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                                    What’s in a name?

                                                                                    Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1989)

The question of color takes up much space in these pages, but the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self.
                                                                                                                                          - James Baldwin, 1961

… blood, darky, Tar baby, Kaffir, shine… moor, blackamoor, Jim Crow, spook… quadroon, meriney, red bone, high yellow… Mammy, porch monkey, home, homeboy, George… spearchucker, Leroy, Smokey…mouli, buck, Ethiopian, brother, sistah…

                                                                                                                                                      - Trey Ellis, 1989

             I had forgotten the incident completely, until I read Trey Elli’s essay, “Remember My Name,” in a recent issue of the Village Voice (June 13, 1989). But there, in the middle of an extended italicized list of the bynames of “the race” (“the race” or “our people” being the terms my parents used in polite or reverential discourse, “jigaboo” or “nigger” more commonly used in anger, jest, or pure disgust), it was: “George”. Now the events of that very brief exchange return to my mind so vividly that I wonder why I had forgotten it.
            My father and I were walking home at dusk from his second job. He “moonlighted” as a janitor in the evenings for the telephone company. Every day, but Saturday, he would come home at 3:30 from his regular job at the paper Mill, wash up, eat supper, then at 4:30 head downtown to his second job. He used to make jokes frequently about a union official who moonlighted. I never got the joke, but he and his friends thought it was hilarious. All I knew was that my family always ate well, that my brother and I had new clothes to wear, and that all of the white people in Piedmont, West Virginia, treated my parents with an odd mixture of resentment and respect that even we understood at the time had something directly to do with a small but certain measure of financial security.
            He had left a little early that evening because I was with him and I had to be in bed early. I could not have been more than five or six, and we had stopped off at the Cut-Rate Drug Store (where no black person in town but my father could sit down to eat, and eat off real plates with real silverware) so that I could buy some caramel ice cream, two scoops in a wafer cone, please, which I was busy licking when Mr. Wilson walked by.
            Mr. Wilson was a very quiet man, whose stony, brooding, silent manner seemed designed to scare off any overtures of friendship, even from white people. He was Irish as was one-third of our village (another third being Italian), the more affluent among whom sent their children to “Catholic School” across the bridge in Maryland. He had white straight hair, like my Uncle Joe, whom he uncannily resembled, and he carried a black worn metal lunch pail, the kind that Riley carried on the television show. My father always spoke to him, and for reasons that we never did understand, he always spoke to my father.
            “Hello, Mr. Wilson,” I heard my father say.
            “Hello, George.” I stopped licking my ice cream cone, and asked my Dad in a loud voice why Mr. Wilson had called him “George.”
            “Doesn’t he know your name, Daddy? Why don’t you tell him your name? Your name isn’t George.”
            For a moment I tried to think of who Mr. Wilson was mixing Pop up with. But we didn’t have any Georges among the colored people in Piedmont; nor were there colored Georges living in the neighboring towns and working at the Mill.
             “Tell him your name, Daddy.”
            “He knows my name, boy,” my father said after a long pause. “He calls all colored people George.” A long silence ensued. It was “one of those things”, as my Mom would put it. Even then, that early, I knew when I was in the presence of “one of those things”, one of those things that provided a glimpse, through a rent curtain, at another world that we could not affect but that affected us. There would be a painful moment of silence, and you would wait for it to give way to a discussion of a black superstar such as Sugar Ray or Jackie Robinson.
            “Nobody hits better in a clutch than Jackie Robinson.”
            “That’s right. Nobody.”
            I never again looked Mr. Wilson in the eye.

