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In Spain, the official language is Spanish.  The Spanish government also wants the country to be a mono-lingual and mono-cultural society.  The country has a region called Catalonia, which is multi-cultural and multi-lingual.  Mostly, the region speaks Catalan.  The Spanish government is trying to stop this and make the region mono-lingual.  Catalonia is thinking of seceding from Spain if they don't let them speak their own language and have their own culture.

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Spain is a state split into autonomous communities, three of which-Catalonia, Galicia, and Basque Country-are denominated historic communities, having their own languages that coexist co-officially with Castilian, the official language of Spain. All the autonomous communities in Spain have their Statutes of Autonomy, the basic institutional legislation for an autonomous community, recognized by the Spanish Constitution of 1978. At the very least, this legislation encompasses the community's designation, its territorial boundaries, the organization and location of the seat of its autonomous institutions, its assumed powers, and, if applicable, the principles governing its language regime.

Catalonia is a pluralistic and multicultural society. Catalans, as a group, strive to achieve and to maintain an ethnolinguistic identity by preserving their economic, historic, cultural, and demolinguistic (speakers of Catalan) status, dimensions that allow them to compare favorably with the Spanish national group.
What is happening?
Today we are witnessing a very strong ethnopolitical polarization between Catalonia and Spain. In recent years, the strong anti-Catalan action of the Partido Popular Español (Spanish People's Party henceforth PP), an essentialist right-wing party in charge since 2011, ruling with an absolute majority from 2011 to 2015 and with a relative majority in the legislature initiated in 2016, has provoked a significant surge in Catalan national feeling. That is, the Spanish State do not accept the idea of a multinational and multicultural state. Spain from its stance as a unique and essentialist nation, is facing a Catalonia that claims recognition as a nation and a strong self-government. These demands have led to a strong polarization between the parties, to such an extent that the conflictive escalation has led Catalonia to consider secession.

Since the arrival of the Bourbons in the early eighteenth century, the Spanish elites have been building an organizational identity around a mystification based on "unity" and "common" language. This undertaking has had a powerful effect on the legitimation of Castilian Spanish's supremacy over other languages, and the representation of cultural and linguistic diversity as an issue.

One of the repressive strategies carried out by the current state government on Catalonia has consisted of putting legislative obstacles to the development of the Catalan language. We must bear in mind that the challenge for the Catalan society is to maintain its own language with a high ethnolinguistic vitality for community life and, therefore, as one of the basic identifying signs of its society. Those who speak Catalan as their first language also express themselves with an absolute fluency and without any difficulties in Spanish, according to the 2015 report on the Catalan language. Despite its resurgence, the Catalan language survives in a strongly adverse sociodemographic context, regarding its recognition and the right to its use, suffering continuous impositions of other languages and regulatory pressures from the Spanish government which strongly oppose to its use. The Spanish State refuses to fully recognize the Catalan language as an official language of the State and of the European Union. This situation is unique in the European Union and among developed countries with a democratic tradition.
Why is it happening?
Spanish nationalism is used by the PP to obtain anti-Catalan votes in the rest of the country, while keeping the main opposition party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español-PSOE) split into two groups that support, respectively, the plurinationality and the national unity of Spain. Thus, the PP, because of its conviction, convenience, or political profitability, keeps an immovable position, with a strict application of the law and a rigid interpretation of the Spanish Constitution.

The Spanish financial oligarchy operates in complete symbiosis with the State's political power. The degree of cronyism and corruption is very high (estimated at 80,000 million euros per year), and it serves their own interests and the irregular financing of the PP. For these and other reasons, the Spanish deficit has been growing unchecked in recent years and has a direct impact on the Autonomous Communities, which have had their incomes cut.

The territorial debate in Spain against the Catalan demands certainly is a very profitable asset for the Spanish government of the PP. Their policies aimed at confronting the Spaniards with the Catalans and arousing negative emotions against the Catalan people help the PP to remain in power.
At what moment does the polarization between Spain and Catalonia break out?
The current ethnopolitical conflict has a clear origin: the 2010 ruling against the statute of autonomy. The statute that the Catalans had accepted in a referendum was appealed by the PP who took it to the Spanish Constitutional Court-and this Court cut it mercilessly. This cut meant great frustration and humiliation for the Catalans and has had enormous consequences.

For seven consecutive years until today Catalonia has officially requested to hold a referendum on self-determination, to be carried out with the agreement and support of Spain, and has never obtained any answer other than "No." After many difficulties and obstacles, this consultative referendum was held in Catalonia without the agreement of the Spanish Government on 1 October 2017. The forceful actions taken by the Spanish government during the whole day was brutal: the state police that the Spanish government moved from Madrid and other points of Spain to Catalonia raided polling places and confronted crowds of voters. Despite the outrageous aggression on this day, the vote for independence won by a landslide.
How can the current conflict be moderated?
Intractable ethnopolitical conflicts such as the one can be moderated through communication between the parties, but this requires respect, recognition, and attention to the demands of the minority group. That is, it depends to a greater extent on the dominant group. And, due to the reasons explained, this attitude of dialogue is impossible with the current government who have pushed the minority group to extreme positions to defend their interests. Having pushed the political situation to extremes, the big economic powers realize that this situation can harm them (as the International Monetary Fund [IMF] has expressed itself in this regard) and have begun to step in.

