Here We Go Again

Sometimes the differences just slap you in the face. Not that you're looking for them. They just appear, and go, "Whap! Now have a nice day!" I never even heard of Brock Allen Turner before today. In case you haven't either, the short version is that he was convicted of rape and sentenced to only six months in county jail and probation because, judge Aaron Persky said, "“A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him" (to which the logical response is, "It's supposed to!"). But even before I read the one story that I read, the presentation threw me off. The picture of Turner that accompanied the story - the picture of a convicted rapist - was practically an icon of innocence. I didn't know immediately where it came from (Stanford University, where Turner has been a student), but I immediately knew this: it wasn't a mugshot.

That's what I expect when reading about someone arrested for a crime, you know (let alone convicted of one) - a mugshot. The visual disconnect between the image of this smiling, innocent-looking young man and the crime for which he was arrested and prosecuted, and of which he was convicted, was so jarring that I went to Google in search of a different image - an image of a criminal, or at least someone who had been arrested for a crime - a mugshot.

And I didn't find a single one. (As of 8:25 p.m., 6/4/2016 - perhaps by the time you read this, that will have changed.)


Whap! Now have a nice day!

Now, when even Google doesn't present a mugshot of someone arrested and convicted of a crime - and not some slight misdemeanor, but one of the most heinous and despicable crimes - it makes me ask, "Why is that?"

Was no mugshot taken when Turner was arrested? If there was one taken, has no media outlet anywhere had access to it? Or has every editor who chose to run a story about Turner also deliberately chosen to NOT use a mugshot, although they could? And if editors are making that choice - WHY?

It all leads to the question, "Would there be a mugshot if Turner had been black?' Or to put it in perhaps a more interesting way, have you ever seen a story about a black man arrested for/convicted of a crime that was accompanied by such a benign-looking photo of that person?

Or maybe the distinction at work here is not one merely of race, but of class. Lord knows I've seen plenty of mugshots of non-rich white people.


In any case, I'm not the only one who has noticed:

I expect a hashtag to emerge: #showthemugshot or something similar. Meanwhile, I just wanted to point out, for anyone willing to see: "See this? Here we go again." With all the weariness that that implies. Because it is more tiresome than I know how to say.

NBC News Story On Police Shooting Misses The Mark

An NBC News story on the police shooting of a man in Florida provides a good example of why some people charge the mainstream media with racism.

The headline of the story about the death of drummer Corey Jones reads, "Florida Plainclothes Officer Shoots Dead Armed Musician Corey Jones."

Notice: not, "Musician Corey Jones" - "Armed Musician Corey Jones."

The story is accompanied by a photo of Jones, with a caption describing him as "Corey Jones, a well-known local drummer, who was armed..."

The person who wrote the headline and the person who wrote the photo caption (assuming they are separate people) both went beyond what the story, by reporter Jacquellena Carrero, actually tells us.

Here's the opening paragraph:

Police in Florida have launched an independent investigation after a plainclothes officer shot dead a well-known local drummer — who police say was armed — while he sat in his car on a highway exit ramp. (emphasis mine)

There is a difference - a big difference - between NBC News noting that the police say Jones was armed, and NBC saying directly that Jones was armed. The second thing, which the headline and the photo caption do, states the police assertion as an established fact.

But in fact, the accuracy of the police assertion has not been well-established. The incident is under investigation.

At best, the headline and photo caption are sloppy; at worst, they are racist, buying into assumptions about the dangerousness of Black men.

I'm inclined to go with sloppy, because while I know there's a lot of racism out there, I believe there is even more sloppiness.

In any case, the account begs for more questions to be asked and answered. Questions like, "Did Jones even own a gun?" and "Did Jones threaten to shoot?" (having a gun is one thing, pointing it is another) and "Did Officer Raja identify himself as a police officer when approaching Jones's car?"

If I were waiting for a tow late at night, alone...
if I had a gun...
if an unfamiliar car - not a tow truck - pulled up...
and if an unknown man got out and approached me without identifying himself...
I might well have pointed my gun toward the guy in an effort to make him keep his distance.

The story doesn't say whether or not Officer Raja was in a police vehicle. A CBS report says that he was in an unmarked car, not equipped with a dashcam. With no video and no known witnesses, there's no one to dispute Raja's story.

