers and labor advocates are closely watching as a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws makes its way through Congress. Proponents say the bill, if approved, could offer protections for agricultural workers to more readily report abuse on the job.

    “One of the fundamental reasons we have to get comprehensive immigration reform is so we can stop the daily routine rape of women in the workplace,” said U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., a vocal proponent of an overhaul.

    But some who support new immigration laws have doubts that they would curb sexual harassment in the fields.

    Fazio of the Washington Farm Labor Association said workers who have been assaulted or raped already qualify for a special visa for crime victims. Providing provisional status through the bill, he said, “is not going to make a person more likely to come forward.”

    The primary solution lies with employers, who must create a “culture of compliance,” he said. “They need to put systems in place.”

    Cases Difficult to Pursue

    Beyond the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, farmworkers in some parts of the country can turn to state agencies to file workplace sexual harassment cases against agricultural employers. But those are rare.

    In Washington – home to more agricultural workers than any state except California – laborers filed 92 cases of alleged sexual harassment with the state Human Rights Commission against agricultural companies between 2005 and 2012. Of those, 67 cases were shelved by the commission for having “no reasonable cause” or because the office faced uncooperative witnesses or a statute of limitation.

    The rest – 25 cases – resulted in settlements or remain open.

    In rural areas, access to attorneys for low-income clients is limited, making it difficult for farmworkers to file civil cases on their own in state courts. For example, in California’s Central Valley and Central Coast, some of the most productive agricultural regions in the country, there are a handful of private and legal aid organizations that take on these cases.

    Michael Marsh, directing attorney of the Salinas office of California Rural Legal Assistance, one of the few organizations in the state to take farmworker sexual harassment cases, said that each harvest, at least two farmworkers come to his office to say their boss raped them. This year, he and his colleagues have already met with three.

    In March, a berry farm supervisor who raped a farmworker represented by Marsh’s office was convicted in a state case and sentenced to prison, but the chances of other criminal cases moving forward are not high.

    In some cases, state prosecutors are reluctant to file criminal charges. Sheriffs and police officials said these cases can be difficult to pursue. When reports are made, there often is scant evidence and few witnesses, they said. The burden of proof in criminal cases is much higher than in civil court.

    “If you get into a courtroom and there is no physical evidence, it’s a tough nut to crack,” said Sgt. Kris Zuniga of the Avenal Police Department in agriculturally rich Kings County, Calif. “If there is some evidence, he can say it was consensual and then you’re back to a he said, she said.”

    The 2002 civil sexual harassment case against DeCoster Farms of Iowa, an egg processing plant, and a co-defendant, Iowa Ag LLC, illustrates how well-documented civil cases go nowhere in criminal court.

    After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a civil lawsuit accused three plant supervisors of “repeated and systematic raping” and sexual harassment of nearly a dozen women in boiler rooms and trucks over six years, law enforcement intervened. The Wright County Sheriff’s Department investigated the claims, along with representatives from the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office.

    In one interview, a 28-year-old worker said a supervisor violated her in his truck when he was moving her from one part of the plant to another. She tried to scream and fight off the assault, the sheriff’s report said, but “he put the knife up to the side of her face and told her he would kill her if she didn’t let him do it.”

    He told her that she was not the only woman he had raped, according to the sheriff’s report. None of the supervisors still works for the egg farm.
    Paul Schultz, then the sheriff of Wright County, took statements from seven women, and five of them said they were regularly raped at DeCoster. But the local prosecutor told him there was not enough evidence to take the case to court.

    It’s a case that still fills Schultz with regret. Most of the women have moved away. But Schultz said that if he had an opportunity to speak with them again, he would apologize. He’d tell them, “I’m sorry that the prosecution could not be pursued,” he said.

    DeCoster Farms and Iowa Ag paid $1.5 million to settle the federal civil lawsuit later that year. In the process, they denied all of the allegations. Another Iowa egg company owned by Austin DeCoster, known as Quality Egg, settled a federal sexual harassment lawsuit in 2012 for $85,000.

    But for the three men accused of serially raping the DeCoster workers, life goes on. One of the alleged perpetrators lives in a tree-lined subdivision in a small Iowa town.

    According to family members, the other two have relocated to Mexico. One of them on his Facebook page lists members of the DeCoster family as his friends.

