Finding Fernanda is a sobering story–even more so when you stop to think that it focuses on two women out of thousands at opposite ends of a corrupt system.

Journalist Erin Siegal’s book stretches across the continent: it examines the notorious child adoption business in Guatemala via the ordeals suffered by both Guatemalan native Mildred Alvarado, who loses two of her children not just to kidnappers but to her country’s legal and political processes, and Tennessee resident Betsy Emanuel, an American lured in by a Christian adoption agency when she begins the process of adopting one of the children, not knowing the dirty business behind her wish for another child.

Working with a local journalist over the course of three years, Siegal sheds light on the various players: the American agencies and their in-country networks of handlers and attorneys; the medical professionals and court officials who are either on the take or willfully negligent, like the Guatemala City pediatrician who sees his practice expand as he becomes a go-to resource for adoptionists:

On a child’s first visit to his office, Dr. Castillo would ask about his or her background and felt he had no choice but to take the answers provided to him by cuidadoras (caretakers) at face value. Every time one of the women hesitated, he felt chilled. More than half the children examined at his office didn’t have proper paperwork, such as a birth certificate. Sometimes the names would change. It wasn’t his responsibility to investigate, the pediatrician told himself; he was just there to make sure that the kids were being cared for.

Over time, cases like Mildred’s become a cause celebre in Guatemala, attracting more and more attention from the press and the underfunded authorities before a human rights organization represents her in court. For her part, Betsy also feels her own betrayal at the hands of the agency, pushing her to ask questions of her own, culminating in an encounter with Mildred.

In an e-mail interview with Racialicious, Siegal shared more details about the women at the heart of Fernanda, the industry that brought them together, and her own experience as an American journalist working in Guatemala. The transcript, which includes some spoilers, is under the cut.

Racialicious: Let’s start, literally, from the beginning: you went from wanting to do a human-interest piece on Guatemalan adoptions to finding out about the sordid industry behind it, to shifting your entire storytelling style to cover it. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience at Columbia University, and how it prepared you to put this book together?

Erin Siegal: Spending a year in an intensive program like Columbia’s Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism was a starting point, a shortcut of sorts towards assembling an investigative skill-set. Before this book, I’d written some freelance pieces, but mainly worked as a photographer. I wanted to feel confident taking on complicated investigative stories. A friend who’d finished the Stabile program ahead of me offered very sage advice: J-school is worth it only if you get into Stabile, and if Columbia underwrites your study. It was a huge privilege and a joy to be able to spend a year under the tutelage of Sheila Coronel, the director of the Stabile program. She’s an incredible investigative journalist, and a founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

As far as first-time book writing, “Finding Fernanda” had an intrinsic narrative structure—the book flows in chronological order, from beginning to end, as both women’s experiences unfold. Much of the time, it felt like my chief role as author was not to get in the way of the story.

I would have loved to write a book filled with sparkly, snappy writing, but it didn’t feel appropriate. Instead, I tried to reflect some of the awesome, understated grace and dignity of some of my sources; some of the book’s characters.

R: How long did it take for Mildred Alvarado to trust you with her story? What was going through your mind when you reached her on that initial reporting trip?

ES: Frankly, I was a bit terrified the first time I met Mildred. Her safety and the safety of her family was a primary concern. I also didn’t want to re-traumatize her or pry too much. I wanted her to understand that she didn’t have to speak to me, even though Norma Cruz had asked her to—Mildred feels deeply obligated to Norma, the director of Fundación Sobrevivientes, and I wanted her to understand that she could say no; that it was fine for her to say no.

When we first spoke, I didn’t know how much of Betsy Emanuel’s story checked out. I was still a student, trying to get a handle on what exactly had happened. Mildred and I had a slow conversation, without many direct questions. That first interview was brief in comparison to later ones, when highly specific, difficult details had to be drawn out. Much of the time, my interviews with Mildred were long and meandering; her story came out in chunks and pieces.

R: Throughout the process, you worked in tandem with a local journalist, J (Note: name withheld by request.) How long did it take you to feel comfortable living and working in Guatemalan spaces with J, the journalist who helped you?

ES: Dumb luck and mutual friends led me to find J. When we met, there was an instant connection. What was supposed to be a quick morning coffee turned into a day of hanging out, driving around and trading life stories. It’s rare to find a best friend so quickly, but that’s what J. became, faster than anyone I’d ever met. I still count my lucky stars that I not only had someone like him to turn to for help with context and insight for the book’s investigation, but that I have him as a friend. By the time of my last month-long reporting trip in Guatemala, I was sleeping on his couch. It was invaluable to be able to talk the story through with him, to see what he thought about certain hypotheses. It was also invaluable to have someone to crack stupid jokes with, as the investigation unearthed some incredibly sad situations. He also accompanied me to some rough neighborhoods to knock on doors. J. never admitted how he was scared was with me in certain situations until after the book was written.

R: We’ve talked about transnational adoption on Racialicious in the past but focused more on South Korea and Haiti. I know you mention Congo and Ethiopia in the book; have you gotten a chance to compare the “cultures” behind the adoption industries in various countries? Is this a case of one racket fits all?

ES: There are certainly parallels that can be drawn between the developing countries that have served as “sending” countries for adoption: endemic poverty; a lack of social structures or programs supporting women and families; deep-rooted corruption. Many, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Guatemala, are postwar societies that have struggled with socioeconomic and governmental stability.

I’d say the “racket” is quite simply the lack of regulation—not abroad, but here in the United States. These gaps in oversight mean that child buying, selling, and trafficking for the purpose adoption can still happen today, with little consequence. No adequate legal framework exists in the U.S. for prosecuting adoption crimes, aside from trying to prosecute adoption agencies or facilitators based on money laundering or tax evasion charges. The definition of human trafficking relates exclusively to either forced sex or labor. There are good arguments both for and against expanding that definition.

During my research, I filed numerous public records requests for official U.S. government communication around the issue of adoption fraud. It took three years, but the State Department finally sent me hundreds of pages of previously-unreleased cables. I compiled them into a collection, The U.S. Embassy Cables: Adoption Fraud in Guatemala, 1987-2010, which exposes the U.S. government’s struggle, for over 20 years, tried to navigate the demands of providing fast “customer service” to adopting American families while avoiding complicity in cases of presumed child trafficking. The book of cables is available from www.findingfernanda.com or Amazon as one 718=page paperback or a 3-volume ebook.

R: I saw Adoption Today’s positive review of the book on the FF website. How has the adoption industry at large reacted to the stories you brought to light?

ES: Finding Fernanda has gotten a very positive reception from the adoption community; and I’m very surprised and happy about that, as I tried to make this book widely accessible. My colleague E.J. Graff from the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism warned me beforehand about the probability of receiving hate mail from adoptive parents after writing what some may call a “negative” adoption book. It pleases me to no end that adoption advocates are able to understand this book; to read it and take away information. If there’s a takeaway to Finding Fernanda, it’s that ignorance can and does perpetuate abuses.

Buying and selling children isn’t just an issue to the adoption community—it’s a basic human rights issue. We as Americans need to hold our own government accountable. Through the late 1980′s and 1990′s, the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City faced serious problems related to adoption. As Guatemala’s adoption industry began to grow, so did fraud. Women mysteriously turned up dead. Unknown people relinquished children they weren’t related to. Adoption lawyers, whose profit margins depended on volume, acquired “orphans” in any number of creative ways.

R: Regarding your initial conversation with Betsy Emanuel, you wrote that you didn’t understand “how adoption hooked some families.” How close was the answer you got to Melissa Fay Greene’s statement that “we simply wanted more kids”?

ES: It was pretty close! Betsy felt called to adopt. Many other adoptive parents I spoke with related a similar sentiment.

R: Staying with Greene’s statement, it sounds like she came around to thinking about her own privileges and how those played into the adoption game. Did the Emanuels–who undoubtedly had their hearts in the right place–make any similar realizations during their experience?

ES: Betsy’s experience with Fernanda, and then Mildred, was an eye-opener for her in many, many ways. She was forced to confront the ugly side of adoption: entitlement, imperialism, greed, selfishness. She went head to head with people she had considered to be close friends and community when she chose to speak out. She lost friends in doing so.

Both she and Mildred are regular women, who made mistakes, acted naively at times, and then had to face the consequences of their actions. Their story is painful but important. Through the experience of Fernanda and her baby sister’s kidnappings, both women lost a great deal of innocence. Yet they both, Mildred especially, found an incredible amount of inner strength and bravery.