But that does not entitle NBC News to uncritically parrot it in a headline and a photo caption.

Come on, NBC - do better.

(P.S. to CBS - could you not obtain a single photo of Raja other than one of him receiving a medal?)

UPDATE: NBC did do better. The descriptions of Corey Jones as "armed" have disappeared.

Days Of Absence

Social scientists hastily convened a high level confab this weekend to study a recurring phenomenon that threatens to take the shine off Pittsburgh's lustrous reputation as a city on the rise.

The sociologists, ever fond of jargon that will enable them to craft complicated descriptions of simple facts, have dubbed the phenomenon "ebena evanesca," (sometimes reduced to "the E2 problem") which roughly translates into "disappearing black people."

To put the matter simply, when journalists or other media representatives turn their eyes upon Pittsburgh to seek out what makes the city special, black people consistently disappear from view. The resulting media coverage therefore makes the city appear even whiter than it is.

In a time when corporations and government bodies alike take every opportunity to highlight their progress in fostering diversity, such white-bread presentations of Pittsburgh may well make it less of a destination for the 20,000 new residents that Mayor Bill Peduto wants to attract here.

But the presentations persist.

ITEM: In April 2012, Details magazine ran a feature about East Liberty that somehow portrayed the neighborhood with no black people. 

Details is a national publication; their story essentially told the world, "East Liberty is soooooo cool - and there ain't no black folk there!"

All of the black people who do live and/or work in East Liberty? POOF!

ITEM: In March, 2014, Pop City published a list titled, "Sixteen Pittsburgh social media mavens to follow." There were no black people on that list, despite there being a bunch of black people in Pittsburgh whom a bunch of people (not all black!) consider to be worth following.

So, Pittsburgh's black digerati? POOF! POOF!

Now, TIME Magazine has produced a video about Pittsburgh's comeback, titled "Pittsburgh: The Comeback," in which they talk about the whole steel-to-eds-and-meds story that many of us could probably recite in our sleep.

Except that we won't get asked to, even when we're awake. And by "we," this time, I do mean black people, because for this 10-minute video, TIME magazine only spoke with white guys (or at least, we only see white guys speaking. Maybe they spoke with some black people but edited them out?).

So, black people who might have useful/interesting things to say about Pittsburgh's transformation? POOF!

Wait, it gets better: even when the video acknowledges the realities of segregation and racial disparities in Pittsburgh, they didn't even find a black person to say anything about that. POOF! POOF, POOF!

The confab was convened in response to the video, said University of Pittsburgh sociologist Dr.Thomas Foolery.

"It seems obvious that, as the song says, there's something happening here - but what it is ain't exactly clear," Dr Foolery said. "When media appear, black people disappear, en masse, in a day of absence that would make Douglas Turner Ward shiver, exercising a collective invisibility beyond Ralph Ellison's imaginings."

Dr. Foolery is conducting "a longitudinal study that attempts to determine whether black people circumnavigate and perambulate around media representatives whenever they appear, or whether media representatives do their own circumnavigation and perambulation."

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that TIME, in fact, accomplished a trifecta - as NEXTpittsburgh noted - by simultaneously excluding people of color, women, AND anyone under 40 as interviewees in "Pittsburgh: The Comeback."

The high point of the video for Dr. Foolery and his colleagues will undoubtedly come at the 8:30 mark, when Douglas Heuck, editor of Pittsburgh Quarterly and director of Pittsburgh Today, says, "Pittsburgh ranks at or near the top of all sorts of quality of life measures across the U.S." - while a slide appears of an article with the headline "Behind The Times: The Limited Role of Minorities in the Greater Pittsburgh Workforce."

And the beat goes on.

Of Cosby and Cleaver

Bill Cosby is in the news again, as the Associated Press reports on courtroom testimony from 2005 that they finally got unsealed, in which he testified to buying Quaaludes for the purpose of drugging women in order to have sex with them.

Which is pretty much what a bunch of women have accused him of, while not taking him to trial, for a long time.

When comic Hannibal Buress forced the allegations back into the news last October by calling Cosby a rapist during a standup routine -

- a new string of women came forth to accuse Cosby. The sheer number of them made it harder and harder to believe that they were all lying, and shifted my thinking from the question, "Is it true?" to the question, "If any of it is true, what kind of person is Bill Cosby? What kind of person would do those things, over and over and over?"

