The Bias Committee

Madam Speaker

2008-05-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Karen Bass, yet another important first:

History was made today [May 13 2008] under the dome of the California State Capitol when Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) was sworn in as the first African-American female Speaker of the California Assembly. She is the first African-American female to hold such a high legislative post anywhere in the United States. In her speech after the swearing in ceremony Speaker Bass said she’s ready to begin tackling the many challenges facing the state. Speaker Bass will have less than 24 hours before she knows the extent of the state’s financial crisis. Governor Schwarzenegger is scheduled to release his revised budget proposal Wednesday afternoon.

Scared of an Angry Black Man

2008-05-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

Ridiculous story here about how the U.S. Fine Arts Commission disapproves of a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the MLK Memorial because his stance and facial expression make him seem "confrontational."

White people can't stand the history. Let us emasculate this warrior and revise history to morph him into a cuddly kitten.

White Women Get Lighter Sentences than Black Men

2008-04-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

Oh, stop the presses.

If you missed the backstory,

Johnston and Miller — both former exotic dancers who went by the stage names "Charlie" and "Adrienne" — were nicknamed the "Barbie bandits" after they were videotaped wearing sunglasses and laughing as they appeared to rob a Bank of America branch in Acworth of $11,000.

I first read about this over at BlackPerspective.net:

I guess when white women cry, things go well for them.

If that would have been Shameka and Shawna instead of a couple of Becky’s, I can just imagine what the sentencing would be like.

The ~~strippers'~~ Barbies' sentences were just a timeout, really:

Last month, Cobb County Superior Court Judge Mary Staley sentenced 20-year-old Heather Johnston to 10 years probation after she pleaded guilty to a charge of theft by taking in the 2007 heist. The judge gave 19-year-old Ashley Miller two years in jail and eight years probation. Both women are white.

Now the NAACP is asking for an investigation as to why these other two defendants got sentences of 5 and 10 years. Well. Obviously the judge did not want to interfere with the girls' career trajectory, which we all know has a time stamp.

P.S. Who knew that naming your daughter Ashley was to seal her destiny to the pole?

More about Disproportionate Sentencing

2008-03-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

From ColorofChange.org, a message to the Senate Judiciary Committee to support S.1711:

Misguided politicians and their "war on drugs" have created a national disaster: 1 in 9 Black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are now behind bars. It's a man-made disaster - fueled by unfair sentencing rules.
These rules treat 5 grams of crack cocaine—the kind common in poor Black communities—the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine, the kind prevalent in White and wealthier communities.
Tell the Senate Judiciary Committee to challenge unequal justice by ending unfair sentencing laws.

Go here to sign the online petition, and, if you like, you can copy and paste the below to an email message to the likeminded:

Dear Friend,
The so-called "war on drugs" has created a national disaster: 1 in 15 Black adults in America are now behind bars. It's not because they commit more crime but because of unfair sentencing rules that treat 5 grams of crack cocaine, the kind found in poor Black communities, the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine the kind found in White and wealthier communities.
These sentencing laws are destroying communities across the country and have done almost nothing to reduce the level of drug use and crime.
Senator Joe Biden is one of the original creators of these laws and is now trying to fix the problem. But some of his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee are standing in the way. I've signed on with ColorOfChange.org to tell them to stand with Joe Biden and undo this disaster once and for all. Will you join me? It just takes a moment and you can start by clicking on the link below:
http://www.colorofchange.org/crackpowder/?id=2357-346645
Thanks.

Talk About It

2008-03-26T10:39:00.001-07:00

In Memory of Chiquita Ford

2008-03-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

Laci Peterson was eight months pregnant when she was reported missing in December 2002. We got news updates daily. National coverage in the newspapers and on television. I don't even watch much TV, and I can still picture her face. People went crazy with the story. Everyone knows the story. Her husband, who we all agreed was the jackass to end all jackasses, was eventually convicted of killing her. Now he is on death row in San Quentin.

Chiquita Ford was five months pregnant when she was reported missing in October 2007. That was after I got rid of the cable, so I cannot for a certainty say there was never a news report about her disappearance. I do read the newspaper, however, and I can say that there was not daily coverage, not even locally. No big People spreads with pictures of Ms. Ford and her family in happier times, no People interviews with friends and family members.

Here is Chiquita Ford. The remains of her body were found near Lexington Reservoir on March 7.
Chiquita Ford deserves to be remembered just as much as Laci Peterson. Toward that end: Ms. Ford was 33 years old. She lived in Oakland. She was the mother of two teen-age boys. She liked to watch comedy; she like to do hair; and she liked to dance. She had a family, she had friends, and there are people who loved her who miss her. There is a lot more to her story, just as much to her story as there was to Laci's, but we'll probably never know it.

The Long March of Those Who Came Before Us

2008-03-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

. . . in the immortal words of Senator Barack Obama.

I suspect many will rely on media accounts of the speech, instead of going to the primary source. That is unfortunate. Regardless, here it is:

It's So Easy

2008-03-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

Oh, yes, Obama is in the running because he's Black. Because being Black gives you an elevator ride to the top, while all white Americans are slowly and laboriously climbing the ladder by dint of their own efforts. Huh. That must be why there have been so many Black presidents.

Keith Olbermann's response here.

It Seems Like Self-Defense to Me

2008-03-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

Let me first offer the disclaimer that I am not a lawyer. But if even one man--let alone two--broke into my house, I am certain I would stab them. If I had the presence of mind. And a knife handy.

AMHERST, Mass.—About 200 University of Massachusetts students and faculty members have rallied on the Amherst campus in support of a former student they say has been excessively charged for an on-campus fight. Jason Vassell, who is black, is charged with attempted murder for allegedly stabbing two white men who broke his dorm room window and used racial epithets.Twenty-year-old John Bowes of Hancock, New Hampshire, has been charged with assault and hate crimes for the incident last month, while 19-year-old Jonathan Bosse of Milton has not been charged.Vassell's supporters say the two men provoked the fight and shouldn't face lesser charges. They say the incident reveals society's racism.Vassell, of Boston, has withdrawn from school.A university spokesman has declined to comment on the case.

What Does This Smile Say?

2008-03-03T08:51:00.001-08:00

I'm thinking it says something along the lines of, "Once this mess gets cleaned up, Ima own this town."

I'm hoping.

Let Us Choose, Part II

2008-02-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

And from Color of Change, another petition to the superdelegates:

Dear Friend,
Voters in places like Atlanta, Brooklyn, St. Louis, and Inglewood have made clear their choice for president: Barack Obama. So why are some members of the Congressional Black Caucus threatening to use their power as "superdelegates" to undermine those votes and nominate Hillary Clinton?
Voters should decide elections--not politicians. And members of the Congressional Black Caucus should amplify the political voice of their constituents, not silence it. I've joined ColorOfChange.org in demanding that the CBC to listen to the voters; let's tell them to vote with the people, not against us:
http://www.colorofchange.org/superd/?id=2357-346645
Voters in almost all the districts represented by the CBC have chosen Obama, helping him win more delegates than Clinton. But only some delegates vote based on the results of primaries. A fifth of the delegates that will vote at the convention -- and decide the nomination -- are "superdelegates" that can technically vote however they like, regardless of what the voters say. These super-delegates are members of Congress, senators, governors and Democratic party insiders. In a contest this close, they have the power to overturn the will of voters, and decide the outcome.
In 2000 and 2004, CBC members stood up to defend the rights of Black voters that had been disenfranchised. It would be a disgrace for its members to now undermine the votes of Black people in their districts. Rarely have Black voters across the country been so unified behind a particular candidate; if CBC members vote against their constituents, it will diminish the power of Black voters in a historic election that could result in our country's first Black president.
It will take courage and conviction for CBC members to break with back-room politics and stand up for democracy. But we must demand it. Please join us:
http://www.colorofchange.org/superd/?id=2357-346645
Thanks.

Stop and Frisk

2008-02-19T13:53:00.000-08:00

With "some fact-based suspicion," the police can stop anybody, interrogate him, and search him. (Or her.)

But the police seem to have trouble distinguishing between suspicious appearance and conduct. The appearance route seems to result in mostly Black and Brown people getting stopped and frisked, because just having dark skin makes a person suspicious.

If you protest, you might get arrested. That's what happened to Leonardo Blair, a reporter who was stopped and frisked and then arrested and charged with "making unreasonable noise" and "disobeying a lawful order." The charges have since been dismissed.

Morons Against Obama

2008-02-19T10:20:00.000-08:00

I'm not saying that being a moron is a requirement for joining those who are loudly anti-Obaman.

However. I found this racist mess via Davey D.'s Hip Hop Corner. I am late to the party, as the publisher has already issued an apology and has apparently cleaned the mess off the site. Davey D. helpfully had provided contact information (Phone: 631-324-2500 Rick Murphy, Editor
rmurphy@indyeastend.com), and the publisher freely admits his remorse was prompted by the telephone calls and email messages he received:

WE HAVE HAD A SLEW OF LETTER WRITERS (THEY ARE PUBLISHED WITHIN STARTING ON PAGE 15) AND A LOT OF PHONE CALLERS.

(What's with the all caps, dude? And what is with all the misspellings? Raise the bar.)

Anyway, I am reprinting it below. Nothing shocks me anymore.

Why I Should Be Our Next President
By Yo Mama Bin Barack

My name is YoMama Bin Barack, and I want to be your next president so together we can begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.

My opponents say I live in a dream world. That may well be true, for I believe in the dream of Doctor Martin Luther King, the dream that all men are created equal.

His words resonate in my very being: "Some day, you too can be a black man who makes a difference in this country, and you too can be called 'Doctor' even though you are not a doctor of any kind." I believe that, and someday I hope people will call me Doctor YoMama. In fact, I hope someday people will call me President Doctor YoMama (but please don't call me Luther, I hate that name).

I was telling this very thing to my wife AliBama the other night while we were in bed, umm, praying. I said, "AliBama, I want to be your next president so together we can begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today."

And she said, "YoMama, then why don't you cut out the president shit and get a real job and make some freakin' money?" But I explained I have plenty of money, because bleeding heart liberal Democrats from all across this vast country of ours have felt it in their hearts to send a contribution to my campaign so I can begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today and also because I need to buy my little daughter Bama Slamma a PlayStation so she will get off my back.

Why do I think I am the best candidate for the job? Look at my resume – it speaks for itself.

Educational background: Doctorate

Military background: I was the first black troop leader of the Boy Scouts Troop 43 in my home state of Illinois. Well, that's not quite true, because they didn't let black kids in the Boy Scouts, so I lied and said I was Hawaiian, which I kind of am, sort of. You see, part of my strategy of becoming our first black president is to deny I am black unless I am campaigning in Harlem. The truth is, I don't know many black people, but my advisors have drafted a strategy to reel in the black vote:

1) Call everyone "Brother." Blacks, I am told, do this, even if their real brothers are mostly in jail.

2) Talk Jive. Brothers want to hear jive. During my speech I told the crowd "We be, you know, sick of whitey supressin' and congestin' so, you know, we won't denigrate or sophisticate but emulate and populate, you know, the system is, like, broken, y'all!"

I have no idea what that means. The black folk loved it, though, so they all vowed to vote for me. The New York Times covered it, but they are so afraid of saying something racist they twisted my words around and reported:

"Yesterday in Harlem YoMama articulated his vision of a new America, an America with less congestion, a country free of drug use, a world without segregation or racism where citizens emulate the lives of great Americans like YoMama, John F. Kennedy and Doctor Martin Luther King."

So you see, there is my strategy. I get the black vote, I get the white vote, and then I go after the female vote by attacking that bitch Hillary for being the Nasty Witch from Hell.

Anyhow, girls think I'm cute. I'm kind of like Will Smith, except he's got those Dumbo ears and mine are normal. So, for the next six months, I am going to fly all over the country, and every place I speak I am going to tell the people:

"As Americans, we can take enormous pride in the fact that courage has been inspired by our own struggle for freedom, by the tradition of democratic law secured by our forefathers and enshrined in our Constitution. It is a tradition that says all men are created equal under the law and that no one is above it."

To be honest, I have no idea what that means. If you analyze it carefully, it really doesn't mean anything. But it sounds like something a president or a doctor would say. I can make that speech every day and no matter how many times I do the stupid newspapers will report it differently. They will make me sound like the smart, young, new voice of America, because most editors out there figure anything is better than having a cow like Hillary Clinton snorking around the White House making weasel deals again.

Ultimately, if she gets too close, one of my New York advisors has advised me to, "Bitch slap that ho." White women, I am told, like that. (Black women, on the other hand, do not. I tried that once on AliBama and she beat the living shit out of me.)

Of course, I also have to contend with John Edwards. My strategy is to ignore him until he actually manages to win a primary. Since he's, like, zero for 43 so far, that should be the end of him. You see, Mr. Edwards hasn't figured out that to win an election some people have to actually vote for you. (If he does make a run at me, I might consider bitch slapping him, as he is somewhat of a Pretty Boy if you get my jist.)

In closing, I humbly ask for your vote on Election Day, even if I did hang around the school yard and smoke pot when I was getting my Doctorate in Blackstuff. And, oh, by the way, I am in the process of finding out how I can also call myself "Reverend." I have a call in to Al Sharpton.

Fear of a Black Baby

2008-02-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

Posted by Pam at Pandagon:

State Senator Chris Buttars (I will not act like a child and make fun of his last name, although it does take a great deal of self-restraint) exposes how he really feels: Black=Bad.

Republican Sen. Chris Buttars' comment came during a debate on SB48, aimed at equalizing school construction funds. Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, called it "the ugly baby bill," but, as Buttars stood to vote, went further. "This baby is black. It's a dark, ugly thing," he said.

He was coerced into giving a non-apology:

"I made a comment that I think a lot of people could take racist. I certainly did not mean that in any way but it was wrong and certainly could easily have been taken that way," Buttars said. "I apologize to anyone who took offense. . . . I ask for your forgiveness."

Out of the full heart, the mouth speaks. You see how the racism is so very much a part of Buttars' inner workings that he actually could say that?

Let Us Choose

2008-02-14T14:13:00.001-08:00

I don't think my apprehension about the superdelegates can be attributed to paranoia. In my more cynical moments, I entertain the notion that the difference between Democrats and Republicans narrows by the minute. I do think Senator Clinton is closer to the Republican side than some of us would like. I also don't think it's any news that Democrats have been known to roll over on Black people.

Which is a long way of saying that I believe Obama is and will continue to be the people's choice. (The numbers bear me out.) Whether he will be the superdelegates' choice is up in the air. As of this moment, he is not.

MoveOn.org provides this petition imploring superdelegates to support the will of the people in nominating the Democratic presidential candidate.

Pathological

2008-02-12T15:24:00.000-08:00

What with all the overcrowding, and with our awareness of documented disparities in sentencing between black and white defendants, probation seems a suitable sentence than prison for a 66-year-old nonviolent offender convicted of tax evasion. Particularly when the defendant had a stroke only 3 years ago and was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2006.

LOS ANGELES -- Isley Brothers lead singer Ronald Isley has been sentenced to three years and one month in prison for tax evasion.Isley was also ordered to pay $3.1 million in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Conte.

He was convicted last year of five counts of tax evasion and one count of willful failure to file a tax return. During a hearing Friday, defense attorney Anthony Alexander argued that the 65-year-old singer [sic--the sources I've seen say he is 66] should receive probation instead of prison time because of complications from a stroke and a recent bout with kidney cancer. Isley is expected to be sent to a prison hospital facility.

Alexander also pleaded for leniency because Isley had been attempting to pay down his IRS debt.But U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson declined to sentence the R&B singer to less time than called for under federal guidelines."The term serial tax avoider has been used. I think that's appropriate," Pregerson said. Alexander argued during trial that "unfortunate circumstances," such as the deaths of two of Isley's accountants, made him unable to get records together and pay taxes during the years that led to the criminal charges.

This is justice?