Today, Betsy Emanuel is much more savvy and worldly than she was before. She’s still so very warm, loving, and spunky as hell, but she’s definitely also more cynical; she’s lost her ability to blindly trust. The same is true, perhaps more so, for Mildred. She lives in constant fear that someone will take her children away from her again.

R: And speaking of privilege, companies like CCI seem to play on that, as much as a parent’s heartstrings, what with their focus on adopting children as part of “God’s plan” and whatnot. Is that a fair assessment?

ES: I’d say so. Many of the Christian adoptive parents I spoke to selected adoption agencies based on faith and the desire to do business with those who shared their values.

R: Finally, could you give us an update on the Alvarados? When was the last time you heard from Mildred? Have you gotten to talk much to Fernanda and Ana Cristina?

ES: I heard from Mildred this fall. She had a bad dream, about J. and I getting kidnapped and killed in her neighborhood, and she called to make sure we were OK. Communication isn’t easy: she had to have her sister take her to an internet café, pay to use a computer, and then send us an email asking to call her, since she didn’t want to write the dream out. I’ll be returning to Guatemala later this spring and will be see her then.

Today, Mildred and her family are doing well. Both kids continue to heal. Fernanda is still a beautiful little girl, she’s still crazy for Pollo Campero fried chicken and she attends school. Ana Cristina doesn’t really talk much, she’s a very quiet child. Both girls are close to their other siblings, too.

The last time I saw Ana Cristina, we were standing in Mildred’s patio, and one of the family’s two chickens strutted past. Ana Cristina reached out, quickly, and grabbed it—this tiny kid, who at age four still teeters when she walks and struggles daily with the aftereffects of severe trauma– she caught a chicken, effortlessly. Then she looked over at Fernanda, holding the bird, and grinned.

Felecia Young remembered the day she walked into the Forrest County Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. with her 11-year-old son, 9-year-old daughter, and mother on August 17, 1998.

The streets were barricaded. Buildings and streets showed the faces of police officers who were on site in case of a riot. An Aryan organization had threatened to demonstrate. But Young was determined to bear witness.

She and her children found seats in the balcony of the humid, packed courthouse.

“We sat in the balcony area, way up high,” Young said. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that area open, but they had to open it because there were so many people coming that there wasn’t any where to sit downstairs.”

Young is a black woman, born and raised in Hattiesburg. She attended high school there and graduated from the local college, the University of Southern Mississippi.

After serving six years in the Air Force, during which she visited or lived in 13 countries and earned the rank of captain before her commitment was fulfilled, she returned home, where she and her husband decided to raise their family. It was there where she became familiar with the Ku Klux Klan and its acts of violence. And the charismatic leader of the Klan’s Mississippi White Knights, Sam Bowers, was perhaps the most hateful person of them all.

At the courthouse, Young felt anxious, anticipatory, and inquisitive at beginnings of Bowers’ trial – his fifth trial, in fact, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer Sr. 22 years earlier. She wanted to take in the moment. Most of all, she wanted her children to see Bowers and to remember people like him are real. They exist.

“I wanted (my children) to have that historical perspective,” Young said. “A lot of people have sacrificed their lives so that you could have a better life than they had had.”

Bowers’ hate of all colors and creeds not his own was well known in the South.

“Sam Bowers lived a life consumed with hate for African Americans,” Vernon Dahmer Jr. told the New York Times in 2006. “He caused a lot of pain, suffering and death for many individuals and families in my race. During his life, he never apologized or asked for forgiveness for his actions.”

For Young, the Klan was not an urban legend but very real, frightful terrorist organization. She recalled the terrifying moment when it became real to her as a child.

“At some point, we had some people come by, some white people drive by our house,” she said. “My grandfather was sitting on the front porch with his walking cane in his lap. And they stopped. They slowed down and stopped like they were going to do something. We think they thought he had a shotgun or some kind of gun in his lap, and they drove off real fast.”

Dahmer was a grocery store owner and a known civil rights activist, allowing blacks to pay their poll tax in his grocery store, paying for the right to vote. Bower had threatened to punish the elder Dahmer if he didn’t put a stop to his efforts. Like others in Hattiesburg, Dahmer refused. Others like Peggy Jean Connor.

Connor is Young’s mother. She also allowed Hattiesburg’s black citizens to pay their poll tax at her business, Jean’s Beauty Shop at 510 Mobile Street, and knew of Dahmer’s work in the community.

Connor, who turns 80 years old in October, became a licensed beautician at 14. She began another career after her salon went out of business, as a nurse technician at Forrest General Hospital, and held it down for 27 years.

She was secretary treasurer for the Council of Federated Organization in 1963, while teaching citizenship classes for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at True Light Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. She was executive secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was arrested for picketing in front of the Forrest County Courthouse in 1964. She sued the governor of Mississippi – and, on May 31, 1977, she won. Two years later, she received the Carter G. Woodson Award for Courage in Civil Rights.

And, at the time of Bower’s threats, she paid the poll tax.

(l-r) Marie Blalock, Peggy Jean Connor and Vassie Patton. Courtesy of RJ Young

“During that time, you had to pay poll tax to register to vote before you could vote,” Connor said; the tax had to be paid for two consecutive years in order to qualify for registration. “So we were trying to collect poll tax from people who were afraid to go to the courthouse to pay their poll tax.”

And people did. They trusted people like Connor and Dahmer to go in their stead to the courthouse to pay their poll tax for them. But the Klan didn’t choose to come after Connor and her family; it chose to go after Dahmer and his.

The poll tax was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937. Mississippi was one of five states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Virginia, that upheld the poll tax. The twenty-fourth amendment, which sought to outlaw the poll tax, was submitted to the states for ratification on Sept. 24, 1962. The amendment’s ratification came on Jan. 23, 1964, outlawing the poll tax in federal elections.

Of the 50 states, Mississippi is the only one to reject the twenty-fourth amendment. The Supreme Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional in all state elections with a 6-3 vote in 1966, but that decision came a few months too late for Dahmer.

On Jan. 10 of that year, two cars full of white men in white hoods spilled 12 gallons of gasoline on his home under the cover of night. His wife, Ellie, and two small children awoke to the sound of gunfire and the sight of black smoke. Inhaling smoke and badly burned, Dahmer defended his family against the hooded attackers and did his best to extinguish the flames, but there was too much damage. Both his home and his store burned to the ground.

The next morning, Connor said, she went to see the remains.

“It was still smoking,” she said. “I went to the hospital to visit him and he and his daughter were in the room together. He was in one bed and she was in another. And he was talking. I was just shocked when I heard that he had died. It hadn’t been an hour when I left the hospital and heard that he was dead. I couldn’t believe that.”

Dahmer died the next. He was 57. President Lyndon B. Johnson later sent a telegram to his wife, Ellie, expressing “deep concern and shock” over the attack.

“His work was in the best tradition of a democracy,” the President wrote. “His family can be justly proud as his work was a fine example of good citizenship.”

Young heard about the crime from her grandfather, John Henry Gould. She was eight years old.

“I was really small,” she said. “But I was really aware of the Civil Rights Movement and what my mama and my granddaddy where trying to accomplish. I remember somebody coming by to tell my grandfather that Vernon Dahmer had been killed and burnt out.”

Bowers was convicted of murder by a jury that consisted of six minority jurors and sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after his crime. He died in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 82.

In the wake of Dahmer’s death, the Civil Rights Movement came into its own and permanently adjusted the lens through which race and class are viewed. It has ushered in much needed legislation and forced elected officials to become more transparent and vigilant while in office.

Hattiesburg elected its first black mayor, Johnny DuPree, in 2001. After achieving reelection twice, he is still in office. Last year, DuPree became the first black person to win a major party nomination to run for governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction, and he, like Connor, has urged young people to vote. But Connor is worried that the right to vote has become so impressed upon young people that they have become numb to it.

“It worries me that right here in Hattiesburg (young people) don’t think it’s necessary for them to do that,” she said. “You have to just plead with them to go and register. And then after registering, you have to beg them to go and vote.  A lot of people don’t think it was as bad as it was back in the Fifties and Sixties.”