An obvious answer is, "A man who hates women."

But then I noticed that all of the accusers I saw were white (that has changed, but the overwhelming majority still are). And a sliver of memory popped up to suggest a different answer: "A black man who hates white people."

A man like the young Eldridge Cleaver.

The sliver of memory came from Cleaver's autobiographical "Soul on Ice," in which he describes engaging in a campaign of raping white women (after practicing on black women). Biography.com summarizes the campaign thus:

During his incarceration, Cleaver began to develop his own political philosophy. After his release in 1957, he raped an unknown number of women, both black and white. He felt that his rapes of white women were "insurrectionary" rapes, justified by what African Americans had suffered under a system dominated by whites.

I didn't remember exactly what Cleaver wrote, but have found the relevant quote online:

”Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women — and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.”

When I read Cleaver's words in 1969 or 1970, they did not merely shock me, they terrified me, because he seemed to suggest that any black man might be expected to rape white women in revenge for racism. I was in my first year of college, I was 17 or 18, I was living away from home for the first time, I was exploring the world. and I was discovering what type of man I would become in response to what I saw. What terrified me was the sliver of possibility that I might become what he had been, that I might develop such a dehumanizing, objectifying hatred.

For the record: I didn't.

But that passing awareness of the sliver of possibility has come back to mind with the case of Bill Cosby. Could white America's favorite, most non-threatening Black man have carried a simmering hatred for white folk that matched Eldridge Cleaver's? He was only two years younger than Cleaver; would he have shared enough of his generation's experiences with racism to stoke such a hatred?

I don't know. Maybe there's a therapist out there who can suss it out. I just thought the possibility was worth mentioning, if only because it would make the horror of which he is accused  (and which we now know he did at least once) more comprehensible. Not less horrible, just less completely opaque.

This isn't the racism you're looking for.

It's not even 6 pm, and at least four of my Facebook friends have posted this video on their Timelines today. Apparently the video, originally posted on YouTube in 2010, is just now reaching a lot of people via Upworthy, where a fellow named Rafael Casal shared it under this headline: "Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops."

Please check it out before reading further:



In each case, I think the people posting this video, and the people responding to it, are missing the real story. Indeed, I think that the creators of the experiment, the producers of the TV show, "What Would You Do?", are missing the real story of their own work.

At 1:54, when host John Quinones is shown reviewing the footage, he remarks that people respond to the black guy "right away."

AS WELL THEY SHOULD - a CRIME is in progress.

The real story is not that a black kid committing a crime is treated like a criminal. The real story is that a white kid committing a crime is not, and that a white girl committing a crime receives an offer of help (What the what?!?).

Does this clip demonstrate racism? Yes. But the racism demonstrated here is not the racism of persecution (WHICH DEFINITELY EXISTS) - it's the racism of privilege.

On Upworthy, Mr. Casal says:

"at 1:50, I literally yelled, "You've got to be kidding me!" at my screen."

The problem is not at 1:50. The problem is at 1:31, when a black woman (sigh) says, "I remember thinking, 'Young white men don't usually carry burglar tools.'"

The problem is at 3:56, when an older white gentleman helps a white girl to commit her crime.

The racism of privilege says, "that person can't be committing a crime, even though it really does look like they are - because they're white," or worse yet, "that person's committing a crime, but that's ok - because they're white."

That's the racism of privilege - when the assumption of white rightness overrides the evidence of one's own senses, and shuts down one's own moral faculties.

A commenter on YouTube said, "The old guy at 3:23 is my hero." He's mine, too, because he tried to stop a crime. And for all he knew, that kid could have had a gun. That old guy doesn't bother me. The old guy at 3:56 does.

All forms of racism are stupid and evil, but the racism of privilege is especially pernicious in some ways.

• First, because it is largely unconscious. The racism of persecution knows that it is race-based. The racism of privilege often doesn't.
• Second, because, since it operates by unjustly lifting some people up, rather than by keeping some people down, it may feel like generosity of spirit.
• Third, precisely because it is largely unconscious and feels like a virtue, it may be more pervasive than the racism of persecution.