In its ruling, the appellate court said the trial judge was correct in sentencing and "best balanced the need to sanction Mr. Isley's `pathological' tax evasion against the need to accommodate Mr. Isley's poor health."

Maybe the persecution of this Black man is not racially motivated. Maybe American judges hate us Geminis.

Let's Hear It for Vermont

2008-01-28T09:24:00.000-08:00

. . . the first state to make slavery illegal:

That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. Therefore, no male person, born to this country, or brought from overseas, ought to be holden by laws to serve any person as servant, slave, or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one years, nor female in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years, unless they are bound by their own consent after they arrive to such age, or bound by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like.

The Headline that Wasn't

2008-01-27T12:24:00.000-08:00

Mississippi's plan to divert $600 million in hurricane housing relief funds to a port expansion project won federal approval Friday, despite opposition from those who say the housing needs of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina have not been met.
. . .The port expansion plan--which will use the last of the housing recovery money allocated by Congress--has been a subject of contention on the Mississippi coast, where more than 30,000 residents still live in Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers and mobile homes.

Here's a little background information on the money:

The money in question is part of $5.5 billion in HUD Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that Congress authorized for Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, 2005. Administered by the Mississippi Development Authority, about $3.4 billion was allocated to replace and repair some of the nearly 170,000 owner-occupied homes destroyed or damaged by the storm. Another $600 million was set aside for programs to replace public housing, help small landlords fix their units and foster construction of new low- and moderate-income housing.

Mississippi is not a state of great wealth. Poverty rates in Mississippi have increased since 2000, and the poorest people are Black:

When compared to other States across the United States, the State of Mississippi can be considered to have a very high poverty rate amongst the population, with a poverty rate of 19.9 percent with a family income under the 1999 poverty level. The Black or African American race/ethnicity population category, holds the highest rate of poverty with 34.9 percent of the population in 2000 living in poverty. Individuals aged Under 5 years are experiencing most percent people in poverty in Mississippi, reporting 28.7 percent of this age cohort living in poverty.

So the poorest people, the ones who lost the most in Hurricane Katrina and the ones with the fewest resources to get themselves back under a roof are the ones whose pockets are being picked. Yet again.

The Headline Says It All

2008-01-24T17:16:00.000-08:00

When you read a headline like

Danny Glover convicted of trespassing

what are your first thoughts?

My first thoughts are: there go the media, vilifying the Black man yet again. How many people are going to read the whole article and discover that Glover was arrested during a union rally for hotel workers?

NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario - Danny Glover has been convicted in Niagara Falls, Ontario, for trespassing in a hotel during a union rally in 2006. Glover, who wasn't in court, was convicted Thursday along with UNITE HERE union representative Alex Dagg and Ontario Federation of Labour President Wayne Samuelson.

Canadian Niagara Hotels charged the three with trespassing at their Sheraton on the Falls property during a Sept. 16, 2006, protest. The 60-year-old actor took part in the protest as part of a larger campaign that aims to increase salaries and improve working conditions for hotel workers in the U.S. and Canada.

I can think of other, more accurate headlines, headlines that would not create false impressions in the minds of readers (and nonreaders).

File Under: It's About Time

2008-01-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

Florida indicates that it might have plans to consider hauling itself into the ~~20th~~ 21st century with the announcement that the state song, an unlikely nostalgic paean by a fictional former slave to his beloved plantation, may soon be retired:

The Swanee River (Old Folks at Home)
Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere's wha de old folks stay.
All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation,
And for de old folks at home.
All de world am sad and dreary,
Eb-rywhere I roam;
Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!
All round de little farm I wandered
When I was young,
Den many happy days I squandered,
Many de songs I sung.
When I was playing wid my brudder
Happy was I;
Oh, take me to my kind old mudder!
Dere let me live and die.
One little hut among de bushes,
One dat I love
Still sadly to my memory rushes,
No matter where I rove.
When will I see de bees a-humming
All round de comb?
When will I hear de banjo strumming,
Down in my good old home?

I would like to note some inconsistencies with reality. How extremely unlikely it was that this former slave squandered happy days on the old plantation. Far more likely that his body still bore the scars of chains and beatings, and that during the whole of his tenure on the plantation, he had most likely been half-naked, half-starved, and definitely separated from his "mudder" and "brudder" at a very young age. It does not stretch the imagination to speculate that he may have been tortured.

Even if he had escaped the most extreme brutality to which most slaves were subject, the "little hut" was probably not a source of pleasant memories, as it was squalid and drafty, lacking in the barest of comforts, with straw or moss serving as a bed:

Such of these dwellings as I visited today were filthy and wretched in the extreme, and exhibited that most deplorable consequence of ignorance and an abject condition, the inability of the inhabitants to secure and improve even such pitiful comfort as might yet be achieved by them. . . . The moss with which the chinks and crannies of their ill-protecting dwelling might have been stuffed was trailing in dirt and dust about the ground, while the back door of the huts, opening upon a most unsightly ditch, was left wide open for the fowls and ducks, which they are allowed to raise, to travel in and out, increasing the filth of the cabin by what they brought and left in every direction.

Maybe he missed hearing the banjo. Maybe. I doubt it. He probably took his with him, or made a new one, or traveled with people who had theirs.

. . . the banjo — the proverbial “white-man” mountain instrument — was developed centuries ago by enslaved Africans in the North American and Caribbean colonies. The earliest banjos were played exclusively by the enslaved at least 200 years before whites ever considered laying hands on what was, to the slaveholding culture, a “primitive” instrument. By the beginning of the 19th century, this negative perception began to change, and by mid-century white musicians had adopted the banjo in minstrel shows, catapulting it into mass production in the last half of the century. The banjo is now mostly known for its role in bluegrass music, overshadowing its historical origin and its place of prominence as an African American contribution to American music.

(Elvis and the Rolling Stones weren't the first whiteys to co-opt Black culture and music.)

Maybe by this time he could return to that most African of instruments, the drum, which slaves were prohibited by law from having. Didn't want the slaves getting themselves and each other all stirred up with those African beats. But what enrages every tyrant is that you can take away the drum, but you can't take away the music:

Denied their most prevalent, and indeed sacred means of expression, the slaves substituted the forbidden drums with bone clappers, tambourines, and most importantly, hand and body slaps, and foot beats. The most primitive of all instruments, the human body, became the main source of rhythm and communication.

What about a song to celebrate the force of the human spirit of the slaves who had the courage to keep on drumming?

Integration: Good for All of Us

2007-12-27T09:38:00.000-08:00

I just read Can We Talk about Race: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum. Phd.

What is the significance of continuing residential and increasing school segregation? One possible outcome is that while interracial contact and more-tolerant racial attitudes increased during the last half of the twentieth century, the same may not be true in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, particularly in our public schools. For example, when high school students were asked . . . how often they interacted with people of other races--engaging in activities such as having a conversation, eating together, or playing sports--the percentage of white students who said they did this "a lot" increased significantly over the time between 1976 and 2000, doubling from approximately 15 percent to 30 percent. While conversely this statistic suggests that 70 percent of white youth do not have such experiences with great frequency, the increase in interaction reported in this study can be seen as a positive result of improving race relations in America. What will the answers be in 2010? In 2020?
. . . The progress that has been made in the reduction of racial prejudice that can be associated with shared school experiences is at risk of stalling.

Racist or Bumbler?

2007-12-15T09:35:00.000-08:00

You may have heard about Department of Justice voting rights honcho John Tanner's ill-advised remarks back on October 4 and 5, during meetings with the NAACP and the National Latino Congreso:

". . . minorities are slightly more likely" than whites to have photo IDs, speculating that this was due to "vestiges of racism still at work in the United States" ("vestiges"? "vestiges"?)
". . . our society is such that minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first."

At the time, there was a bit of outrage about what Tanner said. From Barack Obama:

Such comments are patently erroneous, offensive, and dangerous, and they are especially troubling coming from the federal official charged with protecting voting rights in this country.

Mr. Tanner has already demonstrated questionable judgment in overruling the decision of Justice Department lawyers that the Georgia photo ID requirement would disproportionately discriminate against African Americans. For Mr. Tanner to now suggest, in an effort to defend his erroneous decision, that photo identification are not necessary for minority voters because "they die first" shows just how far the Justice Department has fallen. This is a disgrace and yet another reason why the next Attorney General must demonstrate a strong commitment to civil rights.

Tanner did apologize later:

"My explanation of the data came across in a hurtful way, which I deeply regret."

And then requested a move. Now he has been assigned to the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices, where he will probably find some way to chew his toenails. Stay tuned.

It seems to me Tanner just as guilty of Not Making Sense as of racism, in that he seems to first argue that requiring IDs for voting cannot disenfranchise minorities because minorities are more likely to be harassed by the police and asked for IDs and therefore are more likely to have IDs already, but then he says that it really doesn't matter if elderly minority folk have IDs because they're too dead to vote, anyway.

To Sir, with Love

2007-12-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

. . . in the immortal words of Lulu.

This tempest in a teapot from the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, via Negrophile:

[School board member] Elliott has drawn heat for an opinion piece that ran Dec. 4 on the Speaking Out page of the Democrat and Chronicle, which in part said:
The reason it is important to have more teachers of color to teach students of color has more to do with 'universality of experience' which, in the case of African Americans, is based on race.

African Americans continue to fight to overcome the ill effects of slavery and segregation, Elliott wrote, and as a result, non-black teachers could be less likely to understand, communicate with or be sensitive to how students of color engage in learning as a result of that experience.

How could anyone disagree? I'm down with Ms. Elliott (I would add that Black children need to see Black leadership everywhere, not just at school--yes, there need to be Black teachers and Black principals at school, but Black children also need to see Black doctors at the hospital; Black lawyers and judges in the court room; and Black city council members and mayors and governors and legislators in city, state, and federal government). Racism is so pervasive, so insidious, so institutionalized, so much a part of white American life that it is so very difficult for many white people to even begin to have any kind of understanding of the Black American experience.

Did anyone protest when a white woman said something similar about six months ago?

Over 40 percent of public school children are members of “minority groups;” only about 17 percent of their teachers are black, Hispanic, or Asian. This imbalance in ethnicity and gender compromises the role model that teachers can offer to poor children of color, particularly black and Hispanic males.

Remember this:

Black students are suspended far more frequently than white students ("No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. . . Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found") even though they do not misbehave more frequently.

Who is suspending the Black children? Teachers who do not understand them, teachers who bring their own mistaken (racist) perceptions into the classroom, teachers who in all likelihood would bristle in outrage if accused of racism, and yet, and yet. . . .it takes so much to scrub that culturally inherited filth from one's soul. How many have the courage to face themselves and their privilege and acknowledge that the privilege and wealth of the some were bought with the suffering of others.

P.S. The whiteys across the Big Pond are facing the same challenge:

In London, [MP Diane Abbott] added, just 12 per cent of teachers were black while in some areas half the children were. On Saturday a black teachers' network will be launched to provide support to teachers but also encourage them to explain cultural differences to their non-black colleagues.
According to Abbott, some white teachers misunderstand the way that black boys behave, seeing them as aggressive because of a 'culture gap', while others stereotype pupils.

P.P.S. One other great thing Tavis Smiley said (he also said he stole it from Cornel West): In order to lead, you have to love.

I Don't Get Clarence Thomas

2007-12-12T09:24:00.000-08:00

What world does he live in? But I digress.

In 1996 California voters rose up in protest against the Color Threat and passed Proposition ~~We Hate Black People, Brown People, and People of the Feminine Persuasion~~ 209, a nasty bit of legislation intended to dismantle affirmative action.

In order to fully understand why affirmative action is necessary, one must review the facts:

Slavery was ended only 154 years ago. (Emmett Till was murdered only 52 years ago.) The Civil Rights Act was passed only 40 years ago. (The Tuskegee Experiment ended only 35 years ago.) After only 10 years, not even enough time to begin addressing institutionalized discrimination practices, the Supreme Court already began to restrict affirmative action only 30 years ago.

But if you don't want to look at history, you can just look at the present circumstances. It seems so obvious that the demographics of the leadership of this country does not reflect the demographics of the country, as the vast majority of legislators and CEOs are white men, which means there is a problem that must be addressed. It seems highly unlikely to me that all who happen to be Brown people, Black people, or people of the feminine persuasion are not as smart nor as capable as the white men who run the show. If the lack is not in capacity, we must look to a lack in opportunity.

Recently, the state of California audited the 23 California State Universities and found that, indeed, there are not so many Brown people, Black people, or people of the feminine persuasion being hired, and the recommendation was made that the CSU "develop an affirmative action plan."

Yes, Sir

2007-12-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

The Michael Vick spectacle is over now, maybe, with the sentencing, at which time the judge could not resist the opportunity to hog center stage with pompous self-righteousness:

“I think you need to apologize once again to the millions of people who look up to you,” United States District Court Judge Henry E. Hudson said.

Really, how many times do this think this blowhard is going to be in the national spotlight? The temptation to shine was great indeed. Vick's sentence is 23 months, a sentence that is

. . . more than Vick’s co-defendants in the case — and also more than the 12 to 18 months prosecutors originally suggested, as part of Vick’s plea agreement.

This seems unnecessary to say, but I will say anyway that I think we can all agree that dogfighting is very bad no good. However, my opinion is that Vick has paid enough for what he did. He has been doing nothing but pay since this whole mess was uncovered:

Monday’s proceedings provided the next chapter in the dramatic and dizzying fall of Vick, who was once the highest-paid and one of the highest-profile players in the N.F.L. As the Falcons’ franchise quarterback, he had a 10-year, $130 million contract and lucrative endorsement deals. But now the N.F.L. has suspended him indefinitely. His major endorsements have vanished. Financial institutions have also started legal proceedings against him for defaulted loans. The Falcons are seeking to recover $20 million in bonuses from him. Prosecutors forced Vick to pay more than $928,000 for the evaluation and care of the 47 dogs that were taken from his property. Six other dogs that were seized have died or were euthanized.

Not to mention the relentless notoriety, the excessive media coverage, the nonstop vilification.

The crime Vick is really paying for is that of being a successful, wealthy Black man in America.

If You're Going to San Francisco

2007-12-05T09:15:00.000-08:00

Just say no. In the immortal words of Nancy Reagan (who has always looked to me like someone whose chihuahua-like high-strungness was fueled by diet pills).

This, seen at Negrophile, is news that should be on the front page every day until the injustices are addressed. This is the news about America's War on Black People:

San Francisco imprisons African Americans for drug offenses at a much higher rate than whites, according to a report to be released today by a nonprofit research institute.

In a study of nearly 200 counties nationwide, the Justice Policy Institute found that 97 percent of large-population counties have racial disparities between the number of black people and white people sent to prison on drug convictions.

And here is where all those morons say, "Those Black people. If only they'd get off the crackwagon." Well, no, not really:

The institute, which is based in Washington, D.C., and researches public policy and promotes alternatives to incarceration, says whites and African Americans use illicit drugs at similar rates. But black people account for more than 50 percent of sentenced drug offenders, though they make up only 13 percent of the nation's population.

(I've seen conflicting reports on this. Some sources report that whites are three to five times more likely to use drugs than Blacks.)

So Blacks and whites account for about equal numbers of drug users. But Blacks get sentenced disproportionately. Well, that's not really news. Disproportionate sentencing, blah blah blah. Ah, but how disproportionate, you ask?

San Francisco locks up a higher percentage of members of the African American community in drug cases than any other county in the study. In the county, 123 people out of every 100,000 are sent to state prison each year for drug offenses. Of those, whites are incarcerated at a rate of 35 per 100,000 white people, while blacks are incarcerated at a rate of 1,013 per 100,000 black people.

What is the lesson here? There are many, the most obvious being that it's OK to use drugs in SF if you are white, but stay straight if you are Black:

"It is not that San Francisco is sending a lot of people to prison for drug offenses, it is that the people they are sending are black," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the institute. "An average citizen who uses drugs in San Francisco has a pretty low chance of going to prison, but if you are African American, the chances are fairly high."

