(theGrio) What happens when the police are the criminals?
The city of Chicago settled with the family of LaQuan McDonald for $5 million, in connection with the October 20, 2014, fatal shooting of the 17-year-old by a police officer. Johnson was shot 16 times, including nine times in the back, and a total of six police officers have been named in connection with the cover up.
Despite news of this settlement, LaQuan’s family will never be made whole, because nothing can replace the loss of one’s child. And we still need to hear more about the police deleting 86 minutes of a surveillance video of the incident from a nearby Burger King. The feds are investigating the killing, as they should, but the investigation, trial and conviction, if any, will not resolve this fundamental question: Why are the police allowed to harbor criminals in their midst?
Showing posts with label black men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black men. Show all posts
June 6, 2015
Baltimore’s deadliest month should be as big of a story as Freddie Gray
(theGrio) The city of Baltimore has reached a tragic milestone, as May became its deadliest month in over four decades. Last month, Baltimore experienced 43 homicides, and the city has not seen these numbers since December 1971, when 44 were killed. This news should receive as much attention as the police killing of Freddie Gray, correct? If not, then why not?
The news comes as former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, also former mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007, announced his bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy. In a perfect example of bad timing, O’Malley has come under fire by community activists for installing “zero tolerance” policing and “broken windows” policies as mayor, as well as a data-tracking management tool called CityStat, all of which facilitated a sharp rise in arrests of black people during his tenure.
The news comes as former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, also former mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007, announced his bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy. In a perfect example of bad timing, O’Malley has come under fire by community activists for installing “zero tolerance” policing and “broken windows” policies as mayor, as well as a data-tracking management tool called CityStat, all of which facilitated a sharp rise in arrests of black people during his tenure.
Condemning police violence doesn’t mean we don’t care about other violence
(theGrio) We pay lots of attention when police kill unarmed black people — and we should — but do we care as much when black people kill each other?
We do, and it is ok to care about both at the same time.
In a damning report on the Cleveland Police Department, the U.S. Department of Justice takes that city’s police force to task for its excessive, unnecessary and unreasonable use of deadly force. The cops in Cleveland, according to the DOJ, shoot at people who pose no threat, brutalize unarmed people and misuse stun guns. Meanwhile, the CPD has agreed to accept federal oversight and limits on how and when their officers are able to use force.
We do, and it is ok to care about both at the same time.
In a damning report on the Cleveland Police Department, the U.S. Department of Justice takes that city’s police force to task for its excessive, unnecessary and unreasonable use of deadly force. The cops in Cleveland, according to the DOJ, shoot at people who pose no threat, brutalize unarmed people and misuse stun guns. Meanwhile, the CPD has agreed to accept federal oversight and limits on how and when their officers are able to use force.
April 26, 2015
America’s 1.5 million missing black men is nothing short of genocide
(theGrio) Where have all the brothers gone?
The numbers are staggering.
According to a report in The New York Times, black women between the ages of 25 and 54 outnumberblack men by 1.5 million, based on an analysis of data from the 2010 U.S. Census. There were 7.046 black men of that age group not incarcerated, to 8.503 black women.
To put it another way, for every 100 black women, there are 83 black men. This is not the case in white America, where for every 100 women, there are 99 men, almost complete parity.
What that means, effectively, is that black men have disappeared. This reality lends credence to the idea that black men are an endangered species — not just symbolically or rhetorically, but based on the hard numbers.
The numbers are staggering.
According to a report in The New York Times, black women between the ages of 25 and 54 outnumberblack men by 1.5 million, based on an analysis of data from the 2010 U.S. Census. There were 7.046 black men of that age group not incarcerated, to 8.503 black women.
To put it another way, for every 100 black women, there are 83 black men. This is not the case in white America, where for every 100 women, there are 99 men, almost complete parity.
What that means, effectively, is that black men have disappeared. This reality lends credence to the idea that black men are an endangered species — not just symbolically or rhetorically, but based on the hard numbers.
December 2, 2014
Ferguson’s lesson to our black sons: Your lives don’t matter
A St. Louis County, Missouri grand jury has decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown. Honestly, I cannot say I am the least bit surprised by the decision, because I did not expect things to unfold in any other way. I wanted to be pleasantly surprised, but past experience convinced me otherwise. And it is unfortunate to have to think that way.