But perhaps there is hope for this generation:  Circle, the center for information and research on civic learning and engagement, reported 23 million Americans under the age of 30 turned out to vote in 2008. The Times reported young black voters led all ethnic groups in voter turnout for the first time ever.

The socioeconomic results of the Civil Rights Movement could be best depicted in the lives of Connor’s two grandchildren. Both attended a predominantly white elementary school, Presbyterian Christian School, in that same Hattiesburg.

The 11-year-old son, this writer, has graduated from the University of Tulsa and is beginning his last semester of coursework in route to his master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma. The 9-year-old daughter is now majoring in biosystems and agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State University.

Neither child has ever been convicted of a crime. Both are registered voters. Both exercise that right.

CeCe and several friends, all black, were walking to the grocery store on June 5th, 2011 when white adults standing in the patio area of a South Minneapolis bar started screaming racist and transphobic slurs at the youth. CeCe, who is only 23 years old, approached the group and replied that she and her friends would not tolerate hate speech. In response, one of the white women said “I’ll take you bitches on” and smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. The broken glass sliced all the way through CeCe’s cheek. A fight ensued between the adults and the young people after this initial attack and one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

As if it were not sufficiently tragic that a group of young people were subjected to such severe violence and that Dean Schmitz lost his life, police arriving at the scene arrested CeCe, denied her adequate medical treatment, interrogated her for hours, and placed her in solitary confinement. In the aftermath of being attacked, she was not treated with care, but launched into another nightmare. The only person arrested that night, she has since been charged with two counts of 2nd degree murder. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has the power to drop these charges, a choice he made in multiple other clear instances of self-defense this year, but he has not yet done so.

CeCe’s story is a portrait of the United States Criminal Justice System. Her story is what is meant when we are told that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, experience disproportionate rates of police harassment, profiling, and abuse. She is living one of the stories rolled into statistics like: trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than cisgender (not transgender) people, or nearly half of African American transgender people have spent time in jail or prison.

These statistics are the result of the all of the ways that transgender people, especially transgender people of color, are denied access to the resources and opportunities that we need to live healthy lives free of violence, discrimination, and oppression. Transgender people consistently experience high levels of harassment in school, extreme levels of unemployment due to discrimination and lack of education, denial of competent medical care, inability to change identification documents, and disproportionate violence and harassment. Nevertheless, for generations transgender people, especially transgender women of color, have been at the forefront of movements against police brutality, white supremacy, economic injustice, and for queer liberation and gender self-determination.

CeCe is one of these leaders. She is the everyday hero that is the college student, working her way toward the career of her dreams. She is a femme icon, reminding her many friends and loving community that it’s never the wrong time to look fabulous, even as she is unjustly held in jail and awaiting trial for unwarranted charges. She is the center of a growing community of supporters in Minneapolis and nationally, inspiring action and solidarity in our joint struggles to (in her words) “be able to help and comfort someone who is unsure about his or her own sexual identity and preference…eliminate people’s fears of being victims of hate crimes and domestic violence…[and] help someone to accept and be comfortable as whomever they choose to be.”

Today, we are faced with the opportunity and the obligation to challenge racism and transphobia. Locally, we have and will continue to support CeCe every step of the way- from ensuring she has access to hormones in jail to packing the courtroom at every one of her hearings. Nationally, an increasing number of support groups and individuals are following CeCe’s case and demanding that Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman drop the charges against her. In Minneapolis and the rest of the country we aren’t only watching Freeman; we are standing up beside CeCe, a leader in our community, and waiting for him to do the same.

For more information and new developments: http://supportcece.wordpress.com
To tell Michael Freeman you support dropping the charges against CeCe
call: 612-348-5561
email: citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us
fax: 612-348-2042

By Arturo R. García

Basketball fans are well-acquainted with stories about a local star who never got to show their skills outside the neighborhood courts.

And make no mistake, Tayshana Murphy was on her way to bigger things. As Grantland’s Jonathan Abrams wrote:

Mention a court in New York City — West 4th, Rucker, Orchard Beach — they don’t just know of Tayshana “Chicken” Murphy. They know her. She possessed that killer crossover and played “man strong,” as Taylonn, her father, likes to say. Tayshana loved contact. “Babies,” she called the girls who helplessly bounced off of her when she drove to the rim. She played taller than her 5-foot-7 and with a fierceness that contrasted against her gentle, hazel eyes.

Those eyes sized up Shannon Bobbitt of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever this summer.

Bobbitt conducts a clinic every year outside the Harlem projects where she grew up. The clinic is a way for children to see the footsteps she laid for them to follow. Bobbitt had heard of Tayshana and that she could ball. She probably had no idea that the high schooler was itching to test her skills against the professional.

“She’s fast as hell, Pops,” Tayshana told her father of Bobbitt. “But she’s so little. She can’t handle me. I’m too big for her.”

Murphy’s story came to a premature and violent end on Sept. 11, when she was shot and killed in the Grant Houses project where she lived. Initial reports said the shooting was a case of mistaken identity stemming from a feud between residents of the Grant Houses and the nearby Manhattanville Houses – a story her family refuted.

Three men have been arrested and charged in connection with Murphy’s murder: Tyshawn Brockington and Robert Cartagena, who allegedly shot her, and Terique Collins, accused of delivering the murder weapon. But since her death, details have emerged adding more layers to the tragedy.

Less than a month after Murphy was killed, WABC-TV reported that homophobic graphitti had been written and drawn on the wall near the stairwell where it happened. Yet, as Mecca Jamilah Sullivan observed in The Feminist Wire, Murphy’s sexuality and how that may have factored into her death was not being talked about:

The D.A.’s indictment press release doesn’t mention the homophobic comments or the possibility that anti-gay hate played a role in the crime. Even the New York Times article on the Grant-Manhattanville feud, which quotes another 18-year-old woman as Murphy’s “girlfriend” leaves the issue of homophobic hate silent, focusing instead on Murphy’s foreshortened basketball career. One exuberantly homophobic blog even goes so far as to say that the love of basketball turned Murphy gay. The message of all these sources is clear: Murphy wasn’t really a black lesbian; she was an athlete. And her loss should be mourned accordingly.

According to Bridgette P. LaVictoire at LezGetIt, the hate speech on the wall opens up another possibility.

“Even if Tayshana was not lesbian,” LaVictoire wrote after the graphitti was found, “there is always the possibility that she was murdered for just appearing to be lesbian, and because of a view of women that puts such an athletic woman into danger because of a patriarchal view that women should be far more submissive an far less athletic.”

It’s important to note that Murphy’s family hasn’t commented on her sexuality. But Sullivan’s point stands: coverage of the case has not mentioned whether authorities intend to prosecute her murder as a hate crime. (All three defendants have pled not guilty.) And stories reflecting on her life, whether at her wake or at an event named after her, have kept the focus primarily on the court.

Though the family’s right to privacy is unimpeachable, it may have opened the door for another, more problematic narrative to emerge: the New York Post reported this week that Murphy was part of a female gang, pointing to it as an example of “good girls recruited by neighborhood gangs into lives of violence, where carrying weapons and committing crimes is as commonplace as shooting a free throw.” There’s no source mentioned other than some mysterious “cops,” and the bulk of the article focuses on a whole other case.

But the story is already getting posted verbatim on other sites.  If it gets enough momentum, it’s not hard to imagine that in a trial it could be used as a way to paint Murphy as an Angry Lesbian Gangbanger – to define her life by hate, and put her sexuality, however she defined it, on trial as much as the men accused of killing her.

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

Mythili Rajiva is associate professor of Sociology at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on girlhood, the Canadian South Asian diaspora, and racialized identities. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Canadian Review of Sociology, Girlhood Studies and Feminist Media Studies. She is the co-editor of Reena Virk: Critical Perspectives on a Canadian Murder.

BCP: Why a book on Reena Virk?

MR: The idea of working on the case had been in my head from about 2004 onwards, maybe because of a shift in my own identity from being a graduate student just starting a ph.d. in 1997 to where I was in 2004, finishing my thesis. I think it was Salman Rushdie who once said that the journey creates us; writing a thesis on South Asian Canadian girls’ experiences of racism in adolescence made me realize how much I cared about social justice issues.

The case had always haunted me, but up to this point, it had been at a visceral level. When I started analyzing it through the scholarship on racism and identity that I’d read for my thesis, I realized the case mattered to me deeply, both at a personal as well as a political level. But when I started doing research, I found very little academic work.