Even so, at the moment, the Catalan people, after the overwhelming result of the referendum of 1 October, are still waiting for the Catalan government to carry out the secession and declare Catalonia independent from Spain, or to decide to delay its decision.

Let us hope in today's highly interconnected and globalized world Catalonia can only maintain greater sovereignty integrated in a Europe that shares and defends common values and diversity.
Featured image credit: 2012 Catalan independence protest on September 11th by Kippelboy. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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The current conflict between Spain and Catalonia explained | OUPblog

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Spain is a state split into autonomous communities, three of which-Catalonia, Galicia, and Basque Country-are denominated historic communities, having their own languages that coexist co-officially with Castilian, the official language of Spain. All the autonomous communities in Spain have their Statutes of Autonomy, the basic institutional legislation for an autonomous community, recognized by the Spanish Constitution of 1978.

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In 2011, the spark of the Syrian Civil War began.  There are many causes of the war, some being the government against the people, part of it being a religious conflict, and a proxy war that includes Russia, Iran, and the United states.  Whatever the cause, it has killed over 220,000 people and displaced over half the countries population as of 2015.  The war also includes many countries like the US trying to destroy ISIS in Syria.  There have been over 9 countries trying to interfere in the rebel groups and ISIS.

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Syria's conflict has devolved from peaceful protests against the government in 2011 to a violent insurgency that has drawn in numerous other countries. It's partly a civil war of government against people; partly a religious war pitting Assad's minority Alawite sect, aligned with Shiite fighters from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, against Sunni rebel groups; and increasingly a proxy war featuring Russia and Iran against the United States and its allies. Whatever it is, it has so far killed 220,000 people, displaced half of the country's population, and facilitated the rise of ISIS.

While a de-facto international coalition-one that makes informal allies of Assad, the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Kurds, and others-is focused on defeating ISIS in Syria, the battlefield features numerous other overlapping conflicts. The Syrian war looks different depending on which protagonists you focus on. Here are just a few ways to look at it:

Who?

When we asked readers what they wanted to know about the civil war, one asked: "Who are the various groups fighting in Syria? What countries are involved?" By one count from 2013, 13 "major" rebel groups were operating in Syria; counting smaller ones, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency puts the number of groups at 1,200. Meanwhile, the number of other countries involved to various degrees has grown; including the United States, nine countries have participated in U.S.-led airstrikes against ISIS in Syria (though Canada's newly elected prime minister has vowed to end his country's involvement in the military campaign); Russia is conducting its own bombing against ISIS and other rebel groups, in coordination with ground operations by Iranian and Hezbollah fighters. This is before you tally the dozens of countries whose citizens have traveled to join ISIS and other armed groups in Syria.

Thomas van Linge, the Dutch teenager who has gained renown for his detailed maps of the Syrian conflict, groups the combatants into four broad categories: rebels (from "moderate" to Islamist); loyalists (regime forces and their supporters); Kurdish groups (who aren't currently seeking to overthrow Assad, but have won autonomy in northeastern Syria, which they have fought ISIS to protect); and finally, foreign powers.

Many of the parties I place in this last category are fighting or claiming to fight ISIS. The divide among them is whether to explicitly aim to keep Assad in power (Russia and Iran), or to maintain that he must go eventually while focusing on the Islamic State at the moment (the U.S.-led coalition).

In that sense, broadly speaking, Russia has intervened on behalf of the loyalists and the United States has intervened on behalf of the rebels, though the U.S. has tried to only help certain rebels, providing arms and training to "vetted" groups. It's this contradiction in U.S. goals-America wants Assad to go but is also fighting ISIS, one of the strongest anti-Assad forces in Syria, in defiance of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle-that helps answer another reader's question: "Why is it still so difficult to wrap my own head around our official involvement in the conflict?" Russia's approach is less sensitive to the differences among rebel groups: It opposes all of them. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov summed it up at the United Nations earlier in October: "If it looks like a terrorist, acts like a terrorist, and fights like a terrorist, it's a terrorist, right?"

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The Confused Person's Guide to the Syrian Civil War

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Syria's conflict has devolved from peaceful protests against the government in 2011 to a violent insurgency that has drawn in numerous other countries. It's partly a civil war of government against people; partly a religious war pitting Assad's minority Alawite sect, aligned with Shiite fighters from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, against Sunni rebel groups; and increasingly a proxy war featuring Russia and Iran against the United States and its allies.