(By the way, this also an issue across the Big Water:

Figures showed that of those arrested [for possession of cannabis], 40% were African and Caribbean, 28% were white Europeans and 13% Indian and Pakistani. Of those who were later charged, 18.5% were African or Caribbean and 14% were White Europeans. Nineteen per cent of white Europeans were given a caution, rather than being taken to court, compared with 14% of people from African or Caribbean communities.)

P.S. Whites are more than twice as likely to receive treatment for drug use than Blacks (59.3% versus 22.1%).

You Call That News?

2007-12-04T13:27:00.000-08:00

There have been so many issues I wanted to write about that I got overwhelmed. And ended up writing nothing. There is probably a clever blogging term for this circumstance.

Anyway, I will get started with this piece from Colorlines:

This summer ColorLines and The Chicago Reporter conducted a joint national investigation of fatal police shootings in America’s 10 largest cities, each of which had more than 1 million people in 2000. Several striking findings emerged.

To begin, African Americans were overrepresented among police shooting victims in every city the publications investigated.

The contrast was particularly noticeable in New York, San Diego and Las Vegas. In each of these cities, the percentage of black people killed by police was at least double that of their share of the city’s total population.

"There is a crisis of perception where African American males and females take their lives in their hands just walking out the door," said Delores Jones-Brown, interim director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York.

Although it is dangerous to be Black in America, it is now less dangerous to be Black in D.C. than it used to be:

Washington, D.C., which had the nation’s highest rate of police shootings during the 1990s, has cut the rate of shootings dramatically through a combination of training and accountability.

Not surprisingly, holding the police accountable makes a big difference.

Work to Do

2007-11-14T10:04:00.001-08:00

. . . in the immortal words of the Isley Brothers.

I could have left this Achievement Gap Summit after the first session I attended, by three brothers, three warriors on the front line, about what these brothers have done at their school to raise up the children.

One of the co-founders, Fluke Fluker, described a trip he made to Africa, and in so doing, told us that Masai warriors greet one another by asking, "How are the children?"

So here we are, well-meaning folk all I am sure, talking and listening about the achievement gap. Black students and Latino students are attending college at half the rates of white and Asian students. Three times as many Black men are going to prison than are attending college. (Obviously, the problem here is also the criminal injustice system, not just the lack of equity in education.) Tavis Smiley said this morning that education is the civil rights issue of this decade.

But, people, let us stop laying all the responsibility at the teachers' door. We are our brother's keeper. We all have a responsibility. We are all accountable for the education of our children, which means we are all accountable for their welfare.

Do they have food? A hungry child can't learn.
Are they receiving dental care? A child sitting in class with a toothache can't learn.
Do they receive preventive health care? A child who is ill at home is not learning.
Are their homes and neighborhoods safe? A child who is afraid will not learn.

Talk. Listen. Read. Learn. Teach. Vote. Do something.

Blackout

2007-11-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

I joined the Blackout yesterday! There was no spending yesterday in our household, and A. and B. were careful to make sure that their father did not spend any money, either.

A small step. Now we need a day during which we spend our money only supporting Black business.

Buy It Now

2007-10-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder to buy whatever you need so you can participate in the economic boycott November 2.

Show up.

MAKE NO PURCHASES NOV. 1-3, 2007.
November 2, 2007 National Blackout Day

WARREN BALLENTINE, 'THE PEOPLE'S ATTORNEY,' IS CALLING FOR ALL AFRICAN AMERICANS TO PARTICIPATE IN A NATIONAL BLACKOUT'

WHO: Warren Ballentine 'The People's Attorney' and radio 'Truth Fighter' is calling for a National Blackout throughout America, on Friday, November 2, 2007.

WHAT: Attorney Ballentine is calling for a National Blackout that is necessary for African Americans, and is long over due. Especially with all the present injustices that are being allowed and accepted in America right now. From the situation with Mychal Bell and the Jena 6, Genarlow Wilson, Megan Williams, and all of the nooses being hung all over America lately. Until we have federal legislation in place regarding these hate crimes, as African Americans, we need to band together to show our 'Economic Power' by refusing to spend ANY money that day from fast food restaurants to gas. More on Jena 6 at http://www.JENA6TV . com.

WHY: As African Americans we spend an estimated 715 billion dollars a year, and if we were to stop spending for one day that is 2 billion dollars that will not in the system. However, we ask that you don't make a mad dash to the stores days prior or on the days following. If the stores have a major increase in sales right before or right after the Blackout than we will not create the impact we are striving for.

WHEN & Friday, November 2, 2007

WHERE: Nationwide Blackout for ALL African Americans

Blackout 2 November 2007

Don't Spend ANY money — Show a sign of solidarity

Many people marched in Jena, LA, last month in support of the 6 young men unjustly charged with attempted murder for a school yard fight. There are many situations all over the nation that scream of injustice and unfair treatment of people in this country.
. . .

On Friday, November 2, 2007, Warren Ballentine, Reverend Al Sharpton and other civil rights leaders are calling for a national boycott. Black people alone spend 2 billion dollars a day in the United States and we are only approximately 12% of the population—2 billion dollars a day, lining the pockets of companies that have shown no interest in our interests. We ARE living in the new civil rights movement.

We cannot allow the march in Jena to be only an event. It MUST be a movement. In the 1950s, the bus boycott was only supposed to be for a few days or weeks. It ended up being over a year.

The goal was for fair treatment and bus integration. Our parents and grandparents sacrificed and showed that with faith and strength, they could show corporate America the power of the community and demanded fair treatment. As we know, those buses were integrated. This is not about color. This is about class. The middle class and poor people in this country are not treated as the Declaration of Independence says we should be treated. It states that 'all men are created equal'. Clearly the governing class of the United States disagrees with their document.

Join us on Friday, November 2, 2007 and don't spend ANY money. If you have to shop, do it the day before or the day after. If you need gas, get it the day before or the day after. We have to join together as a community. You may be thinking, it's only one day, what difference will it make? I had the same thought at first, but just think about it. If we all save our money that day, it WILL make a difference. That day may become a weekend. That weekend may become a week and that week a month. As we showed in the 1950s, we can make a difference if we do this together.

Show a sign of solidarity.

No Education for the Poor

2007-10-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

The War on Poor People is also part of the American War on Black People. More than 40% of the nation's poor live in the South. The state with the greatest concentration of poor students is Louisiana, where 84% of public school students are poor; more than 60% of Florida's public schools are poor.

Where there are inequalities in education, of course inequalities in income and wealth follow. (The poor get poorer.)

How this country finances education is criminal. Criminal, I say. (There is a Judgment Day a-comin', and some people are going to get the shock of their lives is all Ima say about that.) Schools are financed by local and state taxes, which means that the accident of birth governs whether an American child receives an adequate education.

When there is concentrated poverty in the schools, it means that poor students have the least qualified, least experienced teachers, fewest counseling services (and certainly the greatest need for counseling services), least access to technology, and--this probably goes without saying--the highest drop-out rates.

Reform, reform, reform. There is a solid affirmative action program in place for rich white kids, with all the children of alumni admissions policies and so on. Let us now turn our attention to people in need.

[Stats from today's News & Notes on NPR]

UPDATE: More on this from Education Week:

More than half of public schoolchildren in the U.S. South now come from low-income families, according to a new report, which predicts that the nation as a whole could reach the same demographic milestone within a decade if current trends persist.

“What these figures are beginning to tell us is that we’re no longer talking about a small slice of the population when we talk about low-income students,” said Steve T. Suitts, the author of the report, which was released today by the Southern Education Foundation, an Atlanta-based group. “We’re talking in the South about a majority of students and that does have profound implications and challenges for schools.”

According to the report, the South, for the first time in at least 40 years, is the only region in the nation where low-income children constitute a majority of public school students. Overall, the study found that in the 2006-07 school year, 54 percent of students in 15 Southern states examined came from families poor enough to qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program. Under the guidelines for that program, families cannot earn more than 185 percent of the federal poverty threshold—about $31,765 a year for a family of three—to participate.

Whiteness Is Inhuman

2007-10-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

. . .The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis--strangely of no interest to psychiatry. Ahab, then, is navigating between an idea of civilization that he renounces and an idea of savagery he must annihilate, because the two cannot co-exist. The former is based on the latter. What is terrible in its complexity is that the idea of savagery is not the missionary one: it is white racial ideology that is savage and if, indeed, a white, nineteenth-century American male took on not abolition, not the amelioration of racist institutions or their laws, but the very concept of whiteness as an inhuman idea, he would be very alone, very desperate, and very doomed. Madness would be the only appropriate description of such audacity. . . .
. . . I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was engaged in some simple and simple-minded black/white didacticism, or that he was satanizing white people. Nothing like that. What I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness as an ideology.

--from "On Herman Melville" by Toni Morrison in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White

Genarlow Wilson Did Not Create His Own Reality

2007-10-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

Genarlow Wilson is free. For the first time in years, he can get up in the middle of the night and make his way in the dark to the refrigerator and get himself a snack. He can go outside whenever he wants. He can sleep all day. He can make choices about what to do every minute of the day. The way we all do. He is free.

Maybe some of you have heard of this New Agey spirituality based on the Create Your Own Reality concept. It is what it sounds like: no matter how horrifying your circumstances, whether you are an Ethiopian orphan or a child starving in Darfur, your soul picked them from the vast array of choices on the menu at the Heavenly Diner. You coulda had a V-8, but no, you wanted to experience suffering in Africa. To build your character. To enlighten your understanding.

Stretches all credulity, really. Such a convenient belief system, in that it absolves one of the need for compassion and the moral imperative to speak and act for those who cannot do so for themselves. It is probably no accident that the Create Your Own Reality people also preach the Gospel of ~~Greed~~ Prosperity. (It goes without saying that the prosperity is for themselves. It's interesting, because although so many of the Create Your Own Reality folks align themselves with liberal politics, their beliefs and actions align with the We Hate Poor People party.)

Grossly Disproportionate

2007-10-26T08:58:00.001-07:00

Yobachi at BlackPerspective.net noted that Genarlow Wilson is to be released, as the Georgia Supreme Court has deemed his prison sentence (for engaging in consensual oral sex) "cruel and unusual punishment":

The Georgia Supreme Court on Friday ordered the release of Genarlow Wilson, the Douglas County teenager who has been serving a controversial 10-year sentence for consensual oral sex.

The court's 4-3 decision upholds a Monroe County judge's ruling that the sentence constituted cruel and unusual punishment under both the Georgia and U.S. constitutions.
The majority opinion said the sentence appeared to be "grossly disproportionate" to the teenager's crime and noted that it was out of step with current law.

We Are All One

2007-10-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

"Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal."

That's Whitney Young, y'all.

Put Away Your Wallet

2007-10-25T14:08:00.000-07:00

Stock up. There's an economic boycott coming:

ATLANTA -- Civil rights leaders called Tuesday for a march on the Justice Department and an economic boycott next month because they believe the federal government has been sluggish in dealing with hate crimes.

They called for Americans not to spend any money Nov. 2 as an economic boycott of the federal government's handling of hate crimes. And they announced initial plans for a Nov. 16 march on Justice Department headquarters in Washington.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and other activists at a news conference outside the federal courthouse in Atlanta cited the uproar in Jena, La., surrounding three white teens accused of hanging nooses outside a school and the six black teens charged in the beating of a white student. Five were initially charged with attempted murder, but that charge was reduced.

The civil rights leaders believe the federal government should prosecute the noose hanging as a hate crime. Louisiana authorities have said there is no state law under which they could prosecute the students suspected of hanging the nooses.

"The Justice Department is missing in action," King said.

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Erik Ablin, said in an e-mail message that federal, state and local officials are aggressively investigating numerous noose hanging reports around the country, as well as other incidents involving racial or religious threats.

I'm all for it. Show the power. If nothing else, it will be good for legislators and companies to see how many people really are paying attention. November 2. Mark it on the calendar.

Ring the Alarm!

2007-10-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

. . . fire in the house! in the immortal words of (heheheheheh) Christina Aguilera et al.

. . .didja hear my gasp of disbelief? I was skimming the NYT headlines, and each has a little excerpt to entice you into actually reading the article. This paragraph is simply breath-taking:

For a presidency still haunted by memories of Hurricane Katrina , the forceful round-the-clock response was a political no-brainer — the “anti-Katrina,” in the words of Peter Wehner, a former domestic policy adviser to Mr. Bush.

The unmitigated gall! The effrontery! The baldfaced chutzpah! The, the, the. . .excuse me while I hyperventilate.

How could anyone possessing the capacity to make meaning out of print pass this by unnoticed?

I will spell it out, however, because that is how I do: THERE IS A STRONG RESPONSE TO THE FIRE EMERGENCY BECAUSE THEM BE RICH WHITE PEOPLE.

If the fires were taking place in Richmond or in Oakland (not the Here There Be White People Hills, I mean the real Oakland), let's say, or in Compton, or in some parts of Long Beach (not Belmont Shores), they would be permitted to burn merrily and in fact, there might be a wienie and marshmallow roast.

Cowardly Acts Through the Mail

2007-10-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

Yet another noose:

The principal of Canarsie High School received a noose along with a racially charged letter yesterday, the police said. The package was delivered to the school over the weekend and opened yesterday morning.

The principal, Tyona Washington, who is black, is in her first year at the school, which is in Brooklyn.
The hate crimes unit of the Police Department is investigating, but the police said yesterday that there were no suspects.

Florida on the March for Marvin Lee Anderson

2007-10-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

Remember Martin Lee Anderson, the young man who died at the hands of the guards (who were later acquitted)?

Get your calendars out. March on Tuesday in Tallahassee. If there were any way I could go!

The Florida State Conference NAACP is mobilizing thousands of people from across the state and nation to support the "Justice for Martin Lee Anderson" march and rally Tuesday to demand justice in the death of Anderson, a black 14-year-old, who was killed while in the custody of the Bay County Sheriff’s Department Boot Camp in January 2006.
The march begins at 11:00 am Tuesday at the Tallahassee Civic Center and will proceed to the Federal Courthouse.

Who's the Idiot?

2007-10-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

Back to My Little Pony, the racial achievement gap:

It appears to be that time once more for the race and IQ debate to rear its foolish head by dint of something said or published by a person of purportedly high intelligence.

We were last here in 1994, with the release of "The Bell Curve," in which Charles Murray, a historian, and Richard Hernstein, a behavioral psychologist, argued that black people, on the whole, are of lower intelligence than whites as a whole.

A firestorm erupted, with loads of dissenters and critics on one side and loads of defenders and believers on the other. Murray swam through the turbulence, laughing all the way to the bank as the book climbed the bestseller lists. . . .

Now comes the chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a scientific research facility in New York, telling a British audience that he sees a dire future for Africans because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really.”

If you are using a measurement tool, and the results look screwy time and time again, might one not question the accuracy of the measurement tool and therefore investigate the process whereby it is created and the methodology used in the measuring and a whole host of other related factors?

Let's not linger, though, there is more to see. Sex, baby! Yeah! Because the good Dr. Watson (most famous perhaps for being one of those who discovered the DNA molecule) also fantasizes that the Black people be getting they groove on:

Hunt-Grubbe also reports that Watson has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, hypothesizing that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos . In 2000 Watson shocked an audience at the University of California, Berkeley , when he advanced his theory about a link between skin color and sex drive. His lecture, complete with slides of bikini-clad women, argued that extracts of melanin — which give skin its color — had been found to boost subjects' sex drive.

Don't take it personally; although Watson may seem racist at first glance, a more thorough examination reveals he is batshit crazy.

Among the screws that are not only loose, but rolling around freely looking for a brain to which to attach in the echoing dark cavern of his haid are his fantasies of creating a Watson World in which all the ladies please his palate:

He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

In this best of all possible worlds (in the immortal words of Leibniz and then Voltaire), there are no--gasp!--gays:

He has been quoted in The Sunday Telegraph as stating: "If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her."