What little there was, was excellent, and informed much of my thinking around the topic; but the scholars who were offering a more complex and critical reading of the case seemed to be writing into a void, as if no one was listening. It seemed even stranger to me that such a highly publicized case would not be taken up at the very least by criminologists or other researchers in a more sustained fashion. But it wasn’t. Before we published this collection, the only book available on Virk’s murder was Rebecca Godfrey’s True Crime novel, which, as a couple of authors in our collection point out (see Atluri; also see Byers), offered a problematic re-telling of the story.

So I was reading this great scholarship, and wondering why there wasn’t more, and then I met Sheila and we talked about doing some kind of project together. I decided that we needed to encourage more critical scholarship on this case, a next generation so to speak, and even more crucially, we needed it not to disappear from public view, as most academic work does, in a single article in a journal or book. I initially considered a special issue in a journal, but this didn’t seem to offer enough scope, especially since I felt that anything written on the case would have to locate itself in relation to the earlier material. I wanted to bring both the existing and new material together; I think like any solidarity movement, there’s strength in numbers. People are more likely to pay attention to a bunch of people yelling about something than one person, right? So that’s where I got the idea for the book, and then all I had to do was talk Sheila into it, which wasn’t that hard!

BCP: What was the process in putting this book together?

MR: Once we decided we were going to do a book, and that it was going to be an anthology that included the existing material, we got in touch with the scholars and asked if they’d be willing to have their work included as reprints. I have to say that they were incredibly gracious and very supportive of the project from the beginning. Then we sent out a call for papers on the internet, on both social activist and scholarly websites. We got a lot of responses, and some great abstracts, and for awhile we were worried that the project was getting too big.

However, like with any project, life happens; not everyone who originally signed on was able to complete but we were really pleased with the final chapters. Our job as editors was to shape the process and guide the work along, but our contributors really made the substantial contributions.

BCP: How long had you been thinking about ReenaVirk before the book came about?

MR: As I’ve already mentioned, the case had been in my head since it first happened, kind of like those terrible stories you hear and no matter how much you try to excise them from your mind, they linger. It was also a personal thing. My thesis subject was on South Asian girls and racism, and I was a South Asian Canadian girl who had experienced racism in childhood and adolescence, in the form of racial epithets or having “friends” make racist comments or jokes around me.

Obviously, though painful in their own way, I’m not saying that my experiences are comparable to Virk’s, but I think it’s important to point out that they’re on a continuum of racism that people of colour have experienced and continue to experience in our supposedly tolerant and multicultural country. The book is about making links between the ordinary everyday experiences of racism and the more serious acts of violence against people of colour. So I was personally invested in the case, from the beginning.

BCP: Who, or what, are your influences and reasons for doing this kind of work?

MR: That’s tough because there have been so many. But I could name a few scholars that have given me a theoretical lens through which to interpret my own struggles with belonging, as a racialized minority girl growing up in a primarily white society.

Frantz Fanon’s moving work on the pychic violence of racism; Homi Bhabha’s writing on the “unhomeliness” of the immigrant experience and the trauma of the ordinary: when who we choose to love, where we are allowed to sit, what streets we are allowed to walk down etc. become points of political contestation; Chandra Mohanty’s beautiful call to arms, “to make feminist analysis dangerous to empire”, which I sincerely hope is part of what we’ve done in this book; and queer feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s work, especially her post 9/11 writing, where she asks what role grief plays in the service of the national imaginary; why we grieve for some lives but not others, and how we might conceive of a politics of grief that does not justify violence, and retaliation but instead recognizes the mutual vulnerability that constitutes us all as human beings, that we are all capable of being injured and committing injury. According to Butler, “the struggle against violence accepts that violence is one’s own possibility.”

An ethical stance in the world is, therefore, about recognizing one’s own rage and then seeking to limit the injury you might cause through this rage.

BCP: The book is raw at some points, challenging, honest, and stimulating. What are you as co-editor trying to convey to your readers with these 9 selected essays?

MR: So many things but I guess, overall, I want readers to re-think the discourse of violent girls on the playground perpetuated by the media and certain “experts”. Instead, I would like them to think about how Reena’s life and death are a troubling reminder of the racism that pervades Canadian culture, as painful as that may be to acknowledge.

When “we”, which is to say, members of the dominant group (white, Christian middle class, Anglo Canadians), view certain groups as “immigrants” regardless of how long the community has been in Canada; when we see brown or black skin as the opposite of “Canadian”; when we construct certain communities as having barbaric cultural practices without looking at our own social problems, we create an “us” and “them”, with the former being constructed as superior. It’s a seamless transition then to treating those we think don’t really belong as second class citizens. And this sense of superiority is false anyway.

The Canada that we think we know through our mythologies (“the true north, strong and free”, the peacekeeper, the multicultural democracy), is a nation founded on the brutal exploitation and marginalization of indigenous peoples, built through the labour of many migrant groups, not just French, English or European, but people of colour, some of whom paid the high price of alienation, explicit state racism and even violence and death. This history has to be acknowledged so we can have a radical revisioning of what makes someone a “real” Canadian.

BCP: How long were you working on your essay “The Killing Season: Interrogating Adolescence in the Murder of Reena Virk”? Can you briefly give the crux of it?

MR: I wrote and presented a draft of the paper in the fall of 2005 at a conference on child rights, so the final chapter was a long time in the making and went through several iterations before it was published in the book. The main argument is that the Canadian media’s ubiquitous descriptions of growing girl violence and the refusal to ask whether social relations such as race, gender, class or sexuality played a part in the murder, were influenced by a discourse on adolescence pervasive in North America.

So, when incidents like the Virk murder take place, we have a moral panic where people talk about girls becoming more violent and adolescents in general being out of control with boredom, hormones and a lack of moral subjectivity. This really pathologizes teenagers, as if they are the only ones capable of bullying, aggression and murder.

Last time I checked, adult society was winning that competition, but this reality gets erased systematically in news coverage. The teenagers involved in the case were treated as if they symbolized the degeneration of youth in general. But who raises youth? Who schools them? Who offers particular media frames and images up to youth that tell them who belongs for what reasons? Who implicitly encourages the social and peer hierarchies that develop so strongly in adolescence? Adult society does, and then it wants to blame young people as solely responsible for violent behaviour.

For example, children and adolescents don’t learn racism in a vacuum. Sure, children identify differences among themselves at a very young age, but at what point do they realize which differences are important and which are not? They learn it from parents, teachers, larger culture and peers. They pick up very quickly that adult society values certain people and not others, and then they create their own social hierarchies that are partially informed by larger social relations. But this can’t be acknowledged at a societal level, because then we would have to say we are actually not doing a great job of raising children who see others as equals, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality or ability. In the Virk case, this played out in the media’s refusal to acknowledge racism as even a possible motive. The handful of times that racism was raised in either tv or newspaper articles, it was immediately dismissed, as if it was impossible that these white kids could be racist. They could be vicious, murderous and without remorse, but not racist, because of course, then that might mean that the larger adult society that they were learning their values from, was racist too.

BCP: While reading the book I had to put it down several times because of them descriptions of the murder and the horrific way the media represented the case. Was writing and putting the book together a painful experience?

MR: Yes it was a very painful experience. I didn’t realize how hard it would be when I started.

I was reading and watching all the media, and encountering the brutality that characterized the case. I think being forced to live day in and day out with a recognition of the horror that people are capable of inflicting on one another left some scars. On the other hand, I think that my reaction also speaks to my own first world, middle class privilege. My life is, and has always been, far removed from contexts of brutal and violent domination; I know that a significant portion of the world, including people in Canada, are not so lucky. Violence is simply a daily part of their lives.

So the case threatened my comfort zone, and that is a good and necessary thing for people with any kind of privilege to experience. I felt a similar wrenching at the end of the project.

Alongside a pride in the work and relief at its completion were worries about whether I had ever had the right to embark on this project, and whether it was fundamentally exploitative – stealing Reena’s voice, as it were. I spent a lot of time thinking about this as we wrapped up the introduction to the manuscript as well as a lot of time interrogating my own privilege in relation to Reena. I think none of that is particularly surprising; it’s a form of survivor guilt for those of us whose identities are not simply fashioned through the myth of the western liberal subject. Women, racial, sexual or other minorities, those people who belong to marginalized groups, are always seen and see themselves as something more than individual selves. Their “I” is always linked to a “We”.