    An Image At Odds With Allegations

    The Evans Fruit Co. is one of the biggest apple operations in the country, shipping 320 million pounds a year to markets around the globe. A job there is desirable, workers said in interviews, because the size of the operation means more work, longer days and bigger paychecks.

    The claims lodged against Evans Fruit for failing to stop sexual assault and harassment can be difficult to reconcile with its homespun image.

    The company’s beginnings make it seem beyond reproach. Bill and Jeannette Evans, now in their 80s, first met at a chocolate shop in downtown Yakima, Wash., got married as teenagers and started the company with 10 acres. They work nearly every day of the year, and now the company cultivates its award-winning crop across 7,500 acres on various farms.

    The ranch that Juan Marin managed is Evans Fruit’s second largest. The orchard sits at the foot of the Rattlesnake Hills, near the city of Sunnyside. The property is vast: From the main road, stands of apple trees blend into distant orchards, a blur of fruit, branches and greenery.

    Here, some 50 miles from company headquarters, Marin wielded power in the ugliest ways, workers claimed in interviews and court testimony. In these remote and endless groves, Marin is said to have bragged constantly about his sexual exploits and to have groped women while they stood on ladders filling picking bags.

    It’s where he allegedly pinned 15-year-old Jacqueline Abundez between tree branches and said – loudly enough for bystanders to hear – that despite her young age, she could “already endure the stick,” a former Evans Fruit tractor driver told government investigators.

    Abundez filed a sexual harassment claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2006. Her mother, Angela Mendoza, filed another claim based on what allegedly happened to her daughter, telling lawyers in a deposition that Marin had said: “Give me your daughter. I’ll marry her and I’ll have her give birth every year to a son or a daughter year after year.”

    In an unrelated case, Abundez was found dead in 2008 at age 17, her body dumped in an irrigation canal. The Yakima County Sheriff’s Office investigated, but her death remains unsolved. The judge dropped her harassment case, along with her mother’s.

    Attorneys for Evans Fruit said the company could not substantiate the claims by Abundez or Mendoza that they had been harassed.

    In 2008, more complaints came in. An apple picker named Wendy Granados told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Marin separated women from their husbands, who also worked for Evans Fruit, so that he could harass them. He “offered pay raises, cars, and houses in exchange for sexual favors,” according to her complaint.

    Later that year, another Evans worker named Norma Valdez filed a claim alleging that Marin had forcibly hugged and kissed her in his truck and said he had done the same thing in 2005. He called her “my love” and “my star,” and he told people at the ranch that she was pregnant with his child, according to the complaint.

    The company’s lawyers said they could find no corroborating evidence of misbehavior, and Marin kept his job.

    In June 2010, the commission filed a lawsuit against Evans Fruit alleging that Marin and some of the crew leaders had sexually harassed or assaulted at least seven women at the Sunnyside ranch. As the case progressed, a total of 26 women with similar claims joined the lawsuit.

    In her case, Esther Abarca testified that Marin groped her three more times – once again in his truck and twice after he had taken her to properties he owned.

    At trial, these incidents were used to discredit Abarca because she hadn’t mentioned the later incidents in her deposition testimony.

    “It made my job on cross-exam much easier,” said Monahan, the attorney for Evans Fruit. “I was able to illustrate for the jury this remarkable escalation of alleged offenses. My sense is the jury found her absolutely not credible.”

    Four additional women told stories like Abarca’s in federal court: Marin ordered them into his truck and then fondled or attacked them, they said. Others said Marin had propositioned them for sex or offered to put them up as mistresses in exchange for bearing him a son.

    Several women accused other crew leaders of misbehavior at the ranch, including one who allegedly exposed himself and showed pictures of male genitalia on his cellphone.

    Motivation Questioned

    About a month after the suit was filed, Marin was fired. His letter of dismissal did not mention sexual harassment allegations – company lawyers said they still have no proof of the women’s claims. Instead, the letter said he was let go because the company had evidence he had embezzled money.

    A father of seven daughters who emigrated from Mexico in the early 1970s by crawling through a sewer tunnel, Marin emphatically denies stealing from the company. He said the apartment buildings and houses he owns around Sunnyside – valued at more than $1.8 million – are the product of hard work and sound investment decisions.