And by the way? Fuck the fat people, too:

On the issue of obesity, Watson has also been quoted as saying: "Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."

UPDATE: From the 10/26/07 NYT:

James D. Watson, the eminent biologist who ignited an uproar last week with remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, retired yesterday as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, and from its board.

Suppressing the Black Vote

2007-10-21T21:19:00.000-07:00

Here is an appeal from ColorofChange.org:

NO on Hans von Spakovsky

Demand the Senate take a stand against voter suppression

Hans von Spakovsky has made a career out of suppressing the vote of minorities.
Now Bush wants von Spakovsky to be confirmed for a seat on the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the agency in charge of enforcing election finance laws. It's not a surprise that most Republicans support his nomination. But while Democrats talk about supporting voting rights, most of them are ready to let him through without a fight.
Please join us below in calling on your senators to oppose von Spakovsky's confirmation and to send a strong statement that voter suppression will not be tolerated and that those who engage in voter suppression have no place in the electoral system.
http://www.colorofchange.org/vonspak/?id=2357-346645

The Meaninglessness of Race

2007-10-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

The justification for making distinctions--at least the distinctions pulled over our eyes in this country-- is economic oppression. (That is my opinion. And not just mine.) But the debate goes on:

Ever since scientists discovered “the secret of life” embedded in our DNA a half century ago, the study of human genes has sparked debate about the nature of race. The question seemed to be settled in the early 1970s when biologist Richard Lewontin compared variations in genes within and among different population groups. His conclusion, that most human genetic variation did not fall along racial lines, was widely accepted. At the molecular level, human beings are more alike than different. Repeat experiments confirmed this finding, and many experts embraced the knowledge that the racial categories that have long divided people and justified racist oppression represented social and political beliefs rather than biological truths.
But the notion that race is real as a biological fact did not die. Even after research teams who identified and sequenced all 20,000-25,000 genes as part of the historic Human Genome Project declared in 2000 that race was not a valid scientific concept, the counterclaim resurfaced.

No Justice for Martin Lee Anderson

2007-10-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

Maybe you remember this:

Martin Lee Anderson, 14, died Jan. 5, hours after arriving at a juvenile boot camp for stealing his grandmother's car and violating probation. A local coroner says sickle cell trait, not an altercation with boot camp guards, killed Anderson. But an eerily silent surveillance video shows Bay County deputies restraining, kicking and punching the boy, who at times appeared limp and unable to comply. The results of a second autopsy remain secret, but at least one coroner involved says the youth did not die of sickle cell, or any other natural causes.

Now those responsible for Martin Lee Anderson's death have been acquitted:

An uneasy sense of dèjá vu swept over Florida last week after an all-white jury acquitted seven juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse charged with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a black teen last year.

First of all, stealing your grandmother's car is joyriding, and when a white kid does it, particularly a white kid from one of those rolling green hill communities, the cops take him home and hand him over to the parents with a warning. So we can all agree that the original offense was an example of disproportionate sentencing. And then, and then, a death sentence.

Today I am wearing black for Martin Lee Anderson. I am wearing black for Martin Lee Anderson, and for Mychal Bell, who remains in custody, and I am wearing black for all those who have been unjustly imprisoned in this country of outrageous injustice.

[thanks to Raven for the link]

UPDATE: More on this at blackamericaweb.com]

Make Segregation Equal?

2007-10-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

I understand it. Neighborhood schools have a lot to recommend them. You can walk to school; there's a sense of community; your children and their friends live close to each other. Desegregation may mean traveling an inconvenient distance to school, and it may mean social isolation for children after school, and it brings a host of other problems. But, still.

Schools with a majority nonwhite student population are going to have less money, because these are schools on the wrong side of the street from the gated communities and gently rolling green hills and high property values. These schools usually will not be staffed by the most experienced administrators and teachers. They may not have all the supplies they need, nor enough books, nor computers. The way schools are funded makes sure of this, in this land of I Got Mine and You Can't Have Any (so short-sighted).

Yes, all schools should teach the same material, be equally rigorous, provide the same supplies, offer the same opportunities. They should.

But even if they did, even if schools truly were separate but equal, that would still be a terrible world in which to live. Wouldn't it mean that we gave up?

The Possibility of Reform

2007-10-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

Would Ashley Jones have received a life sentence if she were white?

The United States wants to reserve the right to lock children up. Forever.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.

Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.

Which is odd for a nation of people who purport to believe in redemption. But the people who are the loudest in calling for retribution and punishment, the people who are least willing to show mercy, the people who decry compassion as weakness, these are the people who say they believe in the Bible, in Jesus, in the New Testament. And the sole theme of the New Testament is redemption and salvation. That's it.

Par-TAY!

2007-10-16T18:39:00.000-07:00

K. the Brilliant alerted me to the ghetto fabulous party phenomenon:

In October of 2006, law students at the University of Texas-Austin held a “Ghetto Fabulous” party, at which partygoers carried bottles of malt liquor and wore Afro wigs, necklaces with large medallions, and name tags with traditionally black and Latino names such as “Tanika” and “Jesus.” Just a couple of months ago, in January of 2007, white students at Tarleton State University in Texas sponsored a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day party, at which partygoers came dressed in “ghetto” gear, flashed gang signs, ate fried chicken and ribs, and drank malt liquor from bottles. One woman even dressed as Aunt Jemina, red handkerchief in her hair and syrup bottle in hand. For those readers who may view such events as limited only to the South, just a few days later, white students at the University of Connecticut School of Law held a “Bullets and Bubbly” party that featured do-rags, gang signs, gold teeth, and malt liquor.

I don't have much to do with college parties, you know. If you want to check'em out, here's a list from Uncommon Misconceptions:

Ghetto Fabulous Party, Cornell University, March ‘04
Ghetto Fabulous Party, Univ. of Texas Law School, September ‘06
Tacos and Tequila Party, University of Illinois, 10/5/06
Halloween in the ’Hood’ Party, Johns Hopkins University, 10/28/06
Gangsta Party, Clemson University, 1/14/07
Martin Luther King Party, Tarleton State College, 1/15/07
Martin Luther King Party, University of Arizona, 1/15/07
Bullets and Bubbly Party, U. Conn. Law School, ~1/20/07
South of the Border Party, University of Santa Clara, 1/29/07
South of the Border Party, University of Delaware, 5/5/07

Although not a new phenomenon, it seems that over the last year "ghetto," "gangsta," "south of the border" and "taco and tequila" parties have become college chic and cool. Parties at more than a dozen colleges and universities received national coverage in the past year, with countless others going unnoticed save for the pictures posted to sundry websites. It is tempting to interpret such events as clichéd racist expressions. They are, after all, contemporary minstrel theaters that allow middle- and upper-class white Americans to cross moral and social boundaries by racial cross-dressing. But such easy explanations keep us from fully appreciating the circumstances on today's college campus that make minstrel parties pleasing and powerful for so many.

If there is a sensibility to which I have an exceedingly strong aversion, it is that of certain middle-to-upper-class whites. This sensibility is characterized by entitlement, by self-satisfaction, by a preening adoration of self that is nauseating. Its fascination with itself is endless, and it finds even in its flaws an unending source of gratification, boasting of its ignorance and charmed by its egotism. It's the sensibility of people who have never grown up. They got stuck, mentally and morally, in toddlerhood. Which explains the aggressive lack of compassion and empathy, and the failure to understand why what they do is reprehensible.

Oh, it all fits. Why did the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee boycott the hearing on the Jena 6? Why did the Republican presidential candidates pull an FTA on Tavis Smiley? Because they refuse to admit there are other people in the world. But I digress.

In many respects, ghetto-fabulous parties are the culmination of conservative politics on college campuses. They reflect the ongoing insecurities of whiteness in the wake of the civil rights movement and the supposed prominence of multiculturalism and political correctness.

I am sick unto death of the term "politically correct." As far as I am concerned, it is a fabrication of small-minded bigots. What the bigots protest is the curtailing of their freedom to be disrespectful without ceasing to everyone they deem inferior, and that includes all women and all non-white people. Why is it so difficult to treat all people with respect? That was a rhetorical question, but I will answer it: it is difficult, nay, it is impossible, to treat respectfully people for whom you have contempt, particularly when the basis of your contempt is that they are not like you. (No matter that we did not none of us choose to have male bodies or female bodies, we did not none of us choose our skin color nor our geography nor our social class, we all just ended up who we are and where we at.)

Indeed, ghetto-fab parties are part of a broader reactionary movement that believes whiteness and the ivory tower are being imperiled by political correctness, radical professors and "minority rights." Pushing against these perceived evils, conservative students have organized political theatrics on campuses, holding "affirmative-action bake sales" and offering "white-only" scholarships. They have in essence created a culture today in which those with power think of themselves as victims and those without become targets for violence.

The plight of the privileged white person is sorry indeed.

"Decrying the ghetto party as 'modern-day minstrelsy' is surely an expression of righteous indignation, but it is only the beginning of the story rather than the end," argues Dr. Jared Sexton, an assistant professor in African American Studies at UC Irvine. "The persistent challenge is to understand why the perverse pleasure of cross-racial caricature and its disavowed currents of mockery, ridicule, envy and hatred are so powerfully attractive to its participants-participants who, as a rule, rely on the dynamics of racial segregation that have produced the ghetto for the very form and substance of the most public and the most intimate aspects of their social lives."

The answer is obvious:

To be sure, White supremacy and its institutional supports no longer enjoy secure futures. . . .

Says Bernestine Singley, ". . . the hearts and minds displayed in these staged acts of racial assault reveal a breathtaking, even heartbreaking, wall of denial, contempt, and cowardice."

Contempt and cowardice sums it up, I think. The same people strutting around at the ghetto fabulous parties? They are the ones who clutch their purses when a Black man walks by, who are afraid to go into Black neighborhoods, who get twitchy if they are not in the majority at all times. They are right to be scared. The world, it is a-changin'.

Shame

2007-10-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Somebody got in trouble!

WASHINGTON October 16, 2007, 3:06 p.m. ET · Democratic lawmakers denounced federal authorities Tuesday for not intervening in the Jena Six case, citing racist noose-hanging incidents far beyond the small Louisiana town where a school attack garnered national attention.
. . . Democratic lawmakers, many of them black, blasted federal authorities for staying out of the local prosecutor's case against the six, particularly that of Mychal Bell, who is currently in jail after a judge decided he violated the terms of his probation for a previous conviction.
"Shame on you," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said to Justice Department officials, directing most of her fury at Donald Washington, the U.S. attorney for Louisiana's western district — and the first black person to hold that position.

"As a parent, I'm on the verge of tears," Jackson Lee said.

"Why didn't you intervene?" she asked repeatedly, raising her voice and jabbing her finger in the air as some in the audience began to applaud.

Committee chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., called for quiet before Washington spoke.

"I was also offended, I too am an African-American," Washington told the panel. "I did intervene, I did engage the district attorney. At the end of the day, there are only certain things that the United States attorney can do."

Following that exchange, Conyers pointed out he had invited the local district attorney, Reed Walters, to testify, but he declined. At that, some in the audience yelled out, "subpoena him!"

Better late than never. I'm looking forward to what happens next. Will Reed Walters be subpoenaed?

And you know there is always one:

The senior Republican on the panel, Lamar Smith of Texas, said, "more than anything what we need is an effort to reduce racial tension... What we do not need is stoking racial resentment."

There's no context here, so it's possible Lamar Smith's remark was not so awful as it appears at first listen. It does sound as if he is making an accusation, and as if he is trying to shame people into backing down, and even minimizing the seriousness of what is happening. "What we do not need is stoking racial resentment." This implies that the racial resentment ("Those angry Black people!") is an everboiling pot just looking for an excuse to blow.

One out of Three

2007-10-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

1. the right to vote
2. civic equality
3. the education of youth according to ability

Look Inward

2007-10-15T09:55:00.000-07:00

Congress is looking at the Jena 6 matter:

The House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on the Jena Six case Tuesday morning, less than a week after a youth at the center of the controversy was locked up again.

Which is all to the good. Not only to prevent these young men from becoming just another set of stats, but--is this too much to hope--to keep the struggle for justice in the forefront of our minds.

Even as I write this, I feel a little disheartened, not the least because in my heart I do accuse the liberals (or progressives, if that is the term you prefer) of shying away from social justice issues having to do with race. Or not shying away, exactly, but refusing to buckle in for the long ride. Oh, they will hitchhike here and there on a cause, especially if it allows them to castigate the conservatives (not that there's anything wrong with that, and I like to have me my fun, too) or if it allows them to congratulate themselves for their open-mindedness, as if they are somehow virtuous for not being as racist as the conservatives are.

dnA at Too Sense puts it bluntly:

Most white people don't care about what they see as "black" problems. Not even liberal white people.

Which was followed up by commenter Francis L. Holland:

For some reason, white are willing to believe that they are partly at fault for the systematic war on Iraq, but they are not willing to believe that they are partly at fault for the systematic war on Black people here at home. We pose the triple threat threat that they, once having embraced fairness here in the United States - they may have to integrate with us; they may have to share power with us; and they may have to share economic resources with us.

All whites benefit from the systematically racist workings of the way we live in America. I just saw A Lesson Before Dying. A little boy is looking at a globe and asks his teacher if there are white people in Yugoslavia. The teacher says no. The boy asks, "Who does all the work?" Where does the wealth of this country come from? Who benefits. Race is all about economics.

When he was young, W.E.B. Du Bois (so generously and charitably) believed that racism came from ignorance, but later in life believed that "material relationships masked themselves to the guise of race relationships."

We are responsible for what we know. Good intentions are not enough. Refraining from behaving in an overtly racist and discriminatory manner does not absolve one from responsibility. Good God, there is a war on Black people in this country. But it is a home war, it's been going on for so long, it's soooooooooooooo boring. Can we talk about Iraq instead? But oh God, the Black people. . .why should I feel guilty?

Guilt serves a beautiful purpose, you know. It is an indication that all is not well in the soul. You should feel guilty because you benefit from the sufferings of others. You will stop feeling guilty when you take some kind of action--when you refuse to countenance racist jokes, when you educate yourself about what this country has done and is still doing to Black people, when you examine every corner of your soul and scrub it clean, when you stop saying--when you stop thinking--things like, "What do they want, anyway?" or "So I got on this bus, and it was full of Black guys" or "I just never know what to say to them."

What used to be called "the Negro problem" is never going to go away. Pick a side. (If you say nothing, if you do nothing, you have picked your side.) (Although the problem, as how I look at it, is a white problem. It is a white problem with looking inward, with having integrity, with facing the truth, with accepting guilt and responsibility and making reparation and changing how we live and think and behave in this country. What is happening is evil, and those who stand by and let it happen are as bad as the perpetrators.)

UPDATE: I keep thinking about this. I don't think I said what I really wanted to say, which is that American whites who do not wish to support the current oppressive racist structure of how we live must first figure out how to recognize that they are part of the oppression, then identify what their role is, and then somehow extricate themselves as much as possible, at least untangle their thoughts from the dominating racism, and only then is it possible to begin any kind of positive action. Applying rigorous honesty the whole time, and being willing to come face to face with some ugly and then keep going.

Business as Usual

2007-10-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

Mychal Bell has been sentenced and returned to custody on charges stemming from offenses that occurred prior to the Justin Barker matter:

NEW ORLEANS -- A black teenager whose prosecution in the beating of a white classmate drew thousands to Louisiana for a civil rights demonstration is back in jail, but a prosecutor said Friday the sentence has nothing to do with the racially charged case.

Mychal Bell, 17, was unexpectedly sent back to prison on Thursday after going to juvenile court in central Louisiana's LaSalle Parish for what he expected to be a routine hearing, Carol Powell Lexing, one of his attorneys said.
Instead, state District Judge J.P. Mauffrey Jr. decided Bell had violated probation and sentenced him to 18 months in jail on two counts of simple battery and two counts of criminal destruction of property, Lexing said.

