Tag: Mike Brown

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Chris Rock and a Hard Place

“If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, ‘Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.'”

The quote is from an interview with comedian Chris Rock in New York magazine this week. It was widely shared online and is well worth the two clicks it will take you to find it. His point with the above quote?

“To say [electing] Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.”

Anyone who’s been in this country for a few decades can see that racial progress has been made from the pre-civil rights era, but the recent events in Ferguson have opened new wounds and have pulled the covers off a nasty strain of American bigotry.

Rock also said, “I’ve invented a new app that helps you find out which of your friends are racists. It’s called Facebook.” Boy, did he nail that one. The posts on social media vilifying Michael Brown and his family are almost unavoidable at this point. Lots of people now seem to think it’s important to convince others (and themselves) that Brown deserved to die. It’s ugly out there in social media land.

There’s little doubt that Brown was foolishly aggressive with a cop and that his behavior contributed to his death. And there’s no question that the ensuing burning and looting in Ferguson gave those who wanted to turn this incident into an excuse to paint all blacks as “thugs” a great opportunity to do so.

But it’s also likely that if a cop shot and killed a teenager who lived in your neighborhood and left his body in the street for hours in broad daylight, you and your neighbors would be upset and angry. There’s also little doubt that the prosecutor in this case gamed the grand jury system, putting his thumb on the scales to keep Officer Darren Wilson’s actions from objective legal scrutiny.

Little noticed in all the Ferguson furor was the subsequent case of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot by Cleveland, Ohio, police on November 21st. Unlike in the Brown case, there is video of this horrific killing. The cops pulled up at high speed, screeched to a halt, jumped out, and shot Rice within three seconds. I urge you to watch it, and then try to convince yourself this kid did anything that would make him deserve to die — or that the cops followed any kind of logical protocol. And ask yourself if you really think the cops would have done the same thing to a white kid playing with a toy pistol in a park in the suburbs.

Yes, there’s been progress, but we have a lot more work to do. Ratcheting up the hate and anger won’t get us anywhere. We’ve got to stop punching each other in the face.

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Editorial Opinion

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the Roots of Unrest

Some valuable thoughts regarding the current unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, appeared on Time magazine’s website this week. They came by way of an insightful opinion piece authored by one Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who, as the oldest among us may remember, used to play a little basketball.

The column was called, “The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race.” No doubt it was so titled to generate more hits for Time.com‘s website, but the piece that followed was genuinely thought-provoking and even-handed. Abdul-Jabbar’s thesis was that incidents such as the one in Ferguson are as much about class warfare as they are about race:

“This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor.”

Abdul-Jabbar cited the most recent U.S. Census data that more than 50 million Americans are officially classified as “poor.” He further pointed out how via manipulation by political leaders and the media, the poor are kept from utilizing the power that 50 million disenfranchised Americans could have as a unified voting block. They are distracted, Abdul-Jabbar contends, by emotional issues such as immigration, abortion, and gun rights, so much so that they fail to see that their universal plight — poverty — could be a strong enough bond to overcome their racial and political differences.

Abdul-Jabbar pointed to the most recent study by fact-checking organization PunditFact.com. It reported that 60 percent of claims on Fox News were false; and the number for MSNBC wasn’t much better at 46 percent. These so-called news outlets are stirring the pot and reinforcing the biases of their viewers. And in doing so, they are adding to the divisiveness and powerlessness felt by the poor and undereducated.

According to a 2012 Pew Research Center report, quoted by Abdul-Jabbar, just half of U.S. households are middle-income, a drop of 11 percent since the 1970s; median middle-class income has dropped by 5 percent in the past 10 years, and total wealth is down 28 percent. Just 23 percent of Americans think they will have enough money to retire.

For too long, American domestic policy has been dominated by the fatally flawed theory long posited by the “one percent”: Let the rich get as rich as they can and the money will flow down to the poor and middle class. More and more economists are pointing out that the true solution to the economy’s woes is the polar opposite: A healthy and growing middle class lifts all boats — and yachts. The middle-class’ money isn’t squirreled away in overseas trusts or in billion-dollar investment funds; it’s spent on the very goods and services that fuel a healthy economy: cars, appliances, food, travel.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired from basketball in 1989, but it’s obvious he can still pull off a convincing slam-dunk.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Tagged

My car has July tags. I ordered new ones in late July but they were slow in arriving, so for a few days in early August, my tags were out of date. I wasn’t surprised then, to see blue lights in my mirror one morning as I was driving along Union. I pulled into a parking lot and lowered my window as the officer approached.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” she asked.

“Because my tags are out of date?”

From the look on her face, I knew I’d screwed up.

“No,” she said. “It’s because you were going 35 in a school zone. But I will check those tags.” I got a warning for my speeding violation and a ticket for the tags.

Oops.