May 7, 2014
On the Need to Validate Young Black Men
In recent weeks there have been a number of news stories
about young black men who were accepted to numerous elite colleges, including
any and all of the blue chip, Ivy League schools of their choice. All of these
positive news stories have provided a welcome respite from the usual fare, the
portrayals of black youth as dangerous thugs, uneducated, unproductive, and a
criminal element.
February 21, 2011
Cops Are Missing the Bad Guys While Profiling the Black Guys
The history of African Americans is one of great accomplishments amidst the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. That legacy follows black people, and particularly black men, to this day. And it is enough to make you red-hot burning mad. Although some are ready to usher in a new post-racial era of colorblindness, it is clear that their efforts are grossly premature.
In America, race is a proxy for violence. Black men are regarded as a criminal element, and racial profiling is a practice that goes far beyond the justice system. It is culturally ingrained and normalized. In the days of old, when black people were not allowed to roam about unattended or without permission, slave patrols policed the plantations and hunted down fugitives.
Similarly, today, police sweep through communities of color, searching for criminals. Any black man will do. And cops are searching for drugs, not because black or Latino people use the most drugs, but because of preference, of policy. Drug use among white youth is greater than among youth of color, but you will never see the police descend upon the nation's college campuses, round up those who "fit the description" and force them to endure a demeaning arrest. After all, society views them as the victims. Society has already decided who should be designated as its criminals, even if the "suspects" are as innocuous and upstanding as Henry Louis Gates -- a Harvard professor who was arrested for standing on his front porch and attempting to enter his own home. But status is not what counts; it's all about race.
Twelve Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today is a new book which tells the first-person accounts of black men who, like Professor Gates, have been there. These twelve men were victims of racial profiling, at the wrong place at the wrong time -- which for a black man could mean anywhere. Edited by Gregory S. Parks and Matthew W. Hughey, Twelve Angry Men contains a powerful introduction by Harvard law professor Lani Guinier.
A diverse group of people shares their encounters with the police, including a New York Times reporter who was detained while on assignment; Joe Morgan, a baseball legend who was racially profiled at LAX; Joshua T. Wiley, a hip hop artist who is constantly harassed by police, and Paul Butler, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who was stopped by the cops for living in a nice neighborhood. Meanwhile, Byron Bain, a Harvard Law student, was told by his arresting officer that he must attend the school on a "ball scholarship." Bain compiled a tragically comical "Bill of Rights for Black Men," which includes as its first and second amendments, "Congress can make no law altering the established fact that a black man is a n****r," and "The right of any white person to apprehend a n****r will not be infringed." Newly arrived, foreign-born black men with British accents are not immune from profiling and arrest. Even lawmakers are not exempt, as Congressman Danny Davis recounts his experience of racial profiling by the Chicago police while driving home from his weekly radio show.
Throughout the book, which is factual yet reads like a novel, these twelve men share the humiliation of being told that you are not allowed in a certain neighborhood, and the terror that comes with having a gun pointed to your head. Told where they can and cannot go and forced to produce their identification, they compare their experiences to antebellum slaves, black South Africans under apartheid, and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. One man, who was stopped at least once a month and as many as three times, had to leave home early enough in order to account for the possibility of being stopped. Perhaps one of the more appalling cases was of a boy in Prince George's County, Maryland, who was accused of shoplifting by a police officer moonlighting as a department store security guard. The guard made the youth take off his shirt, go home and return with his sales receipt to prove that he purchased it. The young man was awarded $850,000 in damages by a federal jury.
Although much of Twelve Angry Men deals with the anecdotal and the personal, the book also delves into the statistical, including a report on racial profiling as practiced by the New York Police Department. According to the report, which was released by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), race, not crime, drives police stops and frisks. This is what blacks and Latinos have been saying for years. And no matter what the neighborhood -- low crime or high crime, black, Latino, white or mixed, the results are always the same.
For example, 80 percent of the stops made by the NYPD between 2005 and 2008 were of African Americans, who are only 25 percent of the city's population. Whites, who make up 44 percent of the city's population, were stopped only 10 percent of the time. Over the past six years, nearly half of all stops were made on the basis of a vague category called "furtive movements," while only 15 percent cited "fits relevant description." In over half of the stops, the officers noted "high crime area" as an "additional circumstance," even in low crime areas.