Some of you know that I used to be a probation officer. Long ago. It was a period of short duration, but I was there long enough to understand and become sickened by the racist workings of the criminal injustice system--and that is in California, where whites settle themselves comfortably into a wide-eyed "Who, us? We're not racists!" attitude and even get a little huffy when you try to explain that even if a white person intends no racism, there may be a little stain lurking, and that the white person certainly is privileged in this land of ours. I served in both the adult and juvenile courts.

With that background knowledge, I can tell you a couple of things about what is happening with Mychal Bell, even not knowing him or the particulars of his case:

1. "simple battery" could be as insignificant as a shoving match
2. apply the same reasoning to "criminal destruction of property"
3. 18 months seems an excessive sentence
4. what is absolutely criminal is that no one seems to have explained what is going on to his parents:

“He’s locked up again,” Marcus Jones said of his 17-year-old son. “No bail has been set or nothing. He’s a young man who’s been thrown in jail again and again, and he just has to take it.”

There's no bail once a defendant has been sentenced; bail is only an alternative to remaining in custody before the trial and final disposition of a criminal offense.

It's not clear from this whether Bell is in jail or whether he is housed at a juvenile detention center. For his sake, I hope the latter.

I don't know the nature of the original offense that resulted in Mychal Bell receiving probation. I don't know the nature of the probation violations. There are some people who are simply always in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he may be one of those. It's almost impossible to obtain the facts, as juvenile court records are not available to the public.

I do very much suspect that the D.A. and judge are highly motivated to place Mychal Bell in custody, and this may have been the perfect opportunity. The protesters have all gone home. Even bloggers who once called for justice for the Jena 6 are now re-thinking their earlier stance and repenting of their fervor. (Not me. I adhere to the "Enough is enough" doctrine. IT DOES NOT MATTER WHETHER THESE YOUNG MEN WERE ANGELS OR NOT. WHAT MATTERS IS THE DISPROPORTIONATE SENTENCING BETWEEN WHITE AND BLACK DEFENDANTS IN THIS COUNTRY.)

Education Requires Integration

2007-10-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

Or at least it should.

School integration is good for everybody:

Wells’s [Amy Stuart Wells, of Columbia University's Teachers College --ed.] brief primarily focuses on the long-term benefits of school integration. She cites social science data that shows integrated schools have a strong, positive effect on students’ racial attitudes and ability to interact with others in multiracial settings. The data show that minority students receive long-term benefits from integrated schools: they tend to move into more racially integrated settings in their lives and careers; they experience greater social mobility; they have higher occupational aspirations; and they develop intergroup skills that benefit both the graduates and their employers.

At the same time, research shows that white students who attend racially integrated schools have fewer racial stereotypes and prejudices, even controlling for other relevant social factors. Not only do integrated schools help the life chances of minority students, they also lessen the discrimination they face in society. Furthermore, Wells presents research showing that schools are often the only place that children are exposed to the multicultural experiences that lead to these benefits.

But there is so much opposition:

MILTON, Mass. -- Last spring, town officials in this affluent Boston suburb changed the elementary-school assignments for 38 streets -- and sparked outrage. Some white families had been reassigned to Tucker, a mostly black school which has historically had Milton's lowest test scores.
Among those reassigned is Kevin Keating, a white parent who is talking to lawyers about going to court to reverse the plan. I "just don't feel good putting [my son] in an inferior school," he says. His ammunition: the U.S. Supreme Court's June ruling that consideration of race in school assignments is unconstitutional.

Some work for integration in an attempt to reduce the racial achievement gap in test scores:

Although the push to integrate public schools is often associated with the civil-rights movement, these days many school administrators want to integrate schools for a more practical reason: to raise test scores. Studies show black and other minority students tend to perform better academically when they learn alongside white classmates. Districts face the threat of losing government funds if school test scores fail to meet a certain threshold.

Even though closing the achievement gap is ostensibly a significant goal of the No ~~Test Publisher~~ Child Left Behind legislation, really, are we surprised that to learn that

the Bush administration and various organizations have filed briefs opposing the integration policies.

The real issue is that school segregation is a basic human rights violation:

[According to a UN Human Rights Commission report] the state of segregation in U.S. schools may violate an international human rights treaty to which the United States is a signatory.

Some News, and Various Updates

2007-10-11T10:28:00.000-07:00

Gallaudet Attack:

An investigation is continuing to determine whether a recent attack on a black student at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., was a hate crime.

The Sept. 29 incident began in the dorms of the secondary school on the university’s campus. According to D.C. police, seven students -- six whites and one black -- held down a black student and wrote “KKK” and drew swastikas on his body with a marker.

Genarlow Wilson: I've been looking for news. I'll keep looking.
Jena 6: More here. And here.
Nooses: Nooses everywhere you look, apparently. There was a protest at Columbia about the noose on the Black professor's office door. Also, "a white Queens woman was arrested recently for throwing a noose around a tree and threatening to hang her black neighbor’s children from it."
Pleajhia Mervin: The security guard calls the victim a liar, then denies he is racist by saying, "I don't see color, I see people." [from Electronic Village] I have many thoughts, but will summarize: 1. Thank God for the witness who got the video. 2. Everyone sees color.

Not Way Down South, So Very Far Away

2007-10-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

Yet another noose incident:

A hangman's noose was left dangling on the door of a black professor's office at Columbia University Teachers College on Tuesday, triggering a hate-crime investigation and drawing parallels to the "Jena Six" controversy.

[via Ask This Black Woman]

Be Scared

2007-10-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

Also under the category of "I'm not racist, but--" is the Fear of Black Men:

Like many other black men, James says unspoken rules limit how they interact in predominantly white workplaces. In some cases, they must dress more formally than their co-workers, speak softly, or generally comport themselves in unaggressive ways to counteract stereotypes that paint black men as unintelligent, violent, and dangerous. These biases are based on long-held beliefs about black masculinity and sexuality that grew out of this country's history of slavery and segregation.

Who Shows Up

2007-10-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

Remember Pleajhia Mervin, the high school student and birthday cake offender? She is facing criminal charges, while the security guard who broke her wrist is on paid leave. (And Pleajhia has been expelled from school. Probably because she is Black, I'm just going out on a limb here, because of that one federal study: "No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. . . Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found.")

The Reverend is on the scene. As well someone needs to be. Do not criticize the Reverend to me unless you are willing to quit your job and be Johnny on the Spot whenever an injustice of this nature occurs.

[Followed the link at BlackPerspective.net More here at Electronic Village about the 9/30 protest.]

Somebody's Ugly Is Showing

2007-10-09T10:48:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of K. the Brilliant, who sent this story along, I'd like to dedicate this next song to the staffers at Glamour, who issued a Glamour Don't decree banning certain ~~ethnic~~ "political" hairstyles:

Early this summer, the junior-level editor accepted an invitation to speak to a group of women about corporate fashion at New York City law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

During the presentation the editor said that “political” hairstyles such as Afros and dreadlocks are a “Glamour don’t.” Several of the African American women in the audience took offense. Since then, the story—which was first reported in the August issue of American Lawyer—has been circulated in the form of a chain e-mail, a Glamour spokesperson says. The incident even led to a segment on NPR.

Editor-in-chief Cindi Lieve is trying to do damage control. She would do damage control, but all you people who are accusing Glamour of racism (Racism! The idea! All women are beautiful here at Glamour! Well, if they are glamorous, of course, and if they are over 5'10", weigh less than 110, are of a preternaturally youthful mien, and yet have fairly big boobs for their frail yet hyperathletic frames--that's just the start, though, because then they have to read our ads, buy the products, and use them religiously. Oh, and also? They need to follow our fashion advice or they will look like frumpy matrons or 7-11 hos or dirty hippies or radical militants, and nothing is less ~~hot~~ beautiful, and sure, even women who are Black can be beautiful, but just try to look as little Black as possible. . .) are getting in her way.

Because they at Glamour are NOT RACIST! And they will be the first to tell you how NOT RACIST they are!

“These are deep, really personal issues for a lot of women, so it doesn't surprise me at all that this discussion has had legs,” Leive wrote in an e-mail to Folio:. “Ironically, they're the sorts of issues we cover all the time in Glamour, so that's what we've decided to do here: hold a forum to get well-known women—and our own readers—talking about issues of beauty, identity and race, and then run the results in the magazine.”

Oh, Glamour ladies. You are transparent, and your insides are ugly.

We Are All Accountable for Our Actions

2007-10-08T12:29:00.000-07:00

Even Jena 6 Reed Walters.

From Colorofchang.org, one of the groups that helped people mobilize for the Jena 6 rally, a way we can protest Reed Walters' abuse of power:

In a clear case of prosecutorial misconduct, Reed Walters has refused to protect the rights of Jena's Black population and has turned the police and courts into instruments of intimidation and oppression. It's time for everyone outraged by his actions to demand that the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board investigate him immediately.
Anyone can file a complaint against any attorney in Louisiana simply by sending a letter to the Disciplinary Board. It's easy as following the steps below:
Download the letter (you can preview it below), here.
Open it and replace text in red with your information (and change as you wish).
Print the letter, sign it, and place in a stamped envelope.
Mail it to the Office of Disciplinary Council at the address listed on the letter.
Email us at walterscomplaint@colorofchange.org so we can keep track of how many complaints have been sent.
Preview of Microsoft Word Document. You can download the actual document, here. Your name
Your address
City, State, Zip
Phone Number
Today's Date
Office of Disciplinary Counsel
4000 S. Sherwood Forest Blvd., Suite 607
Baton Rouge, LA, 70816
(225) 293-3900
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing to request an investigation into the conduct of LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters over the last year with regards to several incidents, culminating with the prosecution of Mychal Bell, Robert Bailey, Bryant Purvis, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, and an unidentified minor. I am concerned that DA Walters has selectively and aggressively used his prosecutorial discretion in several cases over the last year and I believe he is unable to be an effective and impartial advocate for justice in LaSalle Parish.
In a statement published in a New York Times op-ed on September 26, 2007 that now appears on the Louisiana District Attorney Association website, Walters describes his role as District Attorney as one where he has to "...match the facts [of a case] to any applicable laws and seek justice for those who have been harmed. " What Walters ignores in this definition is the tremendous latitude prosecutors have to raise, lower, or dismiss charges as they see fit, under the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion. It has become clear that when Reed Walters is making decisions, white perpetrators in Jena receive a completely different kind of discretion than black ones.
When it came to prosecuting three white students for hanging nooses in the so called "white tree" at Jena High School after black students sat under it, Walters said (in the same New York Times op-ed) this act "broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none." But Louisiana Revised Statute 14:107.2 creates a hate crime for any institutional vandalism or criminal trespass motivated by race. His discretion, not Louisiana law, is what led to a lack of charges in this case.
Similar discretion was applied after an incident on December 1, 2006. A black teenager, Robert Bailey, was attacked by a group of whites, beaten to the ground, and apparently hit with a beer bottle. Bailey suffered a gash to his head, and Walters could have prosecuted the group of whites with felony charges. Instead, Walters charged one man with a misdemeanor, but that person served no prison time. The others walked.
A very different and more dangerous form of discretion was applied three days later, when an assault on Justin Barker, a white student, occurred. Robert Bailey and five other black teens were arrested and charged by the police with aggravated second-degree battery, a very harsh charge under the circumstances. But Walters went even further and used his discretion on December 7th to increase the charges to attempted murder, later arguing that the students' tennis shoes were dangerous weapons.
A week later, Walters announced that he would try Mychal Bell for attempted murder as an adult, another example of his discretion being aggressively used to bring harsh punishments only to certain young people. When Walters reduced the charges against Bell, he should also have taken the case back to juvenile court. His failure to do so is another example of an inappropriate application of discretion. The result was a conviction that could have ended with a 22-year prison sentence. The 3rd Circuit Court has already ruled that Walters' decision was improper, and nullified the decision.
Walters' misconduct extends beyond these instances of uneven application of his discretion. After black students staged a sit-in under the contested tree to protest the light punishment for the noose hangers, Walters came to Jena High School and told the student body that if they did not settle down, "[he could] make [their] lives disappear with a stroke of [his] pen. " This statement was confirmed by Walters during Mychal Bell's court proceedings, and clearly connects to the actions he took after Justin Barker was assaulted.
Walters' threats against the Jena 6 defendants were not limited to the school assembly. In December 13, 2006, he published a statement in The Jena Times reading in part "I will not tolerate this type of behavior. To those who act in this manner, I tell you that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and with the harshest crimes that the facts justify. When you are convicted, I will seek the maximum penalty allowed by law. I will see to it that you never again menace the students at any school in this parish." There are clear problems with his public characterization, prior to any trials, of the young men who had been arrested for the assault on Justin Barker as criminals who had been menacing the school. The wording of the statement and an introduction associating his tirade with the "recent two incidents at Jena High School" created the impression that those accused of involvement in the fight were also suspected of setting the November 30th, school fire. The Louisiana Rules of Professional Conduct 3.6(a) clearly state that: "A lawyer who is participating or has participated in the investigation or litigation of a matter shall not make an extrajudicial statement that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know will be disseminated by means of public communication and will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding in the matter." His statements to The Jena Times clearly violate this code.
It seems clear from my knowledge of this case that there are ample grounds to conduct a timely and thorough investigation into Reed Walters' conduct as District Attorney of LaSalle Parish. If you choose not to investigate DA Walters, I expect to receive a written explanation of why you deem that an investigation is not warranted. Otherwise, I look forward to hearing the results.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Sincerely,

Your signature

Let's clean up the courts. Then we can tackle the environment. (Apparently today is Blog Action Day, and the theme is the environment, which to me takes a far backseat to injustice.)

Nobody Here But Us Racists

2007-10-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Jena backlash continues:

From the Kansas City Star via Negrophile:

All of this is to say that blaming “outsiders” for protests of local grievances is a well-established tradition in the history of American social protest. Thus, it is not surprising that officials in Jena, La., want to blame an outsider, Tom Bean[I think this is a mistake? I think the name is Alan Bean], founder of the Friends of Justice, for stirring up trouble regarding the six black youths charged in a schoolyard assault on a white student.

From the Independent Weekly in Lafayette, LA:

The article also introduces Jena residents who say the situation is being blown out of proportion by the “international and national media, national civil rights activists and Internet bloggers.” Most believe Jena’s “a safe, nice place to raise a family.”

(A nice, safe place to raise a white family, you mean.)

This isn't new. It had commenced a-brewin' in Jena before the big rally, because Jena was already getting a little too much attention for its segregating ways (article by Etan Thomas and Dave Zirin, posted by Davey D. at Davey D.'s Hip Hop Corner:

Outsiders are always what people in the South have called those who challenge racism. But the story of Jena is not an outsider/insider story. It's a story
about the worst tradition of what is known as Southern Justice.

At Democracy Now, there is an interview with Caseptla Bailey and Tina Jones, the mothers of Robert Bailey and Bryant Purvis. The interview took place the day after the rally. The question about the accusation that outsiders were causing all the commotion came up:

AMY GOODMAN: And, Caseptla, what do you say to those who say this is a bunch of outsiders coming in, everything was fine in Jena before they started marching on our town?
CASEPTLA BAILEY: Well, I’d like to say that everything wasn’t fine in Jena. That’s why the outsiders are here, and that’s why everything has gone so tremendously within the last few months. So I’d like to applaud those people that have come here from the outside, to come in and to support us and to help us and assist us in this matter. So I’d like to say hats off to those persons.

These Things Happened Not Long Ago

2007-10-07T21:32:00.000-07:00

This was noted at FOJ. It is a slideshow of photographs of lynchings, with a narrative. Everyone should watch this. This is the history that explains why the hanging of nooses can never be interpreted as a "prank."

File Under: I Shake My Head

2007-10-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Those college kids today. Crazy. All them pranks they be pulling:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A north Louisiana university is investigating two of its students after a video surfaced on a student's personal Web page depicting several white youths pretending to re-enact a racial beating.