The officer was courteous and professional, which has been my experience with most Memphis cops, even the one who gave me a ticket for running a stop sign because “all four of your wheels didn’t come to a full stop.” I suppressed my inner wise-ass and resisted asking how many came to a full stop. And I politely accepted the ticket.

Cops are human. They make mistakes. They can say dumb stuff. They can be racists. They can overreact. They can panic. They can shoot someone they shouldn’t have shot, at least not six times, which is what I think happened in Ferguson, Missouri. Unfortunately, the original incident involving the death of Mike Brown has now been overshadowed by the resultant protests, looting, and police militarization controversy.

Memphis police have shot and killed a number of people in the past couple of years, some under questionable circumstances — perhaps most notably in the case of Stephen Askew, a young black man who was sleeping in his car, waiting for his girlfriend to get home, when he was awakened by two white officers. They claimed he pointed a gun at them, and they put 20 bullets into his back while he sat in the driver’s seat. There were no riots, no looting. There were vigils and church services — and a lawsuit that will likely cost the city lots of money. But it won’t bring back that fine young man.

The Memphis Police Department (MPD) has hundreds of black officers. The chief is African American. I think that’s a very good thing, especially in a majority African-American city like Memphis. And I can’t help but think the outrage in Memphis would have been infinitely greater in the Askew case, and others, if the police force were 94 percent white, as it is in Ferguson.

Also, I was pleased to learn this week that the MPD has not succumbed to the militarization trend that so many other police departments around the country have embraced. It’s inexplicable why a suburb like Millington needs grenade launchers or Bartlett (Bartlett!!) needs 115 assault weapons. The police have a vital job to do, and it’s not to suppress the populace or stop a foreign invasion; it’s to serve us and protect us. And give the occasional ticket.

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News The Fly-By

Learning From Ferguson

Almost seven years ago, I stood under a clear, blue September sky in Jena, Louisiana, as more than 20,000 African Americans flooded the streets of that rustic community in protest of the conviction of six teenagers for the alleged beating of a white student at the town’s high school. I thought then, in 2007, that that demonstration of unity of purpose might lead to a new awakening of social consciousness in America regarding race relations. It didn’t.

Five years later, I was reporting on the daily demonstrations of outrage in Memphis in reaction to the shooting death in Florida of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman. The outpouring of tears, outrage, and disgust at the fact that Martin’s “stereotypical” hoodie served as a catalyst for his being targeted by the overzealous wanna-be cop seemed universal — an appalled response from the majority of the general public. Surely, I thought, this would be the incident that would sustain a national dialogue about race, false perceptions, and tainted justice and result in sweeping positive social upheaval in the name of equality. It didn’t.

So, pardon me if the prospect of people taking to the streets of Memphis this week to demonstrate solidarity with those mourning the loss of 18-year-old Michael Brown in a police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, strikes me as a hollow gesture — especially since we’ve got so much work left to do in addressing the plight of African-American youth here in Memphis. It’s blasphemous to focus on a tragedy 300 miles away when we should be concentrating on the atrocities within our own city. It doesn’t take much to know where to begin.

As I reported on television last week, there are an estimated 10,000 students who have not yet enrolled in school in Shelby County. Because of confusion regarding the various municipal, private, charter, and state-run achievement district school systems, clarity about who is going where might be a little muddled, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that thousands of students are apparently not in school anywhere. The SCS superintendent and school board members are only now, two weeks into the educational year, deciding to push parental procrastinators into action to get their children in classrooms through a series of radio and television ads.

Since when did getting a basic education become an option? There are laws on the books about the penalties parents can face because of their children’s truancy. Shelby County District Attorney Amy Weirich stands ready to enforce them. Let’s take her up on her word to do so. You can’t tell me there’s not a direct correlation between school truants and the youth violence in our streets. In the month between July 13th and August 13th, Memphis police responded to 27 shooting incidents involving juveniles. The youngest victim was 12. Apparently, these incidents have caught the attention of Memphis Mayor A C Wharton who now wants to call a summit to discuss ways to stop the violence.

Though I have my doubts, I hope the mayor isn’t content in this situation to surround himself with “yes men” who are going to give him a false sense that the city is doing all it can to turn around this distressing tide. If the city truly wants to help, it should join the D.A.’s office in cracking down hard on truancy. Join with the schools in reaching out to young girls to teach them that making babies out of wedlock is not a career path. Have MPD hold seminars to stress to young black males the less-than-attractive alternatives of imprisonment or death that could come from living the life of a “gangsta.” If you want to call it “scared straight” or some snappier title, it doesn’t matter. Just do it.

As history has proven, marches and public demonstrations of concern are usually after-the-fact reactions — too little, too late. We shouldn’t have to march in memory of our slain youth, not when we can be proactive in giving our children a fighting chance to succeed through education. You can’t bring Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown back. But we, and the leaders of our community, can do our utmost to work toward making sure their deaths and the temporary unity of purpose their tragedies generated were not in vain, at least not here in Memphis.