In my case, being second generation and South Asian, and experiencing racism growing up, was what made me feel a connection to Reena Virk, a sense that this could’ve been me. But part of my discomfort stemmed from the fact that alongside my marginalization, I had certain forms of privilege that Reena didn’t have access to and, so, in another sense, maybe it couldn’t have been me. I think it’s both my marginality and privilege that pushed me to do this book in the first place, and it’s where I think real social change has to take place. It’s not enough to focus on the forms of marginality we encounter as individuals or groups. As black feminist scholar bell hooks points out, we also have to acknowledge and surrender our own privilege and participation in forms of domination, if we want to change the world.

BCP: What was most disturbing to me was the fact that Reena was not only erased in books and media, as was race, and Reena was not being mourned. The focus, and sadness, was that white girls were on a social decline as opposed to a young Brown woman being killed by such girls and a boy.  What disturbs you most about this case?

MR: I think you’ve summarized exactly what I find most disturbing. Whenever I saw or read media reports on the case, I would feel so angry. While Virk’s image appeared repeatedly, and her tragic story was re-told, it was always through a politics of pity; she was presented through a framing that implicitly constructed her as an Other; as not belonging to Canadian peer culture because she didn’t look like a “normal” girl. She was killed because she failed to fit in. For myself, and I think many other subjects who live their marginality through their embodiment ( racialized, transgendered, poor or differently abled bodies, to name a few), it was pretty easy to read the code behind this hegemonic storyline: she wasn’t thin, white, middle class, heteronormative, she wasn’t the ideal Canadian girl. But the media simultaneously used these images and storylines and yet refused to ask if there might be a problem with the ideal itself; that maybe a lot of Canadian girls didn’t “measure up” to this standard. That maybe the standard was racist, homophobic, elitist and ableist. They never asked if there was a problem with the ideal, just as they never explored whether a group of mainly white girls viciously beating up a Brown girl might raise some serious doubts about our success in fostering racial equality among children and adolescents, let alone in adult society.

BCP: Do you teach this case at your University? If so, what do you make sure your students get from your work? And how do you get them to understand the brevity and complexity of the case? How do white female students respond?

MR: I have taught the case a little bit recently as the manuscript was wrapping up. In some ways, I think I was too close to it, and living with it for a good four years made it kind of an obsession. I needed to have spaces where I could teach and think about other forms of oppression otherwise my concerns with social justice would’ve shrunk to this particular case. Some of the class discussions that did take place were difficult; like most Canadians, the students were horrified and felt very sad that this could’ve happened, but they wanted to keep it at the level that the people involved must’ve been monsters, rather than the murder being an inevitable, if extreme, consequence of both the history and contemporary reality of racism in Canada. The focus was often on whether or not the girls involved in the beating or its witnessing had ever said anything racist, because if not, clearly racism was not an issue.

The fact that Virk was an outcast, at least in part because she was brown, was something many students didn’t want to see. For some white female students, they pointed out that even among white girls, there is a lot of “mean girl” behaviour if a person doesn’t fit in in terms of looks, weight or clothes.

The Virk case for them was another example of this, rather than anything to do with racial belonging. One way I tried to get them to complicate this was to ask if there is an ideal girl image to which Canadian girls aspire. There was often a general consensus that there was, and then I would ask them to describe this girl as she appeared in their minds. After the descriptions, I would ask them whether the fact that this ideal girl was always white, often blonde, thin, middle class and heterosexual, told us anything about how difficult it might be to fit in if you couldn’t meet some or all of those standards.

I think this type of exercise was helpful, because some students did begin to see what I was trying to get at.

BCP: To me, Reena Virk was first a face without a name and later a name without face. That might be the case for many people. Why is there no picture of Reena Virk in the book?

MR: The media continually flashed one particular picture of Virk over and over again. We thought about using this picture maybe as a cover, but almost immediately felt that it would sensationalize the book. Many people are familiar with that picture, but we didn’t want to “sell” the book in this manner. We also did not want to use the picture because it seemed to us that Reena’s appearance was the focus of media attention and the implicit reason given for why this happened (she was awkward, a misfit etc.), yet this was not accompanied by any explanation of what she didn’t fit into. We wanted to move away from this line of thinking to focus on the systemic issues in the case.

BCP: Does the Virk family know about the book? Do the killers? Media and authors critiqued in the book?

MR: I don’t know whether or not the family knows. We thought about contacting them initially, but we also felt that as an act of scholarship, we needed it to be honest in ways that might not have pleased Reena’s family. I also don’t know whether or not Warren or Kelly knows about it. The mainstream media has, for the most part, ignored the book, which is not unusual for an academic book. Of course, given that it’s a searing critique of their hegemonic “take” on the case, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s why they’re not interested. But it’s hard to say.

Watch a roundtable discussion on the Reean Virk case with Rajiva’s co-editor Sheila Batachary, book contributor Tara Atluri, and community member Mandeep Kaur Mucina.

Compiled by Arturo R. García

Barring a last-minute change, Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed Wednesday at 7 p.m. EST for the murder of a Savannah police officer, despite reports that another person had confessed to the shooting, and seven of the nine witnesses in the original case recanting their testimony.

According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, prison officials denied a request Wednesday morning by Davis’ attorneys to allow him to take a polygraph test. An appeal has also been filed in Butts County, Ga., where the state’s death row is located, seeking a stay of execution, saying new evidence “exposes key elements of the state’s case against Mr. Davis at trial to be egregiously false and misleading.”

Davis’ case has attracted support from around the world, with #TroyDavis and #TooMuchDoubt hashtags becoming trending topics in various U.S. cities, and protests planned not only in the U.S., but in Europe. Supporters are still being urged to contact Chatham County Judge Penny Freeseman, the only person who can stop Davis’ execution.

The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me. This struggle is for all the Troy Davises who came before me and all the ones who will come after me. I’m in good spirits and I’m prayerful and at peace. But I will not stop fighting until I’ve taken my last breath. Georgia is prepared to snuff out the life of an innocent man.
- Troy Davis, The Nation

This case has attracted worldwide attention, but it is, in essence, no different from other capital cases. Across the country, the legal process for the death penalty has shown itself to be discriminatory, unjust and incapable of being fixed. Just last week, the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Duane Buck, an African-American, hours before he was to die in Texas because a psychologist testified during his sentencing that Mr. Buck’s race increased the chances of future dangerousness. Case after case adds to the many reasons why the death penalty must be abolished.
- New York Times

Courtesy of Savannah Morning News

The recantation of nearly all the witnesses in the case should give even the most serious supporters of the death penalty reason to pause. Whether Davis is innocent or guilty almost takes a backseat to the question of whether the judicial system operated in a way that gave a jury any hope of possibly answering that question in the first place.

Death penalty critics have often pointed out that seeking the death of an individual, even one guilty of heinous crimes, is not justice, its vengeance. Yet even that answer fails to satisfy the questions surrounding the prosecution and planned execution of Troy Davis. Even the vengeful would be unsettled by the true perpetrator of a crime going free while they vent their wrath on the wrong target.

No, what the Davis case indicates is that the death penalty is not a public policy — it is a faith, a belief system, a creed holding that fallible humans have been infallible in discerning guilt from innocence. And like most other true-believers, those who practice the faith of capital punishment are immune to all evidence to the contrary.
- Loop21

The surviving relatives of the slain officer presented a decidedly different front. They resolutely told the news media they believe Davis is a killer who deserves to die for what he did.

“He’s guilty,” MacPhail’s widow, Joan MacPhail-Harris, said. “We need to go ahead and execute him.”

“What a travesty it would be if they don’t uphold the death sentence, MacPhail-Harris said on Monday after the meeting with the board. “It’s time for justice today. My family needs justice. He was taken from us too soon, too early.”

As for the case presented by Davis’ legal team that Davis was wrongly convicted, she said, “It’s been a lie.”

MacPhail-Harris was flanked by her 23-year-old daughter, Madison MacPhail, and 22-year-old son, Mark MacPhail Jr., who were a toddler and an infant when their father was killed.