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The Right to a “Custody Hearing” under International Law

by Maria Laura Canineu
February 3, 2014

        A person who is arrested has a right to be brought promptly before a judge. This is a longstanding and fundamental principle of international law, crucial for ensuring that the person’s arrest, treatment, and any ongoing detention are lawful.
        Yet, until now, Brazil has not respected this right. Detainees often go months before seeing a judge. For instance, in São Paulo state, which houses 37 percent of Brazil’s total prison population, most detainees are not brought before a judge for at least three months. The risk of ill-treatment is often highest during the initial stages of detention, when police are questioning a suspect. The delay makes detainees more vulnerable to torture and other serious forms of mistreatment by abusive police officers.
        In 2012, the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment reported that it had received “repeated and consistent accounts of torture and ill-treatment” in São Paulo and other Brazilian states, “committed by, in particular, the military and civil police.” The torture had allegedly occurred in police custody or at the moment of arrest, on the street, inside private homes, or in hidden outdoor areas, and was described as “gratuitous violence, as a form of punishment, to extract confessions, and as a means of extortion.”
        In addition to violating the rights of detainees, these abusive practices make it more difficult for the police to establish the kind of public trust that is often crucial for effective crime control. These practices undermine legitimate efforts to promote public security and curb violent crime, and thus have a negative impact on Brazilian society as a whole.
        The right to be brought before a judge without unnecessary delay is enshrined in treaties long ago ratified by Brazil, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the American Convention on Human Rights. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, which is responsible for interpreting the ICCPR, has determined that the delay between the arrest of an accused and the time before he is brought before a judicial authority “should not exceed a few days,” even during states of emergency.
        Other countries in Latin America have incorporated this right into their domestic law. For instance, in Argentina, the federal Criminal Procedure Code requires that in cases of arrest without a judicial order, the detainee must be brought to a competent judicial authority within six hours.
        In contrast, Brazil’s criminal procedure code requires that when an adult is arrested in flagrante and held in police custody, only the police files of the case need to be presented to the judge within 24 hours, not the actual detainee. Judges evaluate the legality of the arrest and make the decision about whether to order continued detention or other precautionary measures based solely on the written documents provided by the police.
        The code establishes a maximum of 60 days for the first judicial hearing with the detainee, but does not explicitly say when this period begins. In practice, this often means that police in Brazil can keep people detained, with formal judicial authorization, for several months, without giving the detainee a chance to actually see a judge.
        According to the code, the only circumstance in which police need to bring a person before the judge immediately applies to cases of crimes not subject to bail in which arresting officer was not able to exhibit the arrest order to the person arrested at the time of arrest. Otherwise, the detainee may also not see a judge for several months.

                                         (www.hrw.org. Editado e adaptado)

LIFE COACHING - YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS?

Derek Workman


These days it seems that there's always someone there to pick you up, help you out and give your life a new start.
You can find someone to choose your clothes for you, or sort out your wardrobe, if you already have enough; there's someone to arrange your dinner parties and someone else who will look after your diary, or if life just seems to be too much trouble to do anything at all, you can find a psychotherapist to help you deal with your problems.
Fine as it is to have all this help at hand, if we look closely at ourselves, we can begin to see that we don't actually need all these people to look after us. To help us do this is the role of the Life Coach - someone who won't judge us, who won't tell us what to do and is there to support us in those nervous life decisions that we all have to make.
Mike Lewis was a self-confessed computer geek in his hometown of Southampton, England, but rose high up the corporate ladder in California. He now lives in a small coastal town in Spain where he acts as a Life Coach to clients in Europe, America, India and Australia, chatting with them on a regular basis by telephone. But why should we need anybody to help us along?
A life coach is basically a support system for people who want to make some change in their life. The sig- nificant thing about personal development is this: there's relatively few people that I've ever met that don't want to get on in life, but it's hard to get on if you try and find all this stimulus from the outside. The difference between coaching and other forms of personal development is primarily this: with life coaching, nobody tells you what to do, nobody tells you who you should be, nobody tries to change you 'cause we're all perfect as we are! What a life coach does is encourage you to find the answers to all life's problems from within, not from without.

Fonte: Revista Speak UP, edição 201, fev. 2004.