The brief, grainy video, posted Tuesday on YouTube.com, was related to the racially charged atmosphere in Jena, a central Louisiana town where a group of black youths were initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white student.

On the video, one of the students can be heard shouting racial epithets.

(Courtesy of FOJ.)

Educate, Don't Incarcerate

2007-10-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

. . . as one of the Jena signs so eloquently put it.

More than three times as many black people live in prison cells as in college dorms, the government said in a report to be released Thursday. . .

Black students are more likely to attend segregated schools with high concentrations of poverty, less qualified teachers, lower expectations and a less demanding curriculum [says Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University's Teachers College]. "And they are perceived by society as terrible schools, so it is hard to get accepted into college," Wells said. "Even if you are a high-achieving kid who beats the odds, you are less likely to have access to the kinds of courses that colleges are looking for." Students who don't graduate high school are much more likely to go to prison, said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Nearly 40 percent of inmates lack a high school diploma or the equivalent, according to the census data. "The criminal economy is one of the only alternatives in some of these places," Orfield said. "You basically have the criminalization of a whole community, particularly in some inner cities." Blacks made up 41 percent of the nation's 2 million prison and jail inmates in 2006. Non-Hispanic whites made up 37 percent and Hispanics made up 19 percent.

P.S. Some good writing on Jena at The Education of a Bookshop Clerk.

You Got a Right to Say It

2007-10-02T19:03:00.000-07:00

. . . and I got a right to be disgusted by it:

Let's get this out of the way: what happened to the Jena 6 was heinous, non-blacks should be reexamining their hearts, and heads should be rolling Nifong-style. I'm as happy as the next Negro to stick it to the man (I'm on record as saying I'd have thrown a rock, just one and into a bush—more of a tossing if you will—after the Rodney King verdict had I been an Angeleno), but this wasn't exactly Selma and these brothers weren't exactly the Scottsboro Boys . Folks should go to jail for stomping a random (and lone) person into the ER, white or not, nooses or not. Not for attempted murder, of course not, but aggravated battery sounds about right, especially when you factor in that the stompee was not, as far as we know, one of the noose hangers. And when we have it on good authority that Jena High also boasts "black bleachers" where honkies fear not tread. Racism, and its effects on the ground, is rarely simple.

No one is saying it is simple. But people are saying, "Enough is enough." That, at least, is a simple message. And what this writer fails to address is the context.

The most objectionable portion of this piece, however, is the self-righteous sputtering:

I made no effort to get to Jena. Instead, I spent that time reading worthy analyses of the proveable, addressable, effects of racism in the criminal justice system. These bespectacled economists and sociologists are downright radical. They already knew that racism filled our prisons; now they're proving how it affects America at large. They're doing more good on Capitol Hill making these "tough on crime" politicians change gears than all the buses in Jena.

To each is given his calling. To each is given his gifts. Some are called to lift their voices in protest at injustice; others are called to research. Others are called simply to labor, or to do what is in front of them at any given time. We none of us got to pick, but when we hear the voice, we go and do its bidding, or we suffer the fate of Jonah.

Who among us has the wisdom to say which gift is most valuable? Not me, not you, and certainly not Debra Dickerson.

Call It What It Is

2007-10-02T08:28:00.001-07:00

K. sent me this, from Mithras at Fables of the Reconstruction:

Picture the scene: 16-year-old girl attending her friend's birthday party in the school cafeteria. Someone bumps her and she drops her cake. Security guard orders her to clean it up, but when she does, he is not satisfied. When she refuses to do any more, he twists her arm behind her back, breaking her wrist, and slams her head onto a table while saying, "Hold still nappy head."

You know without my telling you the race of the victim and the race of the security guard. Will that white security guard be charged with attempted murder, I wonder?

Sounds Like Blame

2007-10-02T06:09:00.000-07:00

Here, from the NYT via Negrophile, is what seems to be an example of using a series of unrelated events to come to some kind of conclusion with lots of opinions thrown in:

In New York City, the tabloids published sensational details of the bias suit brought by a black former executive for the Knicks, Anucha Browne Sanders, who claims that she was frequently called a “bitch” and a “ho” by the Knicks coach and president, Isiah Thomas. In a video deposition, Thomas said that while it is always wrong for a white man to verbally abuse a black woman in such terms, it was “not as much ... I’m sorry to say” for a black man to do so.
•
Across the nation, religious African-Americans were shocked that the evangelical minister Juanita Bynum, an enormously popular source of inspiration for churchgoing black women, said she was brutally beaten in a parking lot by her estranged husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks.
•
O. J. Simpson, the malevolent central player in an iconic moment in the nation’s recent black-white (as well as male-female) relations, reappeared on the scene, charged with attempted burglary, kidnapping and felonious assault in Las Vegas, in what he claimed was merely an attempt to recover stolen memorabilia.
These events all point to something that has been swept under the rug for too long in black America: the crisis in relations between men and women of all classes and, as a result, the catastrophic state of black family life, especially among the poor.

Go looking for evidence of troubled relationships among whites, or Asians, or Latinos. You'll find them. (And by the way? O.J. and Isiah Thomas are anything but poor.) So the writer uses these big Easy Reader Series news stories as the foundation for conclusions that should require some very specific supporting data.

I doubt if many supporters of the Jena 6 "view events there, and the racial horror of our prisons, as solely the result of white racism." Nothing is ever one thing. But how can anyone deny the white racism is the framework underneath it all? It almost sounds as if the writer is saying that Black men and women are incapable of having sound relationships, and unwilling and unable to raise children with care and thoughtfulness--and I know that is not true. In fact, it almost sounds as if the writer has subscribed to the hoax of race, and saying that Black people are fundamentally different (not in a good way), and that cannot be true. (For most of all time, there was really no such thing as race, until it served people who wanted to take from others to name the others as being of a distinct and different race and therefore undeserving of being treated as human. But that is another, much bigger topic, and I do digress.)

He goes on to propose that "even after removing racial bias in our judicial and prison system — as we should and must do — disproportionate numbers of young black men will continue to be incarcerated." I wonder.

Because even though the writer complains that the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are taking a simple, one-dimensional view of the matter by protesting racism, it seems to me that most of the factors the writer blames for the mess are the results of systemic racism and if not racism, America's War on Poor People:

The circumstances that far too many African-Americans face — the lack of paternal support and discipline; the requirement that single mothers work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money where their mouths are on family values; the recourse by male youths to gangs as parental substitutes; the ghetto-fabulous culture of the streets; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they want; the hypersegregation of blacks into impoverished inner-city neighborhoods — all interact perversely with the prison system that simply makes hardened criminals of nonviolent drug offenders and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable and unmarriageable, closing the vicious circle.

The problem with this article is that instead of offering the facts to support conclusions or a real analysis of any of the hot-button issues it brings up and then dismisses (Black on Black violence; domestic abuse; poverty among Blacks; gangs as a family substitution; school segregation; the failure of school to prepare Black students for the workplace, etc.), it lapses into offering these unfounded conclusions, conclusions that provide justification for a certain amount of self-righteous denial about what is really happening in our country. Always so much more comfortable to blame the people in trouble than it is to help.

Get Out the Pickaxes, We Got Work to Do

2007-10-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

This article in Education Week spells out ways Jena High School administrators might have been able to stop the train that brought tens of thousands of protesters in:

On Aug. 31, 2006, school leaders in Jena, La., arrived to find two nooses hanging from an oak tree on the campus of Jena High School—and boarded a racially charged roller coaster that has yet to stop moving.

The events since that incident—including the beating of a white student and resulting criminal charges against six black schoolmates that have drawn international attention—offer tough lessons for principals and other administrators who must grapple with racial tensions in their schools.

For one, principals and teachers can head off such incidents by knowing the sources of conflict and acting to defuse them, experts on race relations say.

But when prevention fails, for whatever reason, school leaders should treat such matters seriously, condemn any offensive act, and mete out fair punishment. Communication with students, parents, and the community is crucial to keep the situation from worsening, and administrators may need to draw on outside mediators for help.

At A.'s and B.'s school, the administrators have signed on with this conflict resolution program. It involves "I statements" ("I feel sad when you act like such a freakin jerk") and apologies and is, as far as I am concerned, a buncha baloney, an opinion I frequently share with A. and B., along with my opinion that words mean nothing, and you can tell how people really feel from their actions. Someone can apologize sweetly a million times, but if he keeps tripping you/taking your lunch/failing to call when he says he's gonna (that last obviously belongs to me), you know how he really feels.

. . . Paul C. Gorski, an assistant professor of education at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., who has been a consultant for schools grappling with racial tensions, said he is wary of a conflict-resolution approach if it doesn’t enable people to talk about racism in “deep and complex ways.”
He said that getting to the root of racial friction means “bringing people together in a dialogue so that people’s experiences can be shared—so that people can develop a deeper understanding of how racism is systemic.”

I share Mr. Gorski's wariness. I am all for genuine resolution of conflict, and I am all for the genuine expression of regret (and even remorse) for the negative effects of one's actions and for feeling empathy and all that. But I have a violent objection to coercing empty apologies from unrepentant thuglets.

And I am even more violently opposed to the implicit concept (in the program at A.'s and B.'s school, anyway) that it always takes two to tango and that both sides must always apologize. Sometimes, there is a bully, and the bully needs to be taken in hand. Sometimes, as in the case of Jena, there are people making threats (i.e., the noose-hangers) against the innocent (all Black students at JHS), and that needs to be stopped immediately and definitely.

As Mr. Gorski said, everyone needs to get to this foundation of understanding that "racism is systemic."

Racism is real and not merely perceived and to call attention to it does not mean, as Clarence Thomas seems to be going about saying, a matter of Black people painting themselves as victims:

The vehemence of his contention that he was made the victim of false allegations to keep him from joining the court, and the clarity of his statements about the propensity for black Americans to paint themselves, and agree to be painted, as victims, is certain to raise the issue of race in a presidential election contest in which for the first time one of the front-runners, Senator Obama, is an African-American.

(Thanks to Negrophile.)

Oh, No, He Dint!

2007-10-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

He did! He did!

From K. the Brilliant at Gall and Gumption, this message:

Fish. Barrel.

These are them fish:

On the September 27 edition of MSNBC Live with Dan Abrams, while discussing Fox News host Bill O'Reilly 's recent controversial comments about his visit to Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem, host Dan Abrams asked his guest John DePetro , a Rhode Island radio talk-show host: "John, look, you've been on the show and defended Bill O'Reilly before. Don't you wish that he would just be quiet and put this behind him?" After claiming that O'Reilly was "taken out of context," DePetro asserted: "It was a discussion on race and we're talking about Harlem. And by and large -- I lived in New York for years -- white people don't go to Harlem." He continued: "If Dan Abrams and John DePetro, Bill O'Reilly, some white guys are sitting around a table, and Dan Abrams said, 'Yeah, I was up in Harlem last night.' We would think you were either, a) looking for drugs, or, b) looking for a prostitute." Abrams responded by asserting: "That is so idiotic, John," to which DePetro replied: "It is not idiotic," later adding: "It's a primarily black restaurant. It is still a primarily black area."

Oh, people. The whole exchange is gold. Please go read it. It is a spectacle of stupidity.

NT Because Now Is the Time to Get It Done

2007-10-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

. . . in the immortal words of Mos Def.

One would assume that a kindergarten teacher is equipped to manage the tantrum of a 6-year-old. But let's say that the teacher is woefully inexperienced, and may have to call for back-up. The back-up I am thinking of would be a stern-faced principal, not Johnny Law:

AVON PARK, Fla. -- Police arrested a 6-year-old Florida girl and even handcuffed her when she acted out in class. Police officers said Desre'e Watson, a kindergarten student at Avon Elementary School in Highlands County, had a violent run-in with a teacher on Thursday.*

And you see? Even the language in this lede is inflammatory and biased. Here, let me rewrite it from another angle:

When an upset child acted out, her teacher panicked. Instead of calming the child, the teacher provoked her until she was out of control, then called the police to arrest the child. Showing a lack of judgment to beat the band, an officer handcuffed the girl and booked her on felony charges.

A 6-year-old is not capable of having "a violent run-in" with an adult. It is not possible. A teacher who is incapable of handling the tantrum of a 6-year-old has no business in the classroom. As far as the principal and the police go--they should all be abjectly ashamed of themselves. For their stupidity, if nothing else.

Again, do I need to note the child's race? It is staggering that denial of racism in this country continues against the backdrop of injustices that range from housing and job discrimination ("The Discrimination Research Center (DRC) has found that temporary employment agencies in California show significant preference for white job applicants over African American applicants") to disproportionate sentencing and incarceration ("Although blacks account for only 12 percent of the U.S. population, 44 percent of all prisoners in the United States are black"--and it is not, as that moron Heather MacDonald asserts, because Blacks are more violent--"Contrary to popular perception, violent crime is not responsible for the quadrupling of the incarcerated population in the United States since 1980. In fact, violent crime rates have been relatively constant or declining over the past two decades."), to lower-quality healthcare (resulting in lower life expectancy: "Comprising 12 percent of the U.S. population as of 2000, African Americans' life expectancy is six years shorter than whites at birth, two years shorter at age 65").

This, the structure of racism that is invisible to so many (I was going to say people who are not affected by it, but we are all affected by it, and if you are not injured by the injustice, you should accept that you benefit from it) so built into the foundation of every aspect of American life, is the crisis we are facing today.

* Thanks to Yobachi at Blackperspective.net for writing about this.

Ignorance? Hate? Copycats?

2007-09-30T10:48:00.000-07:00

From the Chicago Trib:

A Warren Township High School student was charged with disorderly conduct for making "racially charged" statements to two female students, police said. The student drove into a campus parking lot with a noose hanging from his rearview mirror and a Confederate flag displayed in his vehicle, officials said.

In North Carolina last week, four nooses were found dangling from trees and a flagpole at a North Carolina high school, a local newspaper reported. A Louisiana man was charged with inciting a riot after two nooses were found hanging from the back of his pickup truck. Nooses were left this summer in the bag of a black U.S. Coast Guard Academy cadet and in the office of a white female officer conducting race-relations training.

On their own, the incidents might not have garnered much attention. But against the backdrop of the Jena 6 case in Louisiana, where nooses found hanging from a tree set off a chain of events that polarized the town, local officials and experts say similar occurrences -- even if they might be unrelated -- can be especially troubling.

"I think what all of these incidents reflect -- from Jena to the reaction to Jena -- is the worsening of race relations in America," said Mark Potok, a hate-group expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. "What one would hope is that an event like Jena starts a real dialogue that takes us forward and not backward."

Potok said in recent days the leader of one neo-Nazi group has been fanning the flames on his Web site, encouraging followers to hang nooses in their communities. The site even has a link to news reports of the Gurnee case.

A Reason to Love Ice Cube

2007-09-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

Ice Cube not only appeared in Jena and at the post-protest event in Alexandria, and brought his children, but paid for buses and hotel rooms for marchers from Los Angeles.

Prosecutorial Indiscretion

2007-09-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

Stopped by Friends of Justice today to see if there is any news, and there I find a response from the Southern Poverty Law Center to Reed Walters' NYT op-ed piece (which was mentioned here earlier):

Walters states that the United States attorney "found no federal law against what was done." In actuality, the federal prosecutor told CNN that "the FBI believed that [the case had] the elements of a hate crime ." But because of the boys' ages and backgrounds, he declined to bring charges that could have put them away for 10 years. This is prosecutorial discretion in action.

Walters also had discretion to prosecute the noose-hangers in state court. He claims that the noose incident "broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none." But, it just ain't so.

Louisiana Revised Statute 14:107.2 creates a hate crime for any institutional vandalism or criminal trespass motivated by race. Walters was creative enough to turn a schoolyard assault into an attempted murder case; he surely could have figured out how to make nooses into hate crimes.