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Many instances of police brutality in America - especially associated male, African-American teenagers  being shot - have been increasing in recent years. The first major instance that made national and even international news was Rodney King. King, a black man, was hit more than 50 times with police batons - almost beaten to death - in 1991 for no apparent reason. This is what first brought publicity to this issue in modern and recent times.

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What Happened to Rodney King 25 Years Ago

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The brutal beating of King by four policeman took place on Mar. 3, 1991

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This conflict is also causing issues in the economy. Catalonia has a very important port called the Port of Barcelona. This port is very important to the Spanish economy. All of the money received in the port goes immediately to the Spanish government. This causes tension between Catalonia and Spain because the port is in Catalonia, but Spain took control of it. If Catalonia were to secede, this would cause Spain to loose a lot of money.  This is causing Spain to hold on to Catalonia and not let them secede.

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Other major cases of cops shooting, beating, or killing black teens in America in the last few years include Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Cameron Tillman because of their innocence. This has become a real racial issue in the US because most if not all the teens targeted were and are African American while most of the cops who allegedly beat them were white. Tensions growing have led to prominent figures in the black community calling for justice, often using the phrase, "Black Lives Matter." Multiple protests from both sides have created pressure between both political parties and races, specifically black and white people. The perceived power relationships between white and black people is biased on the white side. Most cases always fall on the offending - white's side.

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Editor's Note, May 29, 2020: In 2017, Smithsonian covered the history of police brutality upon the protests over the verdict in the Philando Castile murder case. With the Twin Cities once again under the national spotlight after the killing of George Floyd, we revisit the subject matter below.

Last month, hours after a jury acquitted former police officer Jeronimo Yanez of manslaughter in the shooting death of 32-year-old Philando Castile, protesters in St. Paul, Minnesota, shutdown Interstate 94. With signs that read: "Black Lives Matter" and "No Justice, No Peace," the chant of "Philando, Philando" rang out as they marched down the highway in the dark of night.

The scene was familiar. A year earlier, massive protests had erupted when Yanez killed Castile, after pulling him over for a broken taillight. Dashcam footage shows Yanez firing through the open window of Castile's car, seconds after Castile disclosed that he owned and was licensed to carry a concealed weapon.

A respected school nutritionist, Castile was one of 233 African-Americans shot and killed by police in 2016, a startling number when demographics are considered. African-Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 24 percent of people fatally shot by police. According to the Washington Post, blacks are "2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers."

Today's stories are anything but a recent phenomenon. A cardboard placard in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and on view in the new exhibition " More Than a Picture," underscores that reality.

The yellowing sign is a reminder of the continuous oppression and violence that has disproportionately shaken black communities for generations-"We Demand an End to Police Brutality Now!" is painted in red and white letters.

"The message after 50 years is still unresolved," remarks Samuel Egerton, a college professor, who donated the poster to the museum. He carried it in protest during the 1963 March on Washington. Five decades later, the poster's message rings alarmingly timely. Were it not for the yellowed edges, the placard could almost be mistaken for a sign from any of the Black Lives Matter marches of the past three years.

"There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, 'When will you be satisfied?" said Martin Luther King, Jr. in his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 march. His words continue to resonate today after a long history of violent confrontations between African-American citizens and the police. "We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality."

"This idea of police brutality was very much on people's minds in 1963, following on the years, decades really, of police abuse of power and then centuries of oppression of African-Americans," says William Pretzer, senior history curator at the museum.

Modern policing did not evolve into an organized institution until the 1830s and '40s when northern cities decided they needed better control over quickly growing populations. The first American police department was established in Boston in 1838. The communities most targeted by harsh tactics were recent European immigrants. But, as African-Americans fled the horrors of the Jim Crow south, they too became the victims of brutal and punitive policing in the northern cities where they sought refuge.

In 1929, the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice published the Illinois Crime Survey. Conducted between 1927 and 1928, the survey sought to analyze causes of high crime rates in Chicago and Cook County, especially among criminals associated with Al Capone. But also the survey provided data on police activity-although African-Americans made up just five percent of the area's population, they constituted 30 percent of the victims of police killings, the survey revealed.

"There was a lot of one-on-one conflict between police and citizens and a lot of it was initiated by the police," says Malcolm D. Holmes, a sociology professor at the University of Wyoming, who has researched and written about the topic of police brutality extensively.

That same year, President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement to investigate crime related to prohibition in addition to policing tactics. Between 1931 and 1932, the commission published the findings of its investigation in 14 volumes, one of which was titled "Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement." The realities of police brutality came to light, even though the commission did not address racial disparities outright.

During the Civil Rights Era, though many of the movement's leaders advocated for peaceful protests, the 1960s were fraught with violent and destructive riots.

Aggressive dispersion tactics, such as police dogs and fire hoses, against individuals in peaceful protests and sit-ins were the most widely publicized examples of police brutality in that era. But it was the pervasive violent policing in communities of color that built distrust at a local, everyday level.

One of the deadliest riots occurred in Newark in 1967 after police officers severely beat black cab driver John Smith during a traffic stop. Twenty-six people died and many others were injured during the four days of unrest. In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson organized the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of these major riots.