"CCR has been litigating against the NYPD's racial profiling and suspicionless stops-and-frisks since 1999. For its part, during all this time, the police have claimed that they stop people based upon reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, based upon a description of a perpetrator, and as an effective tool to get guns off the street," Vincent Warren, CCR's executive director, recently told me. "The significance of this report is that New York City must finally come to grips with its racial profiling problem. There are hundreds of thousands of innocent Black and Brown New Yorkers who daily suffer the indignities of these illegal police tactics. And the police department should be protecting them and not harassing them."
Reading Twelve Angry Men made me angry, not because the subject matter was brand new to me, but because it was far too familiar -- not only as a black man, but also as a human rights advocate who worked with police brutality victims and their families back in the 1990s and decided to go to law school as a result. Whether or not racial profiling is a new subject for you, this book should spark some discussions. And bringing this problem into the light is the only way we can begin to fight it. Black folks are not the only victims of racial profiling, to be sure. But examining America's badge of slavery is a good place to start.
In America, race is a proxy for violence. Black men are regarded as a criminal element, and racial profiling is a practice that goes far beyond the justice system. It is culturally ingrained and normalized. In the days of old, when black people were not allowed to roam about unattended or without permission, slave patrols policed the plantations and hunted down fugitives.
Similarly, today, police sweep through communities of color, searching for criminals. Any black man will do. And cops are searching for drugs, not because black or Latino people use the most drugs, but because of preference, of policy. Drug use among white youth is greater than among youth of color, but you will never see the police descend upon the nation's college campuses, round up those who "fit the description" and force them to endure a demeaning arrest. After all, society views them as the victims. Society has already decided who should be designated as its criminals, even if the "suspects" are as innocuous and upstanding as Henry Louis Gates -- a Harvard professor who was arrested for standing on his front porch and attempting to enter his own home. But status is not what counts; it's all about race.
Twelve Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today is a new book which tells the first-person accounts of black men who, like Professor Gates, have been there. These twelve men were victims of racial profiling, at the wrong place at the wrong time -- which for a black man could mean anywhere. Edited by Gregory S. Parks and Matthew W. Hughey, Twelve Angry Men contains a powerful introduction by Harvard law professor Lani Guinier.
A diverse group of people shares their encounters with the police, including a New York Times reporter who was detained while on assignment; Joe Morgan, a baseball legend who was racially profiled at LAX; Joshua T. Wiley, a hip hop artist who is constantly harassed by police, and Paul Butler, a law professor and former federal prosecutor who was stopped by the cops for living in a nice neighborhood. Meanwhile, Byron Bain, a Harvard Law student, was told by his arresting officer that he must attend the school on a "ball scholarship." Bain compiled a tragically comical "Bill of Rights for Black Men," which includes as its first and second amendments, "Congress can make no law altering the established fact that a black man is a n****r," and "The right of any white person to apprehend a n****r will not be infringed." Newly arrived, foreign-born black men with British accents are not immune from profiling and arrest. Even lawmakers are not exempt, as Congressman Danny Davis recounts his experience of racial profiling by the Chicago police while driving home from his weekly radio show.
Throughout the book, which is factual yet reads like a novel, these twelve men share the humiliation of being told that you are not allowed in a certain neighborhood, and the terror that comes with having a gun pointed to your head. Told where they can and cannot go and forced to produce their identification, they compare their experiences to antebellum slaves, black South Africans under apartheid, and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. One man, who was stopped at least once a month and as many as three times, had to leave home early enough in order to account for the possibility of being stopped. Perhaps one of the more appalling cases was of a boy in Prince George's County, Maryland, who was accused of shoplifting by a police officer moonlighting as a department store security guard. The guard made the youth take off his shirt, go home and return with his sales receipt to prove that he purchased it. The young man was awarded $850,000 in damages by a federal jury.
Although much of Twelve Angry Men deals with the anecdotal and the personal, the book also delves into the statistical, including a report on racial profiling as practiced by the New York Police Department. According to the report, which was released by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), race, not crime, drives police stops and frisks. This is what blacks and Latinos have been saying for years. And no matter what the neighborhood -- low crime or high crime, black, Latino, white or mixed, the results are always the same.
For example, 80 percent of the stops made by the NYPD between 2005 and 2008 were of African Americans, who are only 25 percent of the city's population. Whites, who make up 44 percent of the city's population, were stopped only 10 percent of the time. Over the past six years, nearly half of all stops were made on the basis of a vague category called "furtive movements," while only 15 percent cited "fits relevant description." In over half of the stops, the officers noted "high crime area" as an "additional circumstance," even in low crime areas.