But — and this is a crucial point — Walters and the Justice Department were right not to prosecute the noose-hangers. Prison terms for them would not have served Jena as well as a thoughtful, measured response that addressed the deep community concerns triggered by the nooses.

Unfortunately, that never happened. Instead, Walters and the school system tried to stifle debate. Black parents were ignored at school board meetings. After black students staged a sit-in under the contested tree, Walters came to the school and, according to numerous witnesses, ominously told the student body that if they did not settle down, "I can end your life with the stroke of my pen."

Reed Walters knows prosecutorial discretion.

Things did settle down somewhat, until an arsonist burned down much of Jena High on November 30, 2006. What happened the next day perfectly illustrates the racial disparity in Walters' decision-making.

On December 1, a black student, Robert Bailey, was attacked by a group of whites, beaten to the ground, and apparently hit with a beer bottle. He suffered a gash to his head.

Walters could have prosecuted the group of whites with felony charges that might have put them away for years, just as he is now prosecuting the Jena Six. Instead, Walters charged one white with a misdemeanor; that person served no prison time. The others walked.

FOJ also discusses a column by journalist Ruben Navarette, in which Navarette calls the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson "perennial grievance merchants" (now, really, was that necessary? My response to that is well, perhaps if there were no grievances, they would occupy themselves with other diversions, maybe take up needlepoint or knitting or backgammon--not that I am the great defender of the Reverends, but who can say that their involvement has been an unmitigated evil) and echoes Reed Walters in claiming victim rights for Justin Barker while professing bewilderment that Mychal Bell could be considered a victim.

Hold up there. If Navarette can say that Mychal Bell has not been victimized in this matter, Navarette has never, to his great good fortune, been in jail. To be imprisoned at all is a terrible experience, more terrible really than you can imagine. There is no comfort. Everything that you hold onto for your identity (except what you carry in your mind) is taken away from you. Prisoners have no rights. None. They have no freedom and no privacy. If they are not actually under constant threat, they certainly feel as if they are. Mychal Bell is only 17, and yet was housed with adult offenders for 9 months. His attorneys worked for his release, and, failing that, for moving him to a juvenile facility, but neither happened. Juvenile facilities are no picnic, either, but at least he would have been with inmates his own age and would have continued attending school. Keeping Mychal Bell in jail with adult offenders was wrong--it was an injustice, and anyone who has ever been in jail (in whatever capacity--I used to spend a lot of time in jail as a part of my work) understands how Mychal Bell must have suffered from this experience.

P.S. Navarette also gets his pants all in a twist because he, like Richard Thompson Ford, is also handicapped with a literal mind and is therefore incapable of interpreting symbols (here, baby, have a metaphor):

Students at Morehouse and Spellman – traditionally black colleges in Atlanta – held a rally and declared an affinity with the defendants. Some held up signs saying: “I am the Jena 6.”
Well, not if you've never been part of a mob-style beating you're not. Those college students obviously made good decisions to get where they are. The Jena 6 made a bad decision, and that's why they are in trouble with the law.

His breathtaking capacity for misunderstanding the symbolic language of the protesters (maybe he would understand a literal sign that read "Black defendants are treating unjustly in the courts and because I am a young Black person, I, too, could be treated as unjustly as Mychal Bell and the others of the Jena 6 if I were arrested for a criminal offense, and certainly I would probably receive sentencing more harsh than would a young white person arrested for a similar offense" but come on, that's an awful lot to fit onto a poster board) notwithstanding, Navarette also fails to understand that context is crucial. Which is why the law provides for mitigating and aggravating circumstances.

But really, I'm making one of the same mistakes Navarette does, by sifting through this level of detail and by acceding to his assumption that the Jena 6 are all guilty, because this has not yet been proven in a court of law. (And also? Is everyone aware that Mychal Bell's court-appointed defense attorney, Blane Williams, did not call any witnesses nor present evidence to defend his client?) If it is, then the Jena 6 defendants should receive sentences proportionate to the crime of which they have been convicted, sentences that are the same as white defendants would receive in a similar case.

P.P.S. I'm with the commenter at Too Sense, who fails to understand "the bug up everyone's ass over Jackson." It just seems like spin to me. One side can be as flamboyant and self-indulgent in their hyperbole and rhetoric as they wanna be, yet then accuse the other. Pot, kettle, pot, kettle, pot, kettle. And glass houses. Sure, it would probably be better if we all spoke reasonably in measured tones and used only the most objective, decorous, inoffensive language. But emotions have a way of heating up the words. So what. Maybe Jackson does run the risk of crying wolf too often? But that doesn't mean that there are no wolves.

O Brother Where Art Thou?

2007-09-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

There is a Jena 6 backlash, and I'm not talking about the nooses nor the Confederate flag-waving nor the rabid yapping from the white supremacist minority (all dogs are big on a leash or from behind a fence-- the white supremacists sure did not show themselves in Jena on September 20, but once everybody went on home, they scrabbled viciously out of their kennels).

Now that we're all back home and thinking "What next?" and watching to see what happens for Mychal Bell and the others, there are, unfortunately, too many opportunities to look across the table and say, "Where were you?" Where were the white liberal bloggers, for example. (This question posed here and here and here and here and more places, I am sure.) Where was Clinton? Where was Obama?

I cannot help but note that Clinton brought it for a feel-good moment/camera op with the Little Rock 9, yet was--like Obama--conspicuously absent in re the Jena 6.

Injustice is not a racial issue. Racism is not a Black issue. Maybe we all need to do a little homework. Please take out your books and turn to page 179:

Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. . . .

But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what may be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way?

By deciding they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men, and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.

And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers.

P.S. Since I am venting my spleen, may I just take a moment and state for the record that Michelle Malkin is a moron? And so, also for the record, is Heather MacDonald, upon whom Malkin lovingly slobbers.

Hog Heaven Deli: Get Your Baloney Here

2007-09-29T14:39:00.002-07:00

Reed Walters, the prosecutor in the Jena 6 matter, will accept the ruling of the appeals court which overturned Mychal Bell's conviction as an adult. The appeals court appropriately returned Mychal Bell to the jurisdiction of juvenile court, as he was a juvenile at the time of the alleged offense.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Wednesday that the prosecutor in one of the so-called "Jena 6" cases has decided not to challenge an appellate ruling that sends the case to juvenile court.
LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters had earlier said he would appeal the state appeals court's decision that 17-year-old Mychal Bell's second-degree battery conviction be set aside. The court ruled that Bell could not be tried as an adult.

Blanco said she had spoken with Walters and asked him to reconsider pushing to keep the case in the adult courts system. She said Walters contacted her Wednesday to say he had decided not to appeal the ruling.
"I want to thank him for this decision he has made," Blanco said.

Well, finally. Although this does not guarantee that Mychal Bell will get a fair trial as juvenile. It may not be possible for him to get a fair trial anywhere in Louisiana. Or maybe the whole of the South. Or maybe in the United States. More about that to follow.

It is interesting that Walters changed his mind, given his statement in the New York Times today:

The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. . . .
. . . There was serious bodily harm inflicted with a dangerous weapon — the definition of aggravated second-degree battery. Mr. Bell’s conviction on that charge as an adult has been overturned, but I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record.

People can say anything. Here Walters gets to lay out his own platter of baloney, and it sounds almost reasonable (except for the obviously biased tone) until you remember that the "dangerous weapon" was a pair of tennis shoes; the victim was well enough to attend a social function at the school that evening; and if Walters is so concerned about enforcing the laws that exist, why wasn't the white student who used a weapon to threaten several black teen-agers prosecuted?

A white student brandished a shotgun in a confrontation with three black students. (He claims self-defense; they claim he was unprovoked.) The black students then wrestled the gun away from him and were later charged with theft, while the white student was not charged with a crime.

Richard Thompson Ford, who criticizes the protest and its purpose and focus in Slate, only lightly brushes past the real foundation of the protest on his way to make little digs at Reverend Sharpton:

So, the demonstrators have plenty to be upset about: racial segregation; racially disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incarceration rates; and a pervasive societal racism that is passed from generation to generation. But because none of these sadly common racial injustices have a discrete cause, none are likely to respond to the type of quick and specific reform that a demonstration can demand. As a result, the march on Jena was a bit unfocused.

(By the way? What condescension: "plenty to be upset about." No one I spoke with or marched next to or rode with seemed "upset." They did, however, seem to believe strongly that what was happening in Jena was not justice.) From this description, I can only assume that Ford was not there. The protest at which I was present was calm and highly focused and purposeful. (The crowd was not, as reported by the Washington Post, "raucous." Jesus. How do reporters get away with it.)

Ford implies that the progression of the march from the courthouse to the high school proves that the crowd was milling about and didn't know what to do:

It's telling that the demonstrators moved between the courthouse where Bell was tried for an offense no one denies he committed and the site of the "white tree" that, with all-too-fitting symbolism, has since been cut down.

"Telling" how, exactly? What the progression actually tells is that people purposefully and with determination made a point of visiting the place where it all began, where the white tree had stood and had been mowed down because that place has symbolic value and meaning:

Oh, wait! The tree! It started with that tree on the school grounds whose shade zone was deemed a “Whites Only” area. Yeah! The tree! We nearly forgot about it.

Well...you can forget about it. Because rather than let the tree stand as an example of the potential flowering of race relations in the “New South”—America, really...

The school superintendent had the damn thing cut down.

And then of course, the speakers were in front of the courthouse, so we all had to gather there. There was no milling. No "telling" unfocused wandering.

Unlike Ford's thoughts in the article, which hop about in such a disconnected fashion that at first I accused myself of being too tired to read it; after a second read, I reminded myself that, you know, not to blow my own horn or anything, but I am sort of an expert on reading comprehension, I mean, studying it has been part of how I've earned my living for lo, this many years, and this gave me the confidence to say: O, my, what a bunch of baloney.

Let me count the cold cuts:
1. "The Wrong Poster Children: Why the Jena 6 Protests Have Gone Awry": Um. Have they really? It does seem that the protests have gotten significant results, including but not limited to forcing state and federal legislators to wake up and smell the racism. Kind of lazy writing, too, in that I think Ford should describe how he thinks the protests have gone awry, instead of just assuming everyone will take his word for it. And to take the long view, at the very least, the protests show that people will show up in great numbers to protest what they perceive as injustice. That is a great thing, particularly as we near elections.
2. "When more than 10,000 people converged on the small town of Jena, La. . . .": I am heartily sick unto death of the underreporting of the numbers because it seems to be an attempt to erode the credibility and the show of strength of the demonstrators. Most of the sources I have seen report there were at least 20,000 people:
USA Today: "tens of thousands"
L.A. Times: "Organizers said the crowd swelled to 50,000; state police said it was too spread out to count. "
Washington Post: "Police declined to estimate the size of the throng at the rally, other than to say it numbered in the "tens of thousands."
2theAdvocate: "By the State Police’s estimate, 15,000-20,000 demonstrators poured into this town"

As I said before, the organizers estimated 50-60,000. Even if you control for optimism and enthusiasm, certainly 30,000 would be a conservative estimate. Brother, please. You could check your facts. (Unless the "more than 10,000" was a sneaky way to be letter-of-the-law truthful and cut the legs off the protest at the same time?)

3. "Rev. Al Sharpton called their march the beginning of the 21^st-century civil rights movement. He may be right. And that's just what's worrisome.": Worrisome? Worrisome? I'll give you worrisome. Worrisome is that Black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty, and even more if the victim was white than if the defendant was not Black. Worrisome is that "the rate of increase in black offenders imprisoned for drug offenses was more than four times greater than the rate of increase for white offenders." Worrisome is that Black defendants are locked up 7.66 times more than whites. And that's just the overstuffed backpack of criminal injustice worries. In the education disparity backpack, we find that Black students are suspended far more frequently than white students ("No other ethnic group is disciplined at such a high rate, the federal data show. . . Yet black students are no more likely to misbehave than other students from the same social and economic environments, research studies have found") even though they do not misbehave more frequently. No wonder the drop out rate is almost twice as high for Black students as it is for white students. Or we could take on healthcare, as Blacks receive lower quality care and are more likely to die from heart disease and strokes.

4. "The marchers gathered to protest criminal charges brought against six African-American high-school students, the "Jena 6." But the racial problems facing this town—and many others—are more complex than simple prejudice, and finding solutions will necessarily require more nuance than a mass protest can offer. The mismatch between the complex and layered racial tensions in Jena and the one-issue rallying cry of "Free the Jena 6" suggest that the tactics of last century's civil rights movement may be an anachronism for today's racial conflicts." Here, you see, Ford thinks he is the only person in the world to understand the complexities of racism in America today. Huh. The other rallying cry, the one that Ford didn't notice, was just as common as "Free Mychal Bell", and that cry was "Enough is enough." It was on T shirts and posters, and was the real underlying motivation for the rally.

5. Ford says, "The injustice here is not that they are being prosecuted for their crime. . . " That's a given. And everyone I spoke with at Jena would agree. The injustice is the disparity between whether and how Black and white defendants are prosecuted.

6. "When you think about it, the logic that underlies the demand to free the Jena 6 comes down to this: These six young men were justified in kicking their lone victim senseless because other people who shared his race committed offenses against other black students." He accuses the demonstrators of launching a "racial vendetta." Not once did I hear such a thing from anyone. No one! Again, every single person I talked with believed that the young men should receive punishment if convicted (in a fair trial). (And that the charge should accurately reflect the actual offense, not no trumped-up tennis shoe murder weapon crap charge.)

(There's more baloney, but counting the cold slimy slices is a task that quickly loses its charm.)

Can it be that Ford is so simple-minded (or that his mind is of such a literal turn, is perhaps a more charitable way to frame it) that he does not see that, in the immortal but out of context words of the Spinners, sparks turn into flames? The fire has got to start somewhere, and any kind of change always, always, always starts with a symbol.

There was injustice in the Jena 6 cases, particularly in the case of Mychal Bell, injustice that continues, as he remains in jail even though his conviction has been overturned. But the chain of events that led up to Mychal Bell's prosecution gave this particular instance of injustice even more meaning. What happened in Jena is symbolic of the injustice endured by Black defendants, by Black students, by Black job applicants or hospital patients or apartment-hunters, and the thing to do is to lift that symbol, write about it, talk about it, analyze it, figure it out, press all of the meaning out of it so we understand what is happening so we can use the symbols to light our way to the truth, and the truth will set us free.

"This is much bigger than Jena," said M.K. Asante Jr., an English professor at Morgan State University. . . .

That the young men may not have been pillars of the community doesn't matter. That they may not be perfect poster children for civil rights doesn't matter. What matters is that it appears that their civil rights may have been violated. What matters is that there was injustice, and, in the immortal words of Dr. King, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

More Jena Pictures

2007-09-29T14:39:00.001-07:00

R. from Tennessee sent me some pictures. Here is the march to and from the high school.

See all those people? And that was not the only street that was filled; all the streets were that crowded, and so was the park in the center of town.

On the way to the high school, we saw the mounted police behind a building.

Everyone wanted to see the place where the tree used to be.

This morning K. the Brilliant sent me this story from the Chicago Trib, which is also posted at Friends of Justice. I'm worried about the Jena 6 and their families.

UPDATE 9/26/07: Governor Kathleen Blanco "ordered state police to investigate and protect the families of the Jena Six after a neo-Nazi website posted their names, addresses and phone numbers . . . . The FBI is investigating the posting."

The One to Watch

2007-09-29T14:38:00.001-07:00

This is a video of the march I found on YouTube, posted by TDOGGINYA. Watch it! This is the closest you can get to having been there.

Spread the word, everyone. America needs to talk about what's happening. On the way to Jena and on the way home, I told everyone I met what I was doing. You wouldn't believe how many people--black and white (the security screener at the Jackson airport, my seatmates on the various planes, the cashier at Starbucks, and more)-- did not know about the Jena 6 or the rally.