“A future was taken from me,” saidMadison MacPhail, unable to hold back tears. “The death penalty is the correct form of justice. … Troy Davis murdered my father, no questions asked.”
- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Where is Radiance Foundation co-founder Ryan Bomberger? His group recently erected billboards across Sacramento that say “Fatherhood begins in the womb” and show a black man kissing the stomach of a black woman who appears to be about eight and a half months pregnant. (Given that only 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy and the overwhelming majority of late-term abortions are performed to save the life of the mother, this visual makes zero sense.) Bomberger blames the “abortion industry” and “liberal feminism” for the “nationwide family crisis” of fatherlessness. But is Roe vs. Wade, Planned Parenthood and feminism the problem? Or is it a reckless, racist prison industrial complex that makes the threat of imprisonment so palpable to black men and women that witnesses in cases like Davis’s are willing to “give police what they want” to get the hell out of the station house?

- Colorlines

The persistence of such rituals in 2011 is reason enough to question the death penalty. But the racism that underpins it—along with the 138 innocent people released from death row—is the hallmark of a system that Americans increasingly reject as intolerable. This year Illinois, where a Republican governor once commuted 167 death sentences citing doubts over “the fairness of the death penalty system as a whole,” became the fourth state in five years to abolish it. Last year a comprehensive study found that 61 percent of registered voters favored alternatives to executions—and in death penalty states a majority of voters said that an anti–death penalty stance would not deter them from voting for a candidate;
24 percent said such a candidate would be more likely to get their vote.

Such evolving standards of decency were nowhere on display at the Reagan Library when the Republican faithful cheered Governor Rick Perry’s unprecedented execution record—234 then, 235 now—thanks to the bloodlust of a rabid Republican base. But without a strong alternative—a full-throated condemnation of the death machinery that still operates across the country—can opponents really claim the moral high ground?

For years Democratic politicians, whose party once opposed the death penalty, have embraced it as a suitable punishment for the “worst of the worst.” President Bill Clinton, who famously attended the execution of a mentally disabled man while on the campaign trail in 1992, went on to sign the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which greased the wheels of this death machinery by curtailing prisoners’ rights to appeal their sentences. Former Georgia Republican Bob Barr, who helped write that law ostensibly to curb “abusive delays in capital cases,” has since decried its effect—specifically that it has prevented “claims of actual innocence like Troy Davis’s” from being heard in court.
- The Nation

Courtesy of MSNBC

I support the death penalty, and have for a long time. And I am not making a judgment as to whether Davis is guilty or innocent. But surely the citizens of Savannah and the state of Georgia want justice served on behalf of MacPhail, the police officer.

Imposing a death sentence on the skimpiest of evidence does not serve the interest of justice. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles did not honor the standards of justice on which all Americans depend by granting clemency. In doing so, it will allow a man to be executed when we cannot be assured of his guilt.

That was the final admirable principle standing between Davis and his scheduled death by lethal injection Wednesday. And the parole board did not uphold it.
- Former U.S. Congressman Bob Barr, on CNN.com

Troy Davis may be out of options in the justice system but he is not out of options in the realm of humanity and common decency. A life can still be spared and whatever standards or criteria are required by the justice system can be made more humane by way of an executive decision. Executive action is needed now, not an execution.

- Asian Pacific Americans of Conscience (via Angry Asian Man)

A decision is expected today on the fate of Troy Davis, the Georgia man seeking to avoid the death penalty for the 1989 murder of Savannah, Ga., police officer Mark MacPhail.

Davis is currently scheduled to be executed on Wednesday. But even as Davis’ past attempts to clear his name have been rejected in the court system, seven of nine witnesses in his case have recanted their prior statements, with many of them saying their testimony was tainted by police pressure.

One of the two witnesses who has not recanted his story, Sylvester “Red” Coles, has been implicated in the crime by the other seven in subsequent affadavits.

Davis’ plight has inspired at least two songs: in the first video, “I Am Troy Davis,” rapper Jasiri X lays out the case over the beat from Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y),” while questioning the state of Georgia’s judicial system:

The system’s broke so fixed
2 decades no Christmas
Execution dates 4 listed
get organized show resistance
go online sign those petitions
Black Americans know the difference
It’s a new day but the same old lynching

The second, “Song for Troy Davis,” by singer/songwriter Nellie McKay, is mostly fueled by audio from news reports regarding the case and a statement from Davis himself:

This is Troy Anthony Davis, and I’ve been sitting on georgia’s death row for 16 years for a crime i did not commit. It’s a struggle for me and my family, as well as the victim’s family, who I sympathize with dearly. Because they have been cheated out of justice, just as I have. Because of Amnesty’s [International's] assistance, I am still sitting here alive today being able to have a conversation. I want to continue to urge you to sign the Amnesty petitions. This situation could have happened to anyone, but it needs to start with me.

Davis’ plight has attracted more support for him over the past few days, with another protest scheduled for Tuesday morning in Atlanta.

Besides Amnesty International, groups like Color Of Change and the NAACP have also joined the efforts to spare Davis’ life. If they are successful, it would be the second high-profile execution to be stayed in the past two weeks, following a Sept. 15 order from the Supreme Court delaying the execution of Duane E. Buck in Texas, based on racially-biased testimony against him by a prison psychologist.

Update: The Associated Press is reporting that Davis’ bid for clemency was rejected by the Board of Pardons and Paroles. You can e-mail the Chatham County District Attorney’s office here, or by phone at 912-652-7308 to request a stay of execution for Davis.

But in the wake of Mr. Hill’s death, the BART police department is once again facing disapproval, similar to what it endured after Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III in the back at the Fruitvale station in Oakland in 2009. That case touched off riots and looting last year after Mr. Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Mr. Mehserle was released from jail last month after serving 11 months of a two-year sentence.

BART has not released the names of the two officers who confronted Mr. Hill. But one of the officers was not carrying a Taser, officials said. Neither officer (one is a six-year veteran, the other has been on the force for 18 months) had received crisis-intervention training.

Asked if the officers were adequately prepared for the confrontation, Chief Rainey said, “Absolutely.” But critics said Mr. Hill’s death was a direct result of the agency’s slowness in making changes after the 2009 shooting.

“There’s been a two-year struggle to reform BART,” said Anne Weills, an Oakland lawyer who represents victims of police brutality. “They’ve made no effort to open themselves up to the public, to hire and screen people or to train people to adequately deal with these situations.”

BART officers have shot and killed six people since the agency was founded in 1972; three of the shootings occurred during the past three years. The police force for Atlanta’s transit system, which employs 321 officers, has had two in the last three years; the New York Police Department’s transit bureau, with 2,400 officers, has not had a fatal officer-involved shooting in at least 10 years.

- From “In San Francisco, Latest BART Shooting Prompts New Discussion of Reforms,” by Zusha Elinson and Shoshana Walter

Thanks to the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress (APAP) for the heads-up: you can now watch the seminal 2009 documentary Vincent Who? for free online at vincentwhomovie.com through the end of July.

The film will also be screened live on the following dates:

Friday, July 8, 8 p.m.: Renaissance Hollywood Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif. Salon 5/6. Free screening as part of the inaugural Japanese American Citizens League conference.
Wednesday, August 3: Queens College, Queens, NY. Details TBA.
Saturday, August 13, 10 a.m.: Detroit Chinese Community Center, Detroit, Mich.. Free screening as part of the Asian American Journalists Association national convention.

Of course, we also encourage you to buy the DVD. If you’re not familiar with the film or the story behind it, here’s the details:

VINCENT WHO? (2009, 40 min): In 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit by two white autoworkers at the height of anti-Japanese sentiments. The culprits received a $3,000 fine and no jail time. Outraged by this injustice, Asian Americans around the country galvanized for the first time to form a pan-Asian identity and civil rights movement.

VINCENT WHO? explores this important legacy through interviews with the key players at the time as well as a new generation of activists impacted by Vincent Chin. It also looks at the case in relation to the larger narrative of Asian American history, in such events as Chinese Exclusion, Japanese Internment, the 1992 L.A. Riots, anti-Asian hate crimes, and post-9/11 racism. Ultimately, the film asks how far Asian Americans have come since the Chin case, and how far we have yet to go.

Note: Trigger Warning

Since the days of Prohibition, Juarez has been a place for First World visitors to come and indulge in any number of illicit pleasures (alcohol, guns, drugs, sex). It is also the site where global capital has been making a killing to the tune of billions of dollars in annual profit…Because pollution laws are conveniently lax, the factories can emit fumes and dump waste without much concern or coversight. For all these reason, the U.S.-Mexico border has been made into something of an international sacrifice zone.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard about the women who were being sexually violated, horribly mutilated, and discarded like garbage in the desert surrounding Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The femicide that has claimed the lives of hundreds of women–with thousands more unaccounted for–began in 1993, although no one can really know for sure. Looking at several of the time frames listed in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera and doing the math, I was stunned to realize that I’ve been hearing about this femicide for at least fifteen years now. Over the years, I’ve been even more stunned to learn how many people still don’t know that the murders are even taking place.

