My apologies for the aggressively unoriginal post title, but I am running dangerously low on creative fuel. Thanks to endless bounty of the internet though, I am rarely tasked to come up with anything original – instead I can just string together a couple of barely coherent sentences, provide a link or three and let the world wide web take over. The theme for this post, you ask? A whole lot of race relations and a sprinkle of Charles Bronson, Mr. Death Wish himself.
1. As many of you know, New York bore witness to yet another police shooting of an unarmed African American man in November 2006, when 23-year-old Sean Bell died in a hail of 50 police bullets. On Monday, three of the five police officers involved were indicted, two of them for first and second-degree manslaughter. Many supporters of Sean Bell’s family were understandably disappointed by the relatively paltry indictments handed down, and with racial tensions already reignited by the shooting (Amadou Diallo, the unarmed African immigrant who was cut down by 19 of 41 bullets fired at him in 1999, is still fresh in many New Yorker’s minds) all eyes will be on the upcoming criminal trials. Here’s the New York Times news story, and here’s a searing Newsday column documenting and attacking racial profiling in the city.
2. In another town with a long, troubled history of racism, a 14-year-old African American girl with no prior arrest record, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced to up to 7 years in prison for shoving a hall monitor at her high school. The Chicago Tribune did a great job of writing up this disquieting (to risk understatement) story here.
3. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has also done an excellent job in resurrecting the case of Gary Tyler, a 17-year-old African American boy who was railroaded onto death row in 1974 (he escaped his fate only because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional) and has languished in prison ever since. It’s clear he’s innocent, but, as could be expected unfortunately, the wheels of justice turn quite a bit slower for people of color, especially down south. Check out these articles on the Free Gary Tyler website (I don’t have Times Select, but the columns on the website will have to suffice) here, here and here.
4. And finally, Robert Lipsyte exposes the seedy underbelly of college basketball as March Madness barrels forward here. While I cop to having a Facebook bracket of my own, I agree wholeheartedly with Lipsyte, and it seems many others do as well (Najee Ali, the prominent Los Angeles civil rights activist and former assistant to the USC women’s college basketball team in the early ’80s expressed this strongly worded sentiment to me about it – “I call it slavery”), that it is patently ridiculous for these schools and TV networks to be making millions while the athletes themselves, many of them from impoverished backgrounds, struggle to support themselves at school. The whole wretched affair is steeped in race, and it would be nice, to say the least, to see some college athletes attempt to start a union or something along those lines to demand a chunk of the profits that they create.
5. Finally, on a much lighter note, please check out this terrific Charles Bronson Japanese commercial my brother brought to my attention. I promise you it will be worth your time.
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Image courtesy of allposters.com
Please add to your collection of depressing news items the following two things from the Editorial Page of the Savannah (GA) Morning News this week (3/26/07) – both expressing a great deal of humor over what the authors viewed as the absurdity of the NAACP of Georgia’s request that the great state issue an apology for slavery. The writer of the letter to the editor might have some excuse, since as he wrote he is Polish, and his family has only been here for one generation. I guess he couldn’t possibly understand the advantage he’s gotten just by being white and in America, but I’ll bet he enjoys it very much. I live in Savannah, and both black and white people use the term “slave mentality” to describe many different societal problems that exist here in 2007. Imagine my chagrin when I learned that a former school superintendent accused the School Board of having a “slave mentality” because they refused to change their approach to education per his vision (he later resigned and took his golden parachute with him). Not being from the South, I didn’t even know that whites used/understood the term “slave mentality” – which is alive and well and living in Savannah, GA. But never mind any of that, since according to the writer, the request was only a political move on the part of the NAACP. Both writers gave the classic answer whites give: “I wasn”t born at the time – I didn’t do it”, to which I always respond, “Yes, but you did gain a benefit from it” just by being white and in America. Then they say to me, “well, this is the greatest (r-i-c-h-e-s-t) country in the world”, and I respond, “hey, if I worked everyday, while you stayed home and collected MY paycheck, you’d be rich sooner or later, too. I wouldn’t be so proud to brag about wealth acquired based on a race of people’s free labor!” At any rate, I think the NAACP is asking for the wrong thing, too; they should be asking for money and policy changes. An apology is just words; I want to see some action.