Less than Half of One Percent, Or Jena: Part 2

2007-09-29T14:37:00.001-07:00

We got off the bus and started walking. Even though no one knew exactly where to go, we all went in the same direction. People were moving from the side streets and the highway outside of Jena into the center of town.
Even though we passed many empty parking lots, we could not park there. Brand-new no parking signs were posted everywhere (some misspelled, heh), and lots were protected by makeshift fences of orange construction netting. Yards were festooned with yellow and black police tape. The fear of the white residents was palpable.

The highmindedness of the crowd overwhelmed that ugliness, though. The sheer determination and sense of purpose and justice--oh! I wish you could feel it.

These young men were selling T shirts:

There were stations set up here and there along the route, with people speaking into microphones ("Atlanta in the house! Detroit, Michigan represents!" "Stand up for Jena!" "No justice, no peace!"), and some played music. Almost everyone wore black; the ones who did not were wearing T shirts of their own design that showed support for the Jena 6.

Of the thousands and thousands of people, my estimate is that less than half of one percent were white. Most of the white folk there were journalists, or part of the Red Cross team that was distributing water (it was very, very hot, and there was very little shade).

Here is a picture of my new friend R. from Tennessee and me:That is R.'s sign, but I carried it part of the way--she was toting a hefty backpack.

We flowed with the crowd through the town, chanting occasionally ("Free Mychal Bell!" "No justice, no peace!"), past the courthouse, to the high school, and back around to the courthouse to hear the speakers. We were there for hours and hours, and yet time slowed or sped up, or just seemed nonexistent, as if there were no such thing as time, there was just all the excitement and the fervor and the goodness and what was happening at that time.

The Black Panthers had a strong presence. Mothers brought up their sons for pictures. I saw a Black Panther stoop for a picture with a boy who looked to be about 4. He patted the boy and said, "Go out, young warrior." Beautiful.

There were families and groups of students and elderly people and revolutionaries and very formally dressed, very dignified solid citizens, and dreadlocked rastas. I did not see any extreme saggy pants. Everyone, even the revolutionaries, had a respectable appearance. Every time we stopped, we got into a conversation with people about where they were from and how they'd gotten there and with whom they'd come. There was this sense of unity, of everyone holding hands for the cause.

At the closing ceremony at the convention center, we did all hold hands while Reverend Al Sharpton gave a benediction.

There is so much more to say, but it's almost as if I don't know what to write any more. If you have any questions, feel free to comment or send an email. Next to the day my daughters were born, this was the most spiritual, most beautiful day of my life. I feel like my heart is so full that everything inessential has been moved out to make room for this. This is truly what really matters.

More to see:
pre-protest pictures from NPR
slideshow of the rally from msnbc
Chicago Trib video
Jesse Jackson speaking
Al Sharpton speaking
slideshow of photos from 9/20/07 in Jena
photo essay and story from Michael David Murphy

Jena: Part 1

2007-09-29T14:35:00.000-07:00

I arrived at Jackson about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday night, got my car, and found the hotel with no trouble (thank you, GPS). After showering and calling The Favorite Child, I reviewed all my little papers I printed out from various websites and realized that I needed to be in Alexandria at 5 a.m., 2 hours earlier than I had thought. This meant no sleep. I lay in the bed for an hour, then got up, got dressed, and got on the road at 1 a.m.

I was scared. I can't remember if I've told you this before, but I am greatly handicapped in terms of finding my way about in the world (only geographically speaking). I can't find my way out of a freaking paper bag. If you give me perfect directions, I will follow them and arrive on time. If the directions are not perfect, woe betide.

Here I was, in a foreign country (Mississippi is a foreign country if you are, as I am, a native Californian), driving in the dark to a location I knew not of. Good God. In fear I programmed the GPS and with trepidation I followed its guidance, but God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and two hours in, I happened upon a rest stop and thought I would rest. Four buses were parked out front. The bathroom was full of beautiful sisters, all wearing black. I asked if they were going to Jena. They were. I said I was, too, and one woman asked why. "You've got to stand up for what's right," I said. "You know that's right," said one woman, and I believe an "Amen" followed.

Seeing those buses and encountering all those women in the bathroom gave me this sense of anticipation and happiness, which got me to the Coliseum in Alexandria, where the troops were gathering.

I met so many people. Everyone was so friendly. They asked where I came from. Ali, a muscular young man from Miami, said, "You from California? You came all that way? That's deep." He promised that if I couldn't get a ride to Jena, they would make room on the Miami bus.

When the bikers rolled in, it was so exciting.
And then Al Sharpton arrived. I got a picture of the madness.
The people flowed to the Reverend as if they were the tide. They showed their love, and the Reverend was so gracious. Everyone wanted to touch him, to shake his hand, or give him a hug, or have a picture taken with him. I heard later that his limo went empty to Jena, and the Reverend rode on one of the buses. God bless him, I say. He is a man of the people.

Right around that time, I met R. from Tennessee. R. is super glamorous and very animated, and you can tell she is very comfortable being in charge. To my good fortune, she asked with whom I'd come to Louisiana. When I told her I was by myself, she said she would stick with me. Tell me, who has better luck than I do? For R. got us a ride on a bus while many others waited in the dirt parking lot, walking here and there, not sure what to do. It was chaotic. The atmosphere was peaceful and happy and purposeful, but the logistics were kind of crazy. When you think of all those people coming together and how everything just worked out, you do believe in miracles.

Most of the buses were big charter buses. The bus we got on was a little battered. Tasseled fringe was strung across the windshield. The driver's name was Red, which everyone pronounced as if it had two syllables ("Rai-ed"). Inside, there were couches instead of bus seats, and upon the couches were sprawled many bodies. The woman across from me was wearing shorts and her scarred, thin, muscular legs made me think of a race horse that had seen better days. The large woman next to me, in a turquoise outfit that stood out against all the black T shirts, had sleep apnea. I spoke to her, and she didn't respond, and I thought, "Dang, she is all bent out of shape we on this bus." Later I realized she was just asleep. Every once in a while she'd wake up and say something like, "Duchess, give me a banana," or "What about the blood song?" and they would all sing a song about the blood of Jesus. For we had gotten on the Bus of the Saved Souls from New Orleans. They had driven through the night to get to Alexandria, and were apparently the sinners Jesus loved so much. They loved Him right back. We heard a song I had not heard since my Southern Baptist days, "I've Been Redeemed" (which K. the Brilliant observed is kind of like the gospel version of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"). One woman sang a version of "Amazing Grace" with so much vibrato my ears were ringing and the whole bus shook. The Lost Souls were so generous, offering us food from their stash of bananas, cold cereal, candy bars, and sandwiches. So kind.

It took a long time to get to Jena. There were all the buses, and we kept stopping. Red the Driver let everyone off the bus ("I know y'all need to smoke your cigarettes"), and the recovering addicts trooped off the bus, all the ones I'd seen, with names like Lil Bit and the aforementioned Duchess, and all the ones I hadn't, who had been tucked way back in the dark recesses. The demographics on this bus were unusual, as there were a third as many white people as black people. However, they were all very thin, in baggy clothes, and in desperate need of nicotine.

I took pictures. It was about 5:30 by this time.
To see the buses stretched out as far as you could see brought tears to the eyes, a sentiment shared by all of us who were outside. I met the president of the New Orleans chapter of the NAACP and I met some gentlemen from Los Angeles, and we all marveled at the buses.

Traffic was stopped for a long time. When cars could proceed (very slowly and much hampered by the crowds from the buses milling in the road), you could see all the black people in cars taking pictures and videotaping the buses and the crowds, throwing signs and smiling. The white people mostly looked straight ahead, gripping the steering wheel as if it were a life preserver. On the side of the road, a group of young white people cheered and held up a sign: "Not All White People Are Crazy."

UPDATE: Go to Che Sing the Cool for more pictures. There is a great one that gives you an idea of what it was like to be in the crowd.

The Day After

2007-09-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

This morning I was starting to write this post in my head, and it went something like this:

The protest in support of the Jena 6 will likely come to be known as the most important civil rights event of three decades. To be a part of the peaceful gathering of so many people* as a show of strength and support against such injustice was a powerful, intensely moving experience. (To be welcomed--as I was by many--was grace.)

And then I was going to go on and on. And there is so much to go on about -- the excitement and anticipation, the people gathering in the darkness at 4 o'clock in the morning at the Coliseum in Alexandria, the masses of cars and buses, the sense of marshalling the forces, the reigning sensibilities of the day, which were not anger and outrage, as might be expected; instead, everyone unified in this implacable, quiet, powerful strength and a solid sense of resting in truth and justice against persecution** -- and once I get home, I will write a post that simply describes the day from o-dark thirty to the celebration at the convention center, led by radio host Michael Baisden. (I saw the Reverend Al Sharpton arrive in his limo, only to be surrounded immediately by reporters and photographers and loving supporters who wanted to shake his hand or give him a hug or have a picture taken with him. I was only a few feet away. I got a picture of people taking pictures of him. Heh. I've got other pictures, too, of the lines of buses on the highway, a sight that was so moving, of the crowds, of my new friend R. from Tennessee, of these two Big Brothas selling T shirts. All of which I will post when I get home. I was also only a few feet away from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was flanked by bodyguards and police officers and moved through the crowd at Jena as if he were royalty, while a few lone voices cried out that Jesse Jackson was "the tool of the Democratic party" and that he betrayed his people.)

But I went to have coffee this morning in downtown Alexandria, and a woman came in and told the barista about a story reported this morning on CNN, that a couple of teen-agers were driving around downtown last night -- near the convention center, through where the crowds were gathering -- with nooses dangling from the tailgate of their truck. This woman (who, by the way, was wearing a bright forest green T shirt with bright orange sweatpants and looked so fabulous her appearance defies description) was the one who made the call to a friend of hers who is a sheriff, and the sheriffs apparently handled the matter.

Me: I can't believe that. They coulda been killed.
Beautiful Woman (expressively): Mmmm-hmmm. You got that right.
Me: And they woulda deserved it.
Beautiful Woman (expressively): Mmmm-hmmm.
Me: They're just stupid. There should a stupid law, and
they shoulda been arrested.
Beautiful Woman: Oh yeah, I'll be the first one to vote in
a stupid law. And I know a bunch of folks who'll get arrested.

As someone told me yesterday, some folks is so foolish, you can't even contemplate their foolishness. You just got to keep moving and do your own thing. And that pretty much summed up the feelings of everyone who talked to me about their feelings about what was happening, that this mess in Jena is foolishness, a foolishness indicative of a sickness, because racism is a sickness, and in a way, you only feel sorry for people who are sick like that, but when they hurt you, and especially when they hurt your children, you've got to step up and make them stop.

* The media are underreporting the numbers. I saw articles with headlines like "Hundreds Overwhelm Jena." Tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. I am not experienced in estimating crowds, but all of the streets were full of people. The organizers were estimating 50,000 to 60,000, and there may well have been more. The city of Alexandria, where many of us stayed at least one night, got a sudden, unexpected, and--I am sure--much-needed influx of cash. No wonder the mayor of Alexandria stood on the platform with Michael Baisden to welcome the crowd, express his support of the cause, saying, "Alexandria is not Jena." (That sounds so cynical. Forgive me. He seemed like a good guy. Talked about how reading W. E. B. Dubois in college opened his eyes.)

**It was beautiful. I wish my description could give you a sense of the overwhelming tone of the day. It was the feeling of justice and rightness. Imagine all of your better impulses and everything about you that is good and beautiful uniting and going to war against evil. It was like that, but multiplied thousands of times in this vast crowd. Like all of what is good in human nature all in one place at one time.

UPDATE: More about the noose incident at Blackperspective.net.

Failure to Appear

2007-09-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

Noted by D. Yobachi Boswell at Blackperspective.net:

The black teen at the center of a furor over legal racism remained behind bars - though charges against him were thrown out Friday - because the judge and prosecutor didn't come to a bail hearing yesterday, his lawyer said.

"We showed up. There was nobody there," said Bob Noel, lawyer for 17-year-old Mychal Bell of Jena, La. "No DA, no judge."

A woman who answered the phone at District Attorney Reed Walters' office said he had no bail procedure on his calendar.

The Jena Countdown

2007-09-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

4 more days until I leave for Jena. This is all I can think about.

What happened in Jena, as big as it is, is even bigger than what it is. What happened represents all that must change in this country, what we none of us can get away from, what forms our lives and our thoughts and our ways of being, whether we are Black or white or Latino or Hispanic or Asian, this founding concept of justice for all against a reality of white status and privilege so deeply embedded that most white people will not, cannot afford to admit that it is there and that the accident of birth confers freedom from having to ever deal with the complexities of interactions tainted by perceptions of race.

Recently I read "The White Anti-Racist Is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to White Anti-Racists" by Kil Ja Kim. She makes points that need to be heard, in particular that whites who wish to engage in the struggle cannot expect--although it seems they do--to lead the charge, but

. . . must be committed to either picking up arms for other people (and only firing when the people tell them so), dying for other people, or just getting out of the way. In short, they must be willing to do what the people most affected and marginalized by a situation tell them to do.

All of us are so very self-centered. It is the human condition. But salvation is not to be found in looking at ourselves, and especially not in looking at other people look at us, which is probably even more tempting.

Without constant vigilance to keep our monstrous egos in check, we are always demanding center stage and demanding to be heard. Without close supervision, of course the thoughts come running back to Me and All of Me and the Greatness of Me and How I Am Affected and How Good I Am and Look at Me, I Am a Good Person Doing a Good Thing. In this place, how can those who truly are affected not feel rage when faced with the effrontery of a white person even daring to say that he or she has been affected in any way by the plague of racism? Even worse, white people want to go to the Black people around whom they feel safe, and complain. Or confess. When you are heavily burdened and another complains of carrying a feather, you are justified in having some feelings about it.

I can imagine the questions:
Have you ever seen someone's face close up when you spoke because of your race?
Have you ever been denied a job, a home, hell, even a ride because of your race?
Have you ever been followed in a store because the color of your skin makes the employees assume you are a thief?
Has anyone ever made assumptions about you and your manner of living and your education level and your family because of your race?

The only proper thing to do, in the immortal words of my friend K., is shut up and listen. Shut up and listen. Shut up and listen.

Then, when it seems right, the only proper thing to say is, "How can I help?"

What to Do on Thursday, September 20

2007-09-29T14:29:00.000-07:00

. . . if you can't make it to Jena.

Wear *black.
Join the virtual march.
Check to see if there is a local march in support of the Jena 6.
Tell everyone what is going on. There are still people who don't know.

"The battle didn't start with the Jena 6, it won't end with the Jena 6."

*Just a little anecdote in re my own laminosity (lameness). I bought a Jena 6 T shirt on ebay. First of all, it was white with black print. All right, I thought, I'll just wear it on the plane. But it had a really high crew neck that was uncomfortable and also? Not flattering. So I got out the scissors to do a little trimming on the neckline but one slip of the blade rent the garment nearly in two, and now I have a big white rag emblazoned with "Free the Jena 6."

Black People to Be Free

2007-09-29T14:28:00.001-07:00

. . . in the immortal words of Mos Def.

I like to stop by Che Sing the Cool for the sounds. Eyez posted a clip with Mos Def and Cornel West on that stupid show. I love Mos Def, you know, so I watched that. But keep scrolling down to the video about the Jena 6.

Probably everyone in the whole world knows this story by now. I'd read a bit here and there, and found all I'd read horrifying. It's worse than I knew.

If you are also, like me, someone who lives under a rock and knows nothing of current events but find yourself horrified and would like to help, you can sign an online petition. You can also donate to the defense fund. (Super easy, you can even use Paypal.) Some of the parents have mortgaged their houses to raise money for attorney fees.

More information here, there, and everywhere:
Blackperspective.net
elle, phd
Free the Jena 6
Jena 6 Petition. (In case you didn't do it yet.)
While Seated
Why we should donate. (In case you didn't do it yet.)

UPDATE: Several of you have sent me emails telling me you've taken action. Thank you. Fight the good fight.