To give a brief overview: since 1993, hundreds of women have been found in the desert, deserted lots, and landfills, as well as in more public areas. Mexican government officials and various NGOs estimate that around 350-600 murders have occurred, though there’s no way to get an exact figure, especially since thousands of women have disappeared without a trace over the years. The youngest of the (known) victims are five years old and the oldest are in their seventies, but most of the victims are teenagers and young women in their early twenties, many of whom worked in maquiladoras along the border. Before dying, many of the women suffered through various forms of unimaginable cruelty–stabbings, burnings, beatings, rape, genital mutilation, breast mutilation. Because of the nature of the murders, the femicide has often been sensationalized by the media. But as one of the book’s contributors, a forensic psychologist named Candice Skrapec, writes:

[The crime scenes in Juarez] are like what we see in North America in cases involving the sexual violation of the victims…the motive may be less sensational, and, in fact, more like what we are accustomed to seeing: sexual violations of victims for purposes of personal gratification on the part of the offenders who then discard the bodies.

Yet to this day, the crimes continue to go unpunished. As more information about the femicide came to light, the victims were the ones who were initially blamed by the government, police, and the media for their own murders and disappearances; they were rumored to be prostitutes or wild girls who liked to stay out and party, leaving themselves vulnerable to attack.

Many of the victims were young women from rural areas in Mexico who had come to Juarez to find work in the factories; this influx of young women and the increased demand for a female work force challenged traditional gender roles, and the femicide was portrayed by many to be a result of this disruption of patriarchal norms. In the essay titled “Gender, Order, and Femicide,” the authors write:

If, for women, entrance into the paid labor force often meant acquisition of greater independence, increased status within the family, and freedom to socialize outside the home, it also underscored a process that required local and complex negotiations regarding how these changes would be understood and implemented….To the extent, then, that the failure of maquiladora development began to be written in terms of men’s absence from the maquilas, women workers were cast as a problem rather than another exploited group within Mexico’s struggling development plans, and all women became a target for male resentment.

Perhaps because I was born and raised on the Texas-Mexico border, perhaps because, for the entire time I’ve been aware of the femicide, I’ve also been in the age group that most of the murdered and kidnapped young women fall into, I’ve always felt drawn to the horrific events taking place in and around Juarez. One of the first papers I wrote in grad school was an analysis of media representations of the murdered women. I traveled to Juarez for that project (though I had been there before years earlier with my family), walking around and looking at the black crosses painted on pink backgrounds throughout the city in remembrance of the murdered women. In the years since, the only reports of violence in that area that I hear about have been related to drug cartels, and I’ve often wondered what effect this sharp increase in violence has had on the femicide and its (in)visibility to the rest of the world.

When I heard about Making a Killing, I was immediately drawn to it. Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Georgina Guzmán have put together a powerful book. Though it is mostly academic in nature, Making a Killing also has a very human aspect to it that might appeal to non-academic readers.

The book is divided into three parts: “Interventions,” “¡Ni Una Mas!,” and “Testimonios.” Part One provides a socioeconomic examination of the murders. Taking the effects of the global economy, NAFTA, the prevalence of maquiladoras along the border, and the influence of patriarchal ideals into consideration, this section gives readers a closer look many of the key factors that have allowed the femicide to continue. Part Two takes a closer look at the local and global activism that has developed in response to the femicide. The final section of the book gives some of the victims’ mothers a chance to speak out about their personal experiences. In this section, a forensic psychologist, Candice Skrapec, explains the femicide from a forensic perspective. An artist, Rigo Maldonado, closes this section with his testimonio on activism through art.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into detail on each essay in the book, though a full review can easily be written on every one. Instead, I will say that Part Two, ”¡Ni Una Mas!,” especially appealed to me. This section contained many critical readings of feminist and activist responses that have taken place over the years, and it raised many questions about ethics and the “othering” of the victims and their families. In 2004, for instance, a large V-Day march was organized by Eve Ensler. In “The Suffering of the Other,” the authors write:

[W]hen the call for the V-Day march was received, questions circulated in private conversations: What for? Isn’t it too late? Why not last year, when three more victims were found? Why not seven years ago, when we were struggling to prevent more murders? Why after hundreds of victims? Why’s benefiting from this march? Far or unfair, this is how the majority of the local activists felt and how they structured their feelings. The spirit had its reasons…[Several local NGOs] openly appropriated and misued Eve Enslers’ V-Day event in Juarez by erasing the main objective of agloval movement destined to stop violence against women and girls.

The authors, who themselves participated in the march, were also introspective about their involvement in any “othering” that may have occured as a direct result of the march. They raise many important points about privilege and the practices of using a victims’ pain in order to further one’s cause. This quote in particular stood out to me:

Juarense women cannot be seen as a homogenous group of “Third World subalterns.” This (mis)representation has had serious implications in that privileged women in the locality have been uncritically and socially constructed as the benefactors when they, intentionally or not, have perpetuated oppressive practices toward underprivileged women in Ciudad Juarez.

Other essays that were of high interest to me were the ones on the victim-blaming in government femicide awareness campaigns, as well as those that critically examined media representations of the victims. The mothers’testimonios in Part Three were also powerful–and painful–to read.

The only thing I wish the book had included is an update on the current status of things. Rarely a day goes by when I don’t hear about Juarez in the news, but all of those news reports are related to the cartel-related violence that claims the lives of thousands of people in the city each year. Though that, too, is a narrative that cannot and should not be ignored, it seems that reports of femicide-related news have been subsumed by those related to the drug wars. Because of that last fact, I am all the more grateful that this book was published.

By Guest Contributor Stacia L. Brown, cross-posted from PostBourgie

I was home for the holidays when Phylicia Barnes went missing. My immediate family—all women, now four generations deep, with the birth of my daughter— huddled around the small kitchen TV, listening to local news anchors explain the facts surrounding Barnes’ disappearance: black high school honors student from Monroe, NC comes to Baltimore, filled with excitement at the prospect of strengthening her relationship with a half-sister she barely knew and was likely eager to impress. During her visit, the sister, Deena, age 27, allows Barnes to drink alcohol and smoke marijuana—practices her mother expressly forbade at home. Barnes was last seen alive at her half-sister’s apartment; the only other person in the home at the time was the sister’s ex-boyfriend.

Perhaps the most chilling thing about this incident is how relatable the circumstances are. Family comes up from down south all the time, hoping for a bright lights-big city experience before heading back to the slow-ambling comforts of home. One half-sibling wanting to establish a bond with another, after only just discovering she had half-siblings in the first place? Also pretty common. An older sister who barely knows her younger one not being as protective as she should? That’s a familiar scene. A mother tentatively encouraging her daughter to connect with her estranged father’s side of the family, in an attempt to be a supportive, inclusive parent? Not uncommon.

For it all to end in a disappearance and, as of April 21, the discovery of Barnes’ body floating in the Susquehanna River, is all the more devastating, because we can easily put ourselves in the positions of at least one party involved in this tragedy.

Reportedly, on the afternoon that she went missing, Barnes had planned a day trip, errand-running and bonding with another sister who lived in the area. She’d gotten dressed and confided her plans to the ex-boyfriend of the sister she was staying with. He was said to have called out of work that day, deciding to stop by the apartment to do his laundry while his ex was at work.

Who among you hasn’t stayed with a friend or relative, only to find yourself alone in a room (or the whole house) with an acquaintance of your host, an acquaintance who’s completely unfamiliar to you? It’s one of the most vulnerable feelings in the world. Can you trust this person, on the strength of his relationship with your friend/family? Or should you be as wary as you’d be with any complete stranger?

At 16, Barnes likely wouldn’t have had the instinct to distrust this dude on sight; surely, her sister wouldn’t give someone potentially threatening access to her apartment when she wasn’t home, right? And even if she was naturally suspicious, she wouldn’t have known the city well enough to just set out on her own; that would’ve been jumping from the frying pan to the fire.