The origins of the unrest in Newark weren't unique in a police versus citizen incident. The commission concluded "police actions were 'final' incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders."

The commission identified segregation and poverty as indicators and published recommendations for reducing social inequalities, recommending an "expansion and reorientation of the urban renewal program to give priority to projects directly assisting low-income households to obtain adequate housing." Johnson, however, rejected the commission's recommendations.

Black newspapers reported incidents of police brutality throughout the early and mid-20th century and the popularization of radio storytelling spread those stories even further. In 1991, following the beating of cab driver Rodney King, video footage vividly told the story of police brutality on television to a much wider audience. The police officers, who were acquitted of the crime, had hit King more than 50 times with their batons.

Today, live streaming, tweets and Facebook posts have blasted the incidents of police brutality, beyond the black community and into the mainstream media. Philando Castile's fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, who was in the car with her daughter when he was shot, streamed the immediate aftermath of the shooting on her phone using Facebook live.

"Modern technology allows, indeed insists, that the white community take notice of these kinds of situations and incidents," says Pretzer.

And as technology has evolved, so has the equipment of law enforcement. Police departments with military-grade equipment have become the norm in American cities. Images of police officers in helmets and body armor riding through neighborhoods in tanks accompany stories of protests whenever one of these incidents occurs.

"What we see is a continuation of an unequal relationship that has been exacerbated, made worse if you will, by the militarization and the increase in fire power of police forces around the country," says Pretzer.

The resolution to the problem, according to Pretzer, lies not only in improving these unbalanced police-community relationships, but, more importantly, in eradicating the social inequalities that perpetuate these relationships that sustain distrust and frustration on both sides.

'There's a tendency to stereotype people as being more or less dangerous. There's a reliance upon force that goes beyond what is necessary to accomplish police duty," says Holmes. "There's a lot of this embedded in the police departments that helps foster this problem."

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The Long, Painful History of Police Brutality in the U.S.

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A 1963 protest placard in the Smithsonian collections could almost be mistaken for any of the Black Lives Matter marches of today

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This map shows shows the diffusion of languages throughout Spain. It shows that majority of Spain speaks Spanish, but there are portions that speak Basque, Catalan, Asturian, and Galician.

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The government and justice system is extremely biased against women, even going as far as to inflict laws that say every woman must have permission from a man to do everyday activities and that women can go to jail if they "disobey" a man. These aren't the only discriminations that women face, unfortunately. From an early age, girls are taught classes geared toward their roles as "wives and mothers." This further creates and deepens gender roles and puts women at a disadvantage to enter the workforce. Even worse, women are not allowed to sue someone without explicit permission from a man. They are basically silenced from speaking out against abusers. The power relationship between the genders is clearly tilted to one side in the most extreme way.

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I will never forget the words of my father when he turned down an offer to work at our Yemeni embassy in Saudi Arabia in the mid-80s. He simply said: "I have a daughter!"

His words came back to me this October 26, when more than 60 Saudi women's activists got behind the wheels of their cars protesting against a ban on women driving in the kingdom. Their demand symbolized in a nutshell what it means for a woman to live in Saudi Arabia: perpetual minors in a system of gender apartheid.

Saudi Arabiais the only country in the world that outlaws this right of driving. And yes, depriving a woman of the right to drive serves the purpose of controlling her physical mobility and hence independence. But focusing on the right to drive misses the whole spectrum of the issue.

Systematically treated as perpetual minors

Women in the Kingdom, a 2008 Human Rights Watch report maintains, are systematically treated as perpetual minors through a system instituted by the state that infringes on their basic human rights.

In other words, every adult Saudi woman, regardless of her economic or social status, must obtain permission from her male guardian to work, travel, study, seek medical treatment or marry. She is also deprived of making the most trivial decisions on behalf of her children. This system is supported by the imposition of complete sex segregation, which prevents women from participating meaningfully in public life.

Sex segregation is strictly monitored by the government's Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (the religious police) in all workplaces with the exception of hospitals. Unlawful mixing between sexes leads to the arrest of the violators and criminal charges. The brutality of the members of this commission and the unequal punishments men and women receive when committing the same 'crime of mixing' was best described by the Saudi writer Samar Al Muqren in her novel "Ni'saa al Munkar - Women of the Abominable," published in 2008, which she wrote based on her work as a journalist.

Elham Manea is a specialist in the Middle East at the University of Zurich
Reinforcing discriminatory gender roles
The ramifications of this system of male guardianship and sex segregation are felt by Saudi women in their daily lives. In the field of education, the general framework of education is tailored to reinforce discriminatory gender roles and what the authorities consider as suitable to "women's nature and future role as wives and mothers." In addition, women's and girls' access to education depends on the good will of male guardians, whose permission is essential for their educational enrollment. Sex segregation undermines women's right to equality in education, especially when female university and professors are often relegated to unequal facilities with unequal academic opportunities.

