Israel's Ethiopian community has for decades denounced institutionalized racism that was manifested on June 30, when a police officer killed a 19-year-old Ethiopian-Israeli man Solomon Tekah. Five months later, the case is still dragging on due to a recent police investigation that belies the agent's desire to assassinate the young man.

While the Israeli state espouses multiculturalism and diversity, it oppresses not just the Palestinian population, but also any Black person within its borders.

From warehousing African asylum seekers in giant prison camps, to criminalizing and carrying out eugenics programs against its Ethiopian Jewish citizens, Israel’s treatment of Black people reveals that the Zionist project is not just about Jewish supremacy, but also white supremacy.

In this on-the-ground investigation, Abby Martin talks to Osman Ali, a refugee from Darfur, at Holot prison camp about the treatment of refugees by the government, and Tehune Maharat, an Ethiopian Jewish activist whose cousin was killed in an apparent hate crime by Israeli police, about the rampant and institutional racism in the country.

Egypt's Nubian minority were forced from their ancestral land in the Central Nile valley in the 1960s, as General Gamal Abdel Nasser embarked on a project of major public works. The experience left deep scars on a people who, to this day, continue to fight to be allowed to return to land they say is rightfully theirs. Claire Williot and Edouard Dropsy report.

⁣With soft guttural whoops and a tickle of the water, a pygmy man in Central Africa plucks a fish from the river with his bare hands. Another hunter releases a crude arrow into the canopy above. A monkey falls from the trees, shot directly through the heart. Eyes still bulging from the shock, the hunter quickly slots the monkey’s tail under its lolling neck to make a neat bag of his bush meat. It’s skills like these that have allowed the pygmies to live in the rainforest of Cameroon for generations. But now they’re facing stiff competition for their forest range.
With only 7% of the rainforest here protected, there are rich pickings for the loggers. Now logging tracks have spread like spiderwebs through the forest, leaving the pygmies exposed. Perversely, conservationists are also gnawing away at the pygmies' land. Wildlife reserves patrolled by anti-poaching patrols leave just 1% of the forest available for the pygmies. Emile, an old hunter, bemoans the coming of the white men.“Because there’s this protected zone we don’t have enough to hunt. We were forest people, now we’re beggars.”
Caught between two worlds, the pygmies are making their choice. “'Before we used to live in the forest. Then the tall people came and said you can’t live like this. Before, we always used to run away and hide. Then we said this is getting us nowhere and we left the forest.” The pygmies are reaching out, demanding schools and health clinics. Now many families have abandoned their nomadic lifestyle, settling around mission schools.
Yet outside the forest the Pygmies are struggling to find their place. They are forced into jobs that only serve the whites or the Bantu, the predominant black tribe in the area. They’re losing their identity and are being treated like bonded labour, paid with alcohol, food and cast-off clothing. Ironically, many also find work with the logging companies themselves. Hacking down their forest home for a few cents per tree. In a state of rapid cultural transition they don’t know which way to jump. Their culture grates with the loggers’ work ethics. At the local sawmill their ways are tolerated but not respected. “It’s difficult to work with pygmies. When the hunting season or harvest time comes, they simply leave .You can't rely on them. When people won’t change their mentality they can’t be integrated in the workplace' moans the French sawmill manager. Working for hunters is the only other employment around. Tourists pay $20,000 a week to have the pygmies lead them to the prize prey of elephants and gazelles. Its easy work for the pygmies but it’s killing their land as well. The hunters' guns spell danger to the region's elephants.
Back in the forest, in their traditional leaf huts, a band of pygmies try to live as they used to. Their children line up to have their canine teeth filed - the pain is worth it, they say, for this mark of pygmy beauty. The men hunt, the women gather, digging for roots and grubs to be roasted. But even here the lure of a western way of life is drawing people away. The refrain of many mothers is the same. “I want to stay in the village. The most important thing to me is that [my child] can go to school.”
The pygmies are in an impossible situation, their skills, perfected over hundreds of years, are becoming worthless in a world dominated by profit and loss accounts. They are being exploited in the same manner as the ancient rainforest trees: as an expendable commodity with a short term value. Can the pygmies find a successful identity as the modern world closes in?
Produced by Marion Meyer-Hohdahl

From the archives of the UCLA Communications Studies Department. Digitized 2013.

The views and ideas expressed in these videos are not necessarily shared by the University of California, or by the UCLA Communication Studies Department.

Renowned author of 'The New Jim Crow' says the death of Freddie Gray points to the need for concerted community action to halt excessive force targeted at African Americans. A discussion of the school to prison pipeline and how the The US government, law enforcement agencies, prison industrial complex and banks profit from the War On Drugs.

Discussing whether blacks can receive true justice in American courts, prisons, or in post-prison life, this special Black Journal episode examines America's judicial system from a black perspective. Entitled, Justice? the presentation will include five segments: 1. The Courts: Legal experts examine the difficulties blacks face in American courts the virtual impossibility of receiving trial by pears; the systems tremendous backlog of cases; lack of money for competent legal assistance; and pressures to accept lesser pleas, among other problems. 2. Prison: In exclusive interviews conducted within the San Quentin and Soledad Prison in California, prisoners talk candidly about their lives in prison the dehumanizing conditions and racial pressures; their reasons for being there often poverty or lack of competent legal assistance; prisons failure to rehabilitate and adequately prepare prisoners for post-prison life; and the problem they face upon release which virtually ensure failure to establish normal, productive lives. 3. Angela Davis: At UCLA, where Angela Davis was ousted as a philosophy instructor, her lawyer, friends and professional associates discuss the events which led to her arrest and her current trial. Miss Davis is charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy to smuggle weapons into the San Rafael (California) Courthouse last August 7 in an alleged attempt to free three black prisoners. The prisoners, known as the Soledad Brothers, were indicted for allegedly killing a prison guard. Miss Davis, now held incommunicado in the Marin County jail in California, appears in film segments made while she was at UCLA. 4. The Jackson Family: Mrs. Lester Jackson, mother of George Jackson, one of the Soledad Brothers and of Jonathan Jackson, who was killed in the alleged prisoner escape attempt, is interviewed along with other relatives, friends, and members of the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee. 5. Soledad Brothers: Lawyers defending the three Soledad Brothers George Jackson, Fiesta Durango and John Clutchette discusses the murder charge and tell why they consider the Soledad Brothers to be political prisoners.