"IOC reinstates Jim Thorpe as sole winner of 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon"
Jim Thorpe, stripped of his 1912 gold medals because he'd been paid to play minor league baseball, was reinstated Thursday as the sole winner of that year's Olympic decathlon and pentathlon by the International Olympic Committee.
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A Letter from the Washington State Supreme Court After the Death of George Floyd (June 2020)
Dear Members of the Judiciary and the Legal Community:
We are compelled by recent events to join other state supreme courts around the nation in addressing our legal community.
The devaluation and degradation of black lives is not a recent event. It is a persistent and systemic injustice that predates this nation’s founding. But recent events have brought to the forefront of our collective consciousness a painful fact that is, for too many of our citizens, common knowledge: the injustices faced by black Americans are not relics of the past. We continue to see racialized policing and the overrepresentation of black Americans in every stage of our criminal and juvenile justice systems. Our institutions remain affected by the vestiges of slavery: Jim Crow laws that were never dismantled and racist court decisions that were never disavowed.
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I either completely missed when this was published or had forgotten about it, nevertheless, I am thankful to live in a state where the highest court takes a proactive stance on pushing for social change and equality. Washington is far from a perfect state, and it has its share of white supremacy and problematic history (and current reality), but proactiveness like this is what furthers change.
Yesterday I was out with my wife walking around downtown Kent, the town outside of Seattle, I live in. And I was seeing the growing minority communities with a Kenyan restaurant and other Black-American and African migrant places which are finding homes here. It excited me. Growing up in the South I was used to a much more diverse population than what I found when we moved to Seattle, and I am hopeful the diversity will continue to grow.
The letter that I linked was brought to my attention by this article in the Seattle Times, "‘We’re not colorblind’: Two years after George Floyd, WA Supreme Court tries to chart a different path on race" - which highlights both the progress the state is making while citing a recent study which shows that there is still much to be done.
In the two years since their letter, the court has made efforts large and small, symbolic and concrete, trying to move toward a more just legal system. The court has overturned decades-old hateful precedents, with little public notice. It has thrown out laws, vacating tens of thousands of criminal convictions. It has ordered pay raises to thousands of immigrant farmworkers. In many cases, it has moved faster than both the state Legislature and the nation in barring practices that it considered unjust or racially discriminatory.
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A report from Washington’s three law schools, issued last fall, found racial disparities at every level of the criminal legal system, from who gets stopped and searched by police, to who is arrested and convicted, to the length of sentences that are handed out. Advertising
The report did show some areas of improvement. The rate of Black people incarcerated in Washington fell by nearly half from 2005 to 2020, from about 2.5% of the Black population to about 1.3%. But a Black person in Washington is still 4.7 times more likely to be incarcerated than a white person.
“Race and racial bias continue to matter in ways that are not fair, that do not advance legitimate public safety objectives, that produce disparities in the criminal justice system, and that undermine public confidence in our legal system,” the report said.
The state also has a truly awful history in its treatment of the first people and tribes of Washington. The article goes on to highlight the work of a lawyer working to right past wrongs by the state for members of tribes exercising rights which should have been protected by the treaties that were signed and then ignored.
So, the battle for justice and rights continues. It won't stop. It can't stop. And it is heartening to see the diversity of the Washington Supreme Court and its desire to do just that.
The Washington state Supreme Court may be the most diverse high court in the country. Among the nine justices there is only one white man. There are seven women, four people of color, three Jewish justices, two lesbians, the court’s first Indigenous justice and a Black immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago.
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Natalie Diaz on the Mojave Language and Where English Fails Us
[Auto Generated Summary]:
While sharing meals throughout our residency discussing literature, politics, and love, Natalie's precision and passion around language was immediately apparent. In addition to teaching at Arizona State University and writing poetry, Natalie actively works to preserve the Mojave language with its last remaining speakers. "My body is its own lexicon and I also fight for a language, in Mojave and English, that helps me to hold it in the space of love." It's an out of time place. Natalie went on to say that this is one of the ways she "Refuses to be prophesied" by the English language and works hard to be capacious in English.
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