In the field of employment, the Saudi labor code, which came into force in 2006, repeated a former stipulation decreeing that in line with article 4 of the code, which requires adherence to Sharia, "women shall work in all fields suitable to their nature" (article 149). The result is that Saudi women continue to be marginalized almost to the point of total exclusion from the Saudi workforce.

Both public and private sector require female staff to obtain the permission of a male guardian to be hired, and employers can fire a woman or force her to resign "if her guardian decides for any reason that he no longer wants her to work outside the home." In jobs in clothing stores, amusement parks, food preparation and as cashiers, guardian permission is no longer required. However, strict sex segregation in the workplace is imposed and female workers are prohibited from interacting with men.

The male guardianship system jeopardizes Saudi women's fundamental right to health. Depending on the religious orientation of those working in hospitals, health officials may require guardian's permission for a woman to be "admitted, discharged, or to administer a medical procedure on her or her children." A recent example occurred this July: After a car chase by religious police left the driver dead and his wife and daughter in critical condition, King Fahd Hospital in Baha postponed amputating the wife's hand because she had no male legal guardian to authorize the procedure.

Women under this system are denied their legal capacities, rendering them unable to make decisions for themselves. And as legal minors their ability to access and engage with the courts and the government is severely constrained without a guardian. Some of these limitations border on absurdity; mostly they have grave consequences. For instance, women were granted in 2001 the right to an independent identification card; yet this right, which is optional, still requires a guardian's permission to be granted!

Excuse me, may I sue you?

More gravely, it is nearly impossible for victims of domestic violence to independently seek protection or obtain legal redress because the police often insist that women and girls obtain their guardian's authorization to file a criminal complaint, even when this complaint is against the guardian!

Moreover, even when women manage to file a domestic violence case, often the measures taken against the perpetrators are flimsy and shameful. For example, in May, Jeddah's Summary Court convicted a man for physically abusing his wife to the point of hospitalization, but sentenced him to learning by heart five parts of the Quran and 100 sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.

Finally, Saudi Arabia applies a personal law system based on the Hanbali School of Islamic Jurisprudence, the most strict and literal among the Sunni schools of jurisprudence. The result is that a male guardian has the unilateral authority to marry off his female ward without her consultation and to dissolve a marriage he deems unfit.

Given the effects of this system of guardianship and segregation on women's lives, it comes as no surprise that Saudi women activists have been the most vocal against this system of apartheid. In their shadow report prepared for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 2008, they argued that this principle of "imposing the guardianship of a male over the woman all her life in Saudi Arabia is linked to the inferior look to women and her traditional role in society and family."

Alliance between king and radical clerics

The perception is certainly inherent in the Wahabi Salafi interpretation of Islam. What makes it relevant though is the Saudi regime itself, because its state's apparatus is the one faithfully implementing Wahabi gender doctrines. An alliance between the Saudi dynasty and the Wahabi establishment has meant that in return for legitimacy, the religious establishment will have a free hand in applying its conservative and reactionary religious provisions in areas of social norms and women's lives. This has made the difference between Saudi Arabia and other countries of the Arabian Peninsula, including Yemen.

Survival for the kingdom has meant dependence on the Wahabi religious establishment for legitimacy. It may introduce some measures to make life "less restricted" for women, but the core of "inferiority" still remains the same. The kingdom is also very wary that women's demands for change may turn to an overall social movement for political change. Given the kingdom's shameful records in citizenship and human rights, democracy and good governance, the fear is realistic.

Subsequently, a real change in Saudi gender apartheid system is not likely in the near future. In the meantime, women will continue to bear its consequences - living as perpetual minors segregated by law from their male fellow citizens. It seems my father was right after all: Life for a woman is better elsewhere.

Elham Manea is a Fulbright scholar working as an associate professor at the Political Science Institute at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. This article originally appeared on Qantara.de.

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Women in Saudi Arabia are caught in a system of gender apartheid | DW | 30.12.2013

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I will never forget the words of my father when he turned down an offer to work at our Yemeni embassy in Saudi Arabia in the mid-80s. He simply said: "I have a daughter!"

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Map of Police Brutality Cases since Ferguson 

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Map of Police Brutality Cases since Ferguson 

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This map shows the number of shootings throughout America since the case of police brutality that killed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9th, 2014.

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This video shows the complete history of police brutality in America. The racism seen in today's world all seems to stem from the oppression of black people most prevalent  in the 40's, 50's, and 60's. This unfairly tilted power relationship between black and white people has existed since the people of Africa were brought to the Americas to be plantation slaves.

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For the third consecutive summer, America's attention has been turned to the deaths of black men at the hands of law enforcement - from the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in 2014, to the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, to the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week.

The roots of the outrage and unrest that often follow such killings go back much, much further.