It's hard to know how pervasive it is. And it's especially hard for Black folk to know how pervasive it is, because it happens when we're not around and when people aren't even thinking about us. It is not just a white thing, it is a white-on-white thing. And it is up to white people to notice it and to fight it (also, probably, while we're not around).

Now, some of the white people in the middle segment may be racist. Heck, they all may be. But this clip doesn't demonstrate that. If the same people who let the white guy go, stopped the black guy, that might demonstrate racism. If people gave the black guy a hard time when he was not committing a crime, that might demonstrate racism (and that scenario would have been more worthy of invoking Trayvon Martin, as some have done). But stopping a black kid from committing a crime is not racial profiling, and it is not a racist thing to do. It's a neighborly thing to do. And you know what? I would rather have white neighbors who do that, than black neighbors who allow babies to be shot to death, and say nothing.

Coming Soon: A Black man's story, starring some white guys

I don't look for this stuff, honest. And I don't want to be hypersensitive. But sometimes things just assault my eyeballs.

So...I just discovered Think Progress blogger Alyssa Rosenberg, who this morning posted a link to a Hollywood Reporter video in which writer-director Steve McQueen, who is Black, asks some of his white colleagues why they don't hire more Black actors. Go ahead and watch it, right now. It sizzles.

This clip was also my discovery of Steve McQueen, so I went to IMDB to learn more about him. I didn't recognize the titles of the movies he's done, but I did recognize the title of the one he's working on now, "Twelve Years A Slave," because I've seen (not read, yet) the book on which it is based.

The book is the autobiographical account of Solomon Northrup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped and taken into slavery in 1841.

When I clicked the title for more info about the movie, this page came up:

Huh? Stars: Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Paul Dano?

I thought that perhaps it was based on a different book. Or maybe my recollection about the book was way, way, WAY off...was there some white guy who became a slave for twelve years?

Only by scrolling down did I find Chiwetel Ejiofor listed - behind Fassbender, Pitt and Dano - as Solomon Northrup.

Now, Hollywood has a history of finding it really hard to let a story about a Black man really be about that Black man...

...so my first impulse was to label Ejiofor's billing as racism pure and simple. But having recently heard john a powell speak, I'm better equipped to acknowledge its non-simplicity.

powell, (like bell hooks, he prefers the lower case), Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, spoke about racialization, which is something both more subtle and more pervasive than racism.

powell defines racialization as "the set of practices, cultural norms, and institutional arrangements that are both reflective of and simultaneously help to create and maintain racialized outcomes in society."

In this case, no one involved has to be a racist in order to produce a racialized result. It's not immediately clear whether the order of the cast listing is from the studio or from IMDB itself. Either way, it reflects the cultural and economic reality of star power - IMDB ranks actors' popularity, and Michael Fassbender's StarMeter ranking is 22 (the lower the number, the higher one's rank). Pitt's is 37. Dano's is 1,295.

Ejiofor's ranking is 2,201.

For an actor, being Black makes it even more difficult to enter the seemingly closed loop in which star billing results from popularity which results from star billing. Thus we have a situation which both reflects and helps to maintain racialized outcomes.

So will the protagonist of the book be the protagonist of the movie, or will this be a case of  "here we go again?" McQueen doesn't seem like a particularly Hollywood kind of director, and he co-wrote the script with John Ridley, so that gives me hope for the former.

But we'll see.

Racism (or something like it) in the media - 1

I don't often think about race on my own.

When I say "on my own," I mean that most often when I do think about race, it is because some external circumstance has called it to mind.

That happens more often than I would dare count. This week it has happened twice regarding the realm of media.

The first time was Sunday, when I saw the cover of this week's issue of Newsweek:

I tweeted my response: "Really, Newsweek? In 2012, a blond, blue-eyed Jesus? Really??"

That's all I could think of to say in the moment. The more I thought about it, the more I came to view the Newsweek cover as not just passe, but as scary. Newsweek, you see, is in the business of being smart. No news organization does well by being perceived as stupid. They are smart enough to know that the image of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus lost credibility and cultural currency at least 30 years ago, and even a half-century ago for some Americans.

But they chose that image anyway, knowing not only how culturally out of step it is, but also knowing full well how unlikely it is on a purely historical basis that any 1st Century Israelite looked anything like this.