"CCR has been litigating against the NYPD's racial profiling and suspicionless stops-and-frisks since 1999. For its part, during all this time, the police have claimed that they stop people based upon reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, based upon a description of a perpetrator, and as an effective tool to get guns off the street," Vincent Warren, CCR's executive director, recently told me. "The significance of this report is that New York City must finally come to grips with its racial profiling problem. There are hundreds of thousands of innocent Black and Brown New Yorkers who daily suffer the indignities of these illegal police tactics. And the police department should be protecting them and not harassing them."
Reading Twelve Angry Men made me angry, not because the subject matter was brand new to me, but because it was far too familiar -- not only as a black man, but also as a human rights advocate who worked with police brutality victims and their families back in the 1990s and decided to go to law school as a result. Whether or not racial profiling is a new subject for you, this book should spark some discussions. And bringing this problem into the light is the only way we can begin to fight it. Black folks are not the only victims of racial profiling, to be sure. But examining America's badge of slavery is a good place to start.
May 29, 2010
Why Not Blame It On A Black Man?
I just read a pilot study that CNN released on the racial attitudes of children. And nearly 60 years after the watershed Brown v. Board of Education case - in which the Supreme Court invalidated Jim Crow school segregation - it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In the study, three psychologists tested 133 students in the 4 to 5 and 9 to 10 age ranges. Eight schools were involved, half from Georgia, and half from the New York metropolitan area. The study was designed to simulate the Kenneth and Mamie Clark study used in the Brown case, in which African-American children were asked whether they preferred a white doll or a black doll. Having expressed an overwhelming preference for the white doll, they demonstrated the negative effects of segregation on "ego development and self-awareness in Negro children."
Curiously, the results were about the same six decades later. In the recent study, the researchers asked the 4 and 5 year olds a series of questions and had them answer by pointing to one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark. The 9 and 10 year olds were given the same questions and cartoons, but were also asked questions concerning a bar chart showing light to dark skin tones.
Essentially, white children responded with a high degree of "white bias," meaning that they viewed their own skin tone positively, they associated darker skin with negative characteristics, and they were far more stereotypic in their racial attitudes, beliefs and preferences. There was no difference between age groups. And black children also had a bias towards whiteness, although not nearly as great as white children did.
The lesson that I take from these results is clear:
1) parents, teach your kids well, but better than you're doing now, and
2) this is a nation that still upholds whiteness and denigrates blackness.
To be sure, black self-esteem is a lingering, unresolved issue in a racist nation that cannot grapple with the whole race thing - even with a black president of biracial parentage named Barack Obama. But that white children are internalizing white skin superiority and negative black stereotypes so intensely should tell you that they are not learning the right things at home when it comes to diversity, tolerance and inclusion, if they are learning anything at all. Unfortunately, that is how white-skin privilege works. As the self-proclaimed standard bearers, white Americans often may not feel as if they have to worry about talking to their children about such matters. Parents of color, however, don't have that luxury. And in a nation where the color of your skin can determine where you live, your livelihood and even your life or death, parents of color may feel the need to help their children navigate through a color-coded society fraught with obstacles and pitfalls.
And in this environment screaming for racial understanding, states such as Texas and Arizona would further exacerbate things by whitewashing their public school curricula and eliminating ethnic studies courses.
The negative labels assigned to blackness and all things black are readily apparent in the English language. And the badges of slavery and Jim Crow remain, even as those dreaded institutions are supposedly a thing of the past. Lynchings in this country have a shameful history, and typically they were committed upon a rumor that a black man raped a white woman. Black equals poverty, inferiority, laziness and all the horrible and distasteful things one can conjure up. Black man equals all of those dreadful things plus criminality. (Apparently, a black man with the title of President of the United States equals Nazi-Communist-Kenyan-Muslim-black-radical terrorist.)
So, when Charles Stewart, a white man in Boston, murdered his pregnant wife in 1989, he said a black man did it. And everyone believed it. When a white woman named Susan Smith murdered her two young sons in South Carolina in 1994, she said that she had been carjacked by a black man, who drove away with her children. And everyone believed it, even though Smith said the man wore a knit ski cap. As an aside, I've never seen any of my South Carolinian relatives wear a knit ski cap. And typically when this sort of thing occurs, the police will wage ultimate war on the chocolate side of town, rounding up all the brothers just for the hell of it.