In 2014, during the unrest in Ferguson, Vox spoke with historian Heather Ann Thompson, a professor at Temple University who writes extensively on 20th-century urban politics and criminal justice and worked on the National Research Council's 2014 report on mass incarceration, to talk about the tense and often hostile history between African Americans and the police in America.
Dara Lind: What does history teach us about what's going on in Ferguson?
Heather Ann Thompson: There are some locally important things about this, and there are some nationally important things. There's been a lot of attention to the fact that St. Louis did not riot during the 1960s, for example. But St. Louis has always had this very tortured racial history. In July of 1917, there was one of the most brutal riots against African Americans there - scores and scores of white folks attacking blacks simply for being employed in wartime industries. There were indiscriminate attacks and, in effect, lynchings: beatings, hangings of black residents.

So the fact that St. Louis didn't erupt in the '60s is almost an anomaly or an outlying story. Because St. Louis does have very tense race relations between whites and blacks, and also between the police and the black community.

Nationally, it suggests that we haven't learned nearly enough from our history. Not just 1917, and all the riots that happened in 1919, and 1921 - but, much more specifically, from the '60s. Because of course, this is exactly the same issue that generated most of the rebellions of the 1960s. In 1964, exactly 50 years ago, [unrest in] Philadelphia, Rochester, and Harlem were all touched off by the killing of young African Americans. That's what touches off Harlem. It's the beating of a young black man that touches off Rochester in '64. It's the rumor that a pregnant woman has been killed by the police in Philadelphia in '64. So in some sense, my reaction to this is: of course. Because until you fundamentally deal with this issue of police accountability in the black community and fair policing in the black community, this is always a possibility.
DL: This continuity from the white attacks on black citizens after World War I, to the rioting of disenfranchised African Americans in the 1960s, is interesting. Is there a relationship between those two and between the violence of private white citizens and violence of police?
HT: On the surface they seem unrelated: you've got racist white citizens who are attacking blacks in the streets, and then years or decades later, you have the police acting violently in the black community.
"it's the police that are called out when blacks try to integrate white neighborhoods"
In response to all those riots in the 1910s and 1920s, civil rights commissions were set up in cities, and there was pressure on both local and federal governments to address white vigilantism and white rioting against blacks. And while it was not particularly effective, it certainly had this censuring quality to it. And then what historians would agree happened is that, in so many cities, the police became the proxy for what the white community wants.

So one of the answers is that police became the front line of the white community - or, at least, the most racially conservative white community. It's the police that are called out, for example, when blacks try to integrate white neighborhoods. It's the police that become that body that defends whites in their homes.
DL: How did this play out after the unrest that you mentioned?
HT: We start the war on crime in 1965, which, of course, is very much in response to these urban rebellions. Because politicians decide that protests against things like police brutality are exactly the same thing as crime - that this is disorderly. This is criminal.

And so, police are specifically charged with keeping order and with stopping crime, which has now become synonymous with black behavior in the streets. The police, again, become that entity that polices black boundaries. And I will tell you that one of the most striking things about the media coverage of Ferguson is that they are absolutely doing what they did in the 1960s in terms of the reporting: "This is all about the looters, this is all about black violence."
DL: It certainly seems that even before any looting actually happened in Ferguson, police were anticipating that kind of thing.
HT: Any time that there is urban rebellion, the way that it is spun has everything to do with whether it's granted legitimacy. Notably, when there was rioting in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and you saw the police with fire hoses and police dogs, it was very easy for white Northerners, particularly the press, to report that for exactly what it was - which was police violence on black citizens who were protesting. Everyone's very clear about that. Sheriff Bull Connor is a racist, the police are racist, and that is why it is violent.

But the minute that these protests moved northward, the racial narrative was much more uncomfortable. "Why in the world would blacks be protesting against us good-hearted white folks in the North? And how dare they?" And what it means is that they were demanding too much, and that they were in fact just looking for trouble. So that narrative of who gets to be a legitimate protester shifts dramatically once protests move northward. It's all about violence, troublemaking, looting, and so forth.
DL: What's the response to a narrative like that?
HT: Even in the 1960s, you've got the white and black liberals who are saying, "Calm down, calm down, go home, stop this. Be peaceful." And the white community, white politicians are desperate for these black politicians to have that kind of legitimacy: "Please go out and entice people to calm down!"
"they don't have rubber bullets. it's never a fair fight."
Until black life is valued to the same extent white life is by members of law enforcement and by the criminal-justice community, there will be this question of legitimacy of the police and their actions, particularly among black folks who are routinely stopped. And then, people get angry. And then, people do start throwing rocks and bottles. But make no mistake about it: they don't have rubber bullets. It's never a fair fight.
DL: What we've heard from police officers is that the best way to prevent something like what's happening in Ferguson is for residents to already trust the police, to have a good relationship during so-called "normal" times - when there isn't an obvious incident. How has that worked in the past?
HT: It doesn't work. It isn't working. It's the reason why immigrant communities, for example, are terrified to call the police in times when police might be needed - for domestic violence, for times when people have been robbed or been victimized -because the police might then round them up and deport them. There's no legitimacy. The data is clear that the community knows, firsthand and every day, that the level of policing of black communities is so disproportionate to both the lethalness and the severity of crime that's taking place.