    “Had to be somebody else because (it was) not me,” Marin said. “I can never betray the company.”

    Lawyers for Evans Fruit argued that the women who have accused the company of wrongdoing were motivated by financial gain.

    “The claimants need money, and you may consider that that is a powerful incentive to invent or exaggerate their stories,” attorney Carolyn Cairns said at the trial. “These folks are poor. For the most part, they’re uneducated, and their career paths, frankly, are not bright. This is their chance to get some extra money, and they’re grabbing the brass ring.”

    But women who did not participate in the lawsuit also have accused Marin of making sexual advances.

    One of those women – who is mentioned repeatedly as a Marin target in court filings – trembled as she drove down Cemetery Road, four miles from the Evans Fruit orchard. Turning onto a fire road, she pointed to a house where Marin and his family now live. She said that when she was a 17-year-old employee, he offered to let her live there for free if she would bear him a son. She refused.

    A 39-year-old woman who worked at Evans Fruit eight years ago said in an interview that Marin would order her into his truck, where he would flirt and touch her legs in a way that upset her. If she defied him, she would be fired, she said.

    “I know more women who have gone through this and don’t want to talk,” she said. “They’re scared. But we have to talk so that there is justice and the bosses don’t keep doing these things.”

    In an interview, Marin said these claims are tall tales that have been passed around the ranch by embittered employees.

    “Everyone knows each other,” he said. “And the bad people talk to other people, and people that don’t even know me start talking bad about me.”

    Monahan, the company’s lawyer, said Evans Fruit never was confronted with definitive proof of sexual harassment at its Sunnyside orchard, and if it had been, the owners would have acted immediately.

    By the trial date, the number of former Evans Fruit workers who remained in the case had dropped from 26 to 15. Some women could not be located. The judge ruled that the others had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment.

    In the end, 14 women testified about being groped, verbally harassed and attacked at the Sunnyside ranch. Most of the allegations were lodged against Marin, who denied them all.

    “I would never do that,” he said repeatedly at the trial.

    In April, the jury – seven men and two women – found in favor of Evans Fruit. The jury members determined that the women, including Abarca, had not been subjected to a sexually hostile work environment. And, they decided, even if a hostile work environment had been proven, Evans Fruit was not liable because Marin was not found to be “a proxy for Evans Fruit” and the other alleged harassers were not technically supervisors.

    When the verdict came down, the claimants who attended the final day and their lawyers sat in stunned silence in the courtroom.

    “I was very sad because I felt they gave to the supervisors a free pass to do whatever they want with women, that there was no law to punish them,” said Danelia Barajas, one of the women who claimed Marin groped her in his truck.

    But members of the jury nonetheless believed there was something happening in the orchard.

    Bill Huntington, a juror from Walla Walla, said the jury “felt pretty much that there was some level of harassment,” though the women’s lawyers didn’t prove it to the legal standard.

    “It’s not so much that we believed Juan Marin,” Huntington said. “But their (the women’s) stories lacked consistency. I hope the Evanses will realize that they need to be more vigilant in their sexual harassment policies. They trusted Juan Marin, and they didn’t think it could happen. They were a little too reliant on him.”

    Even the Evans Fruit lawyers concede Marin’s stories have not always been consistent.

    “Juan Marin has told a number of different stories, and it’s difficult to figure out what happened,” Monahan said. “But you can’t make these broad assertions that Juan Marin is a bad person and sexual harassment occurred and therefore find the company liable.”

    The case is not over yet. Aside from its request for a new trial, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A separate case against Marin, filed by three of the women in the federal case, is moving forward in federal court based on alleged violations of state laws.

    But the trial was a sweeping victory for the company.

    After they got word of the verdict, the Evanses were jubilant as they stood in the parking lot across from the courthouse.

    “It is a great win,” Bill Evans said. “It all comes down to accountability and credibility.”

    Before getting into his car, the jury foreman, Cameron Fischer, suggested to the Evanses that they should modernize their operations by hiring a professional human resources staffer.

    “You have to get on with the times and with the way things are run today,” said Fischer, a former state workplace safety and health officer.

    The couple thanked him and then drove to a Dairy Queen, where they celebrated over ice cream.