And just the other day, a white Philly cop shot himself and claimed it was the work of a black man with cornrows and a tattoo. Why do they keep doing it? Obviously because they know, or at least think they can get away with it, in a nation that tells you that these are the acts expected of darker-skinned folks. With negative stereotypes in the media, and black and brown inmates filling up to 70 percent of the nation's prison beds, why not?
This problem is far greater than one study can solve, but the CNN report is instructive. Consequently, we need to remind ourselves that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This reality must be unsettling for those who risked life and limb to build a better society. It tells you the work ain't over, and it would serve us well to reach the children.
In the study, three psychologists tested 133 students in the 4 to 5 and 9 to 10 age ranges. Eight schools were involved, half from Georgia, and half from the New York metropolitan area. The study was designed to simulate the Kenneth and Mamie Clark study used in the Brown case, in which African-American children were asked whether they preferred a white doll or a black doll. Having expressed an overwhelming preference for the white doll, they demonstrated the negative effects of segregation on "ego development and self-awareness in Negro children."
Curiously, the results were about the same six decades later. In the recent study, the researchers asked the 4 and 5 year olds a series of questions and had them answer by pointing to one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark. The 9 and 10 year olds were given the same questions and cartoons, but were also asked questions concerning a bar chart showing light to dark skin tones.
Essentially, white children responded with a high degree of "white bias," meaning that they viewed their own skin tone positively, they associated darker skin with negative characteristics, and they were far more stereotypic in their racial attitudes, beliefs and preferences. There was no difference between age groups. And black children also had a bias towards whiteness, although not nearly as great as white children did.
The lesson that I take from these results is clear:
1) parents, teach your kids well, but better than you're doing now, and
2) this is a nation that still upholds whiteness and denigrates blackness.
To be sure, black self-esteem is a lingering, unresolved issue in a racist nation that cannot grapple with the whole race thing - even with a black president of biracial parentage named Barack Obama. But that white children are internalizing white skin superiority and negative black stereotypes so intensely should tell you that they are not learning the right things at home when it comes to diversity, tolerance and inclusion, if they are learning anything at all. Unfortunately, that is how white-skin privilege works. As the self-proclaimed standard bearers, white Americans often may not feel as if they have to worry about talking to their children about such matters. Parents of color, however, don't have that luxury. And in a nation where the color of your skin can determine where you live, your livelihood and even your life or death, parents of color may feel the need to help their children navigate through a color-coded society fraught with obstacles and pitfalls.
And in this environment screaming for racial understanding, states such as Texas and Arizona would further exacerbate things by whitewashing their public school curricula and eliminating ethnic studies courses.
The negative labels assigned to blackness and all things black are readily apparent in the English language. And the badges of slavery and Jim Crow remain, even as those dreaded institutions are supposedly a thing of the past. Lynchings in this country have a shameful history, and typically they were committed upon a rumor that a black man raped a white woman. Black equals poverty, inferiority, laziness and all the horrible and distasteful things one can conjure up. Black man equals all of those dreadful things plus criminality. (Apparently, a black man with the title of President of the United States equals Nazi-Communist-Kenyan-Muslim-black-radical terrorist.)
So, when Charles Stewart, a white man in Boston, murdered his pregnant wife in 1989, he said a black man did it. And everyone believed it. When a white woman named Susan Smith murdered her two young sons in South Carolina in 1994, she said that she had been carjacked by a black man, who drove away with her children. And everyone believed it, even though Smith said the man wore a knit ski cap. As an aside, I've never seen any of my South Carolinian relatives wear a knit ski cap. And typically when this sort of thing occurs, the police will wage ultimate war on the chocolate side of town, rounding up all the brothers just for the hell of it.
And just the other day, a white Philly cop shot himself and claimed it was the work of a black man with cornrows and a tattoo. Why do they keep doing it? Obviously because they know, or at least think they can get away with it, in a nation that tells you that these are the acts expected of darker-skinned folks. With negative stereotypes in the media, and black and brown inmates filling up to 70 percent of the nation's prison beds, why not?
This problem is far greater than one study can solve, but the CNN report is instructive. Consequently, we need to remind ourselves that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This reality must be unsettling for those who risked life and limb to build a better society. It tells you the work ain't over, and it would serve us well to reach the children.
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