Most people are not being arrested for raping and robbing, murdering and stealing. It's this low level, oppressive policing of communities on the basis of marijuana possession. Low-level drug busts. Riding up on people. Throwing them against cars. Not because blacks do drugs more than whites, not because they possess it more, but because that's where the policing is.
DL: How does that specifically relate to what happened in Ferguson? "on some level, it doesn't even matter what the circumstances are"
HT: For Ferguson, it's much more about the fact that there is an absolute unwillingness to deal with the core issues in American society about equality in the streets: [the principle that] a black citizen and a white citizen really do have equal rights under the laws. Black citizens don't believe it. They shouldn't believe it. It's not true that they have equal rights under the laws. It's not true that they have the same assumptions of innocence. It's not true that they have the same assumptions of peaceful countenance.
DL: Some protesters in Ferguson are demanding that the police force should reflect the community's demographics. How essential is it to make police forces more diverse?
And so, Ferguson happens. A kid gets killed. On some level, it doesn't even matter what the circumstances are around the death. Because all that anyone needs to know is that here is yet another young African-American kid who is going about his business and he's now dead. Let's imagine that somehow he was hassling the police. Let's imagine that. Does that require a death sentence? If the same thing had happened to a suburban teen kid in an elite suburb of St. Louis, would they now be dead? Everybody knows that the answer is no. And thus, the rage.
"the act of policing places the police in opposition to the community"
HT: In Detroit, in Philadelphia, in Rochester, in Harlem, and all those places [in the 1960s], when you have an all-white police force policing an all-black community, not only is there evidence that policing does not happen justly, but you have the perception and the feeling that you have kind of an occupying army in your community. I think it's kind of obvious why it's problematic.

But people misunderstand what it takes to actually integrate a police department and what the impact of that is. It's very difficult to integrate these departments. It took the rebellions of the '60s to put pressure on city officials to do that in most cities. In Detroit, however, even though there was a rebellion in '67, the police force does not really start to get integrated until 1973, when there's a black mayor. Indeed, he gets elected in large part because he is promising, finally, to rein in the vigilante forces in the police department and to finally integrate. It takes enormous effort to actually integrate a police department. And what seems to have happened is that that has really fallen by the wayside. Many affirmative-action clauses and statutes and pieces of city governance and university governance and certainly private business governance have made it very easy to not abide by integration rule now.
DL: Have there been any genuinely good policing trends in the last 20 years, or anything that police departments have developed to succeed in building trust with policed communities and policing them less?
Even if police departments are integrated - certainly this has been proven in Detroit, and in other cities where you have many, many more black police officers - the problem is that police are charged with policing the community and particularly policing the poor black community. The act of policing places the police in opposition to this community. Even if the officers are black, that does not guarantee that there's going to be smooth police-community relations. Fundamentally, the problem is that there is so much targeted policing in these neighborhoods.
"there's a much broader sense of justice that needs to be had"
HT: I think community policing has merit. The whole origin of community policing, which really comes out of the rebellions of the '60s, the pressure on departments to be representative of communities, to actually get out of cars and walk the streets and actually be part of the community - I think that was all good. l think it does have potential.
DL: Has history taught us anything about how communities can successfully demand accountability from police after civil unrest?
But meanwhile, we started a war on crime where we invested every last dime we had in policing and arresting and criminalizing behavior. Not just any behavior, but criminalizing black behavior. And once every resource went to that, that's how we go from having a declining prison rate to being the biggest prison populator of the entire globe. That happens because all of this attention and resources go to policing black communities.

HT: Unfortunately, everyone's immediate response is justice, meaning, "Let's arrest this cop. Let's put this cop on trial." I think that there's a much broader sense of justice that needs to be had.

For example, there were these killings in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979, known colloquially as the Greensboro Massacre. This was when the police and the Klan kind of clashed with demonstrators, and people got killed, and it's really just a horrible situation.

They had a truth and reconciliation commission set up to deal with that. It's a really interesting story. What it resulted in was just pages and pages and tons of documents about what the community felt, and what the hell was going on, and who are these police, and what about the Klan?

Right now everybody's clamoring for this cop to stand trial and so forth. Is that going to heal? Is that going to change the next kid who gets pulled over and shot? Probably not. The broader question of how communities are policed and how black people are viewed and treated on the streets is fodder for something much more significant that the community needs to engage in.

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The ugly history of racist policing in America

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For the third consecutive summer, America's attention has been turned to the deaths of black men at the hands of law enforcement - from the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in 2014, to the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, to the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week.

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There are over 1,200 rebel groups in Syria! Russia has performed many bombings and raids in Syria as well. These conflicts in Syria have also spread to Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon, which now has ISIS in the countries. Since WWII, civil wars have lasted around 10 years. This war, however, has no end in sight.