    Creating Anti-harassment Policies

    Throughout the trial, the Evans Fruit lawyers argued that the company should not be held responsible for the alleged harassment because Bill and Jeannette Evans could not have known about it because no one complained to them.

    Because the Evanses run a business over thousands of acres, “they wanted their employees to know that if they’re out there in the orchard and the Evanses aren’t around, that they can still come to the Evanses and tell them what their problem is,” Evans Fruit attorney Cairns said at trial.

    Cairns noted for the jury that some people did go to the Evanses with concerns about their supervisors or paychecks, but they were silent when it came to sexual harassment.

    The women countered in court that they didn’t think they could complain because Marin was their foreman. Some said they thought raising the issue would get them fired, or they said nobody would believe them because Marin bragged that the Evanses loved him more than their own son. Others said they were embarrassed to discuss these types of issues with the owners.

    The growers’ role in ferreting out sexual harassment became a key question in the Evans Fruit trial, and it’s a problem that vexes agribusiness across the country.

    “If I’m the grower and I have my foreman supervising, and he’s misbehaving and I don’t know what’s going on, at the end of the day, I’m responsible,” said Manuel Cunha, president of the Nisei Farmers League, which represents agricultural businesses in five states. “But if the worker is being controlled by somebody who has an upper hand, how is a grower going to know that?”

    Sexual harassment policies and complaint procedures can help, but agricultural enterprises don’t always operate on the cutting edge of human resources practices.

    Gail Wadsworth, executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies, said some growers are focused on farming and might not have the capacity or awareness to implement policies on sexual harassment.

    “There is a tendency to look at farming businesses as being different from other businesses, and that’s rooted in this concept of the agrarian ideal in the U.S.,” Wadsworth said. “But I do think that farms need to create a corporate culture to include safety for women.”

    For instance, in the case of the Oregon tree farm supervisor who was accused of raping a female worker while holding gardening shears to her throat, the grower testified that the company didn’t have a sexual harassment policy because “we’re just farmers.”

    Likewise, Bill and Jeannette Evans said at their company’s trial that they didn’t think they had needed a sexual harassment policy before 2008, because the law doesn’t require it and because the company is guided by common sense and respect for its workers.

    Sexual harassment policies and training are not mandatory in many states. California, Connecticut and Maine have instituted laws that require sexual harassment seminars for supervisors.

    Joe Del Bosque, a California farmworker-turned-grower, said the culture in the fields has changed since he started harvesting cantaloupes as a 10-year-old during summer breaks.

    “In the ’70s, it (sexual harassment) might have been more common,” he said. “You knew that when it’s cantaloupe season, there are going to be young women coming, and it’s open season.”

    Now, “we’ve taken a new attitude,” he said. “We take these things seriously, and our people understand that.”

    As chairman of the workplace safety organization AgSafe, Del Bosque has come to champion sexual harassment prevention. AgSafe helps growers, packinghouse bosses and labor contractors follow California law by providing regular sexual harassment training.

    During a meeting in a Fresno hotel conference room in December attended by CIR and IRP, farm labor contractor Josh Beas took careful notes as Amy Wolfe, AgSafe’s president and CEO, clicked through a series of slides.

    She encouraged attendees to create a sexual harassment policy, hold supervisors accountable, conduct random inspections and document any problems that arise. It’s about “creating a culture where people can come to work and do the job they were hired to do and people treat each other with respect and dignity,” she said.

    But the message doesn’t always travel well with some managers in the industry.

    From the back row, Ralph Collazo, who runs a Southern California packinghouse, offered running commentary on the proceedings. As Wolfe worked her way through the presentation, Collazo cracked jokes.

    “I want a girl to sexually harass me,” he quipped to the people near him. Collazo did not return calls for comment.

    When Wolfe offered some real-world case studies, such as the story of a farmworker who was repeatedly raped by her supervisor, he sounded skeptical.

    “She was eating eggs and bacon,” he said, implying that the sex was consensual, “and then she decided she didn’t like it.”

     

    ARTICLE

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/female-workers-face-rape-harassment-in-u-s-agriculture-industry/

     

    Some solutions
    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/rape-in-the-fields/three-plans-to-stop-rape-in-the-fields/

     

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