This is the kind of thing that makes people charge the media with racism. And in this case, I would add, an arrogance that goes beyond racism, that says, "We know this is wrong in multiple ways, and we don't care."

It also made me keep my money in my wallet. The cover title, "Forget the Church - Follow Jesus," was interesting enough so that I might have read the article. But I wasn't going to spend my money on that image. No way.

The second time this week that a media outlet made me think about race was just a little while ago, when my friend Kilolo Luckett emailed me the link to an article in Details magazine about East Liberty. It's a slick little piece titled, "The Rust Belt Revival: What's Happening in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

The article made me think about race because Details has apparently discovered an East Liberty with no Black people. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Within a relatively short space, it presents five photos of people and places in East Liberty without a melanin-rich person in sight. (And by the way, that also includes  - or rather, excludes - anybody who looks like they might be Indian, Middle Eastern...you know, anything but...well...white.)

Most astonishingly, it does this while presenting a chunk of text titled, "Hip-Hop's Next Hit Makers." And who would those be? A couple of white guys who, the article seems to make clear, are the real force behind Wiz Khalifa's success. (No, no, no, Wiz is not pictured. What did I just tell you?)

In similar fashion, the article opens with a look at the Waffle Shop, which opened in 2009 - but the Shadow Lounge, which I believe has been around for at least a decade, is relegated to a footnote.

Do I need to say that the Waffle Shop's proprietor is white, and the Shadow Lounge's, Black?

I don't want to believe that the folks at Details are racist, but I also can't believe that they are immensely stupid. So what can you call it when a high-end magazine does something like that? If it's not racism or stupidity or both, then what the heck is it?

The only other word that comes to mind is delusion. The only way that I can think of for something like this to happen, without the people behind it being either racist or stupid, is if they truly perceive the world as a place in which black people either do not exist or exist so tangentially that we do not matter. And if, in fact, one has largely lived in such a world, such a delusion may be natural - even inevitable.

So, with that stretching of the imagination, I give Details something of a pass. Meaning that while I won't buy the current issue (not that I usually do), I also won't get overly mad at 'em (certainly not as mad as I would if I were a hip-hop fan, and especially a Wiz Khalifa fan).

But if a local outfit that knows better the truth about East Liberty (I'm looking at you, Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review) touts the Details article as a good thing, I'm gonna have a conniption.

Just want to take note of a couple of interesting items in the blogosphere...

A blogger who goes by the name of Azerthoth has a blog named, naturally enough, Azerblog, subtitled "Adventures in the land of Linux." In a recent post, he explains why he refuses to call Linux, "GNU/Linux."

Azerthoth is braver than I am. I mean, I might say such a thing here, in the midst of ramblings about thisnthatnwhoknowswhat, but in a blog specifically devoted to Linux, and therefore more likely to be picked up on by those he calls "Stallmanites?" Not this kid.

In a wholly different world, a writer named Kameron Hurley, on her blog, "Brutal Woman," has a well-done piece on "Why Writing Colorblind is Writing White"(which she freely labels "a rant"). Being exposed to stuff like this (I had never heard of Kameron Hurley) is a good reason to belong to Yahoo groups like "BlackSciFiHorrorFantasyClub."

Don Imus returns?

Don Imus may be returning to the airwaves.

After all the protests, all the outrage, all the indignation, the man who made "nappy-headed hos" a catch phrase will apparently be back in the broadcaster's seat.

What does this mean? One thing, apparently, is that protests, outrage and indignation don't count for much these days.

What struck me most about the Imus controversy was the very fact that it was the Imus controversy, as opposed to the McGuirk-Imus controversy. I refer to Bernard McGuirk, Imus' executive producer at the time when Imus made his gaffe, and the one Imus was talking to when he made it.

Here's the exchange:

IMUS: That's some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and --

McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.

IMUS: That's some nappy-headed hos there

McGuirk called the Rutgers women "hard-core hos." Imus - in response to McGuirk using the term "hos" first - called them "nappy-headed hos."

So why was McGuirk not hoisted on the same petard as Imus?

I think the real meaning of the whole mishmash is this: it's okay to call Black women hos. Just don't call them nappy-headed. That is the message that all of protesters sent when they did not call for McGuirk's head along with Imus'.

And that's a shame.