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The world map above shows the level of gender equality each country has. The lighter the color, the more equality between the genders it has. The darker it is, however, the less quality between genders it has. As you can see from the depiction, most of the western and more developed countries have lighter hues while less developed countri s stay in the darker range.

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Saudi Arabia grants women the right to drive

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Saudi Arabia grants women the right to drive

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As stated in the title and video, women have just been granted the right to drive.  This is a major step in reducing the great bias for men and it makes great strides towards equality in this country.

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Apparently the favourite models are going to be Toyota, BMW and Jeep - colour unimportant. But there will be a few hardcore bikers on the roads as well. The day millions of us have been waiting for - and for which several women went to jail for - has finally arrived. The lifting of the driving ban for women in Saudi Arabia, unbelievably the last country in the world to allow women to get behind the wheel.

The decision by the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - known around the world now, thanks to a slick PR campaign, as MBS - has attracted banner headlines, and thousands of driving licence applications from women throughout the kingdom. One driving school received 165,000 applications in just three days. Car sales are expected to soar by up to 10 per cent, with more than 400 thousand vehicles estimated to be snapped up in the remaining months of 2018.

Good news for the car industry - if not for the environment. And also essential news for the Saudi economy and its highly intelligent female workforce made up of women who more often than not have been educated abroad to masters and PhD level, and who until now had to return home to the alien stifling restrictions of life under religious traditionalists.

That's all thanks to Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia's plan to diversify its economy, reducing its reliance on oil, which has accelerated the introduction of social and economic reform.

The decision by MBS to launch Vision 2030 in 2015 was smart and built on social and economic pragmatism for a country which until now has enjoyed vast wealth built on oil - but riches that won't last forever.

Part of his modernising Vision 2030, the lifting of the driving ban encapsulates not only social transformation but a blueprint for economic reform.

In recent years the number of women who work has soared to up to 22 per cent, still not enough, and the government aims to raise that to 31 per cent by 2030. But until now those working women have not been able to drive themselves to their jobs - creating not only transportation, but also financial obstacles for women who have had to employ their own driver - often an overseas national - on a salary that frequently ate up their own. Think of the dilemma so many young mothers in the UK face when juggling childcare costs with a return to work.

Another benefit for the country should be the emergence of many more two-car households. This will add to the economy by boosting spending and attracting strategic investors - both local and foreign - associated with motor insurance and car leasing companies. Pension funds and private investors have for months been looking at innovative solutions to serve the rapidly expanding automotive sector in Saudi Arabia.

With the lifting of the ban on women driving, the government's goal of raising Saudi gross domestic product by 65 per cent will become easier, as this will revive other sectors, such as the automotive and retail, which will increase the productivity because more women will enjoy the ability to work.

And by overturning the antediluvian ban MBS hopes Saudi Arabia will attract even more tourists - who will see the kingdom no longer as a bastion of male repression, but a pluralistic confident society where women are on equal footing with men.

Saudi Arabia announced recently that it would invest $64bn (£48bn) in developing its entertainment industry over the next few years, in the hope that tourism will contribute 300 billion riyals (£60bn) to the economy by 2026.

Other positive spinoffs from today's news will see the removal of the compulsory wearing of the niqab on national ID cards, and a tightening of the protection of women in a society plagued by social and sexual harassment that is all too often brushed under the carpet. A new anti-harassment law will land offenders with a five-year prison sentence and a hefty fine.

There's an aura of optimism in the country that I as a researcher and businesswoman in my thirties have not witnessed before. Could this finally be the moment when all the other ingrained taboos such as segregation and male guardianship can be smashed as well?

Social media in Saudi is largely positive with numerous hashtags like "drive and the nation is behind you" and "be confident - you can do it" flooding Twitter.

We've got the right to drive. Next up, equality in the workplace. I can't wait.
Najah Al Otaibi is a Saudi political analyst and founder of Global Soft Power Communications

The Independent has launched its #FinalSay campaign to demand that voters are given a voice on the final Brexit deal.

Sign our petition here

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'This is what the end of the driving ban means for women's rights in Saudi Arabia'

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Apparently the favourite models are going to be Toyota, BMW and Jeep - colour unimportant. But there will be a few hardcore bikers on the roads as well. The day millions of us have been waiting for - and for which several women went to jail for - has finally arrived.

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This is a picture showing the Catalan region of Spain breaking away from the rest of the country.

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This is a picture showing a group of Catalans protesting for their independence. Over 90% of Catalonia voted for their independence, but only 40% of the region voted in the election. As a result, they couldn't officially declare their freedom.

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This map shows who controls what in Syria. Majority of the country is controlled by the Syrian government, but there are regions controlled by ISIS, Kurdish forces, Rebel forces, and other groups.

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This is a picture of the ruins of a city in Syria.  There are many rebel groups that are bombing cities in Syria, which causes them to look like this.

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This is a family of Syrian refugees. According to the UN, there are over 13.5 million refugees in Syria.