As a viewer, I knew pretty early on that this wasn’t going to end well. The case immediately reminded me of Marciana Ringo, a Baltimore eight-year-old who went missing nine years ago. (Wow. I just realized how long ago this was. Ironically, if Marciana had lived, she too would’ve turned 17 this year. Phylicia Barnes’ 17th birthday was in January, mere weeks after her disappearance.) Ringo’s soon-to-be-stepfather, Jamal Abeokuto, claimed to have dropped her off at school without incident on the morning that she went missing; eleven days later, her body was found in the woods. Within weeks, Abeokuto was arrested—and eventually convicted—for killing her.

That’s how a lot of missing persons cases involving blacks in Baltimore resolve. It’s rare that someone is kidnapped and later safely returned. Often, by the time the case is closed, someone the victim knew, at least tangentially, is arrested and/or convicted in connection with the killing. According to The Baltimore Sun:

In Baltimore, a person is reported missing nearly once a day — police investigated 352 reports last year, and found all but four people. Those who were not found, police believe, were killed in domestic or drug-related disputes. Most victims had something in their past — a bad relationship, a link to nefarious activities or people — to which a motive could be attributed.

Even Barnes’ mother, Janice Sallis, who arrived in Baltimore, after calling the Deena to check on Phylicia and finding out that she couldn’t be found, was steeling herself for the worse. I remember watching her on the local news, commenting on how despicable it was for whoever had taken her–she was certain she hadn’t run away or wandered off alone–to take advantage of the young girl. “If she’s alive,” she said, “she’s scared to death.” The “if” was significant; Sallis knew the odds.

Still, the Barnes case had its distinctions from other missing persons cases in Baltimore. First, Barnes was an out-of-towner. It’s probable that the Baltimore police felt a particular pressure to solve the case because of this. Because Barnes knew so few people here, it was difficult to find leads and suspects. Aside from the ex-boyfriend, there were no clues. At one point in the investigation, a family member reported that the 16-year-old had texted to say she was leaving the house to find a meal before her sister arrived to take her out, but she didn’t mention whether or not she was alone. If this were the case, then her killer could be anyone she might’ve encountered on the walk. By extension, the killing of a tourist could bring substantial bad press to the area.

Initially, the opposite was true: there was very little press on Barnes’ disappearance at all. But as the trail grew colder, Sallis became more visible in her quest for answers, and missing persons billboards went up in search of Phylicia, a campaign began to garner national attention. Chief spokesperson for the Baltimore Police Department declared, “Phylicia Barnes is our Natalee Holloway,” as he expressed bewilderment about the dearth of national coverage.

It worked; Sallis’ appearance on the national news circuit. The FBI joined the search. Search efforts redoubled.

It’s a common complaint that the disappearance of black women in this country is rarely treated with the same gravitas and public outcry as the disappearance of white women. This belief fueled the coverage campaign for Barnes and, eventually, yielded yesterday’s results. Though initial autopsies were unable to reveal the cause of Barnes’ death, hopes remain high that the recovery of her body will result in the necessary leads to find her killer.

For my part, the disparities between these of these incidents of disappearance don’t end at news coverage. The resolution of this case only confirms something I’ve long been taught by my foremothers: black girls are least likely to survive the adolescent experimentation with which every teen finds herself confronted. The wrong car ride, the wrong walk to the corner, the wrong party invitation, the wrong sleepover at the wrong house can get us killed.

In addition to hoping for justice, I also want this case to ingrain the following message: vigilantly guard your own safety, even among friends, even among family. There is no guarantee that they’ll do it for you.

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

Four white boys. One Cree girl.

Four cowards. One warrior.

Two white boys given immunity, one acquitted, one handed a life (?) sentence. A stolen and erased Aboriginal sister joins her ancestors. An Aboriginal community saddened and silenced:

This is the Helen Betty Osborne murder, court case, and disgrace.

Journalist Lisa Priest starts her sympathetic and problematic book Conspiracy of Silence by saying, “November 13, 1971 was cold and miserable.”

The cold and misery continued for sixteen-years until the four white boys were finally taken to trial; and November 13, 2011 makes it 40 years since Osborne was killed. Really, the cold and misery started hundreds of years ago when white settlers from Britain and France invaded Turtle Island (now known as Canada).

Cold was the act of murder by four boys in Manitoba’s community known as The Pas. Cold was the conspiracy of silence by the white townspeople, police, and politicians of The Pas for sixteen years! Cold was the attitude and beliefs of white people before, during, and after Osborne’s murder. Cold is the reality of violence against Aboriginal women in Canada, USA, and the entire Western Hemisphere that goes uninvestigated and unpunished by police and governments.

Priest starts her account with the finding of Helen Betty Osborne’s body by a father and son on a fishing trip. Osborne’s naked body and black boots are all this writer wants to retell. Priest describes in detail the horrific scene of what was once a vibrant 19 year-old girl turned into a lifeless, unrecognizable body.

Pages fourteen to sixteen are hard to get through: descriptions of the body alongside police reports and views are shared. Pages fifty-six to sixty are even harder to read: the description of the events that happened before, during, and after the murder told alongside the coroner’s diagrams and analysis of the murder.

The sensationalist cover of the book is a warning in itself: a bloody screwdriver.

Priest started her reporting career at the Windsor Star, moved to the Ottawa Citizen, and later covered the Helen Betty Osborne murder case for the Winnipeg Free Press. Conspiracy of Silence, her first book, is the outgrowth of her coverage of Osborne’s brutal killing and the trial of her killers.

Doing what conventional journalists do, Priest, a white woman, gives you the dirt that most people want to read — it’s her training, her job, and her cultural background. There is a sympathetic tone throughout; there is good investigative work on every page; there is the sense of exposing a wrong that needs to be justified; but there is also Priest’s own unchecked assumptions and racism.

The “cold” in the first line of Priest’s book is transferred to her zombification of Aboriginal women:

Native women hung out on the streets…they had been waifs who had been turned out on the street either because their parents didn’t want them or because they cost too much to feed. They were neither beautiful nor attractive. They craved affection in any form…They were malnourished, with dried eyes, prematurely wrinkled faces, and round bellies due to starchy diets of bannock…They stood leaning sloppily to one side. Some of them sniffed glue to get over the beating from the night before, but all were helpless because they had nowhere to sleep except under the railroad bridge

At times like these you wonder what Priest is trying to do. Does justice come through villainous jabs? Is empathy practiced through disempowerment? Is truth to be exposed through sweeping, racist statements?

None of the Aboriginal women this writer knows fit Priest’s description. Published in 1989, the description of Aboriginal women in Conspiracy of Silence is a part of the larger conspiracy to keep the epidemic of the 800+ MISSING and MURDERED Aboriginal women of Turtle Island from the world. Canada, a safe haven for millions who come from other lands, is unsafe for the life-givers of the original peoples. If and when news gets out that Aboriginal women are under attack with the support of government and police inaction, the response given is a description like the one Priest gives, along with blame laid on the women.

One of the biggest things activists both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal are fighting is the stigma of Aboriginal women that Priest promotes in her book. In a book that is supposed to fight the problem, Priest willfully adds to it.

And big media wonders why there is such distrust by Aboriginal peoples.

Such distrust is hundreds of years old, resulting from a reality that many peoples globally know all to well: colonization. Throughout her book Priest recounts the distrust of white people, men in particular, by Osborne. And she lays the setting well for such distrust. The Pas was white and brown with the two sides not getting along. Priest describes situations that many Canadians do not know of, and which are thought to be practiced by Americans down south, not here in Canada:

They [Aboriginals] sat on the left side of the theatre — the only seats Indians were allowed to take. Otherwise they ran the risk of being kicked out or the usher would make a point of embarrassing them by loudly directing them to the other side, to the sneers of most whites

Priest follows her movie theatre description with the many names that Osborne and The Pas’ Aboriginal community were called regularly:

• “f-cking squaw”
• “dirty Indian whore”
• “potato”
• “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”

It’s no wonder Osborne did not trust white people: As Priest describes that relationship, “To her, The Pas resembled every cowboy and Indian movie she had seen,” writes Priest. “Natives were merely the Bulls-eye in a town dartboard.” In Osborne’s case, darts were not used; two screwdrivers were the instruments of choice by four white boys looking for some fun.

There are no mug-shots of Osborne’s killers in Priest’s book. The four boys — Jim Houghton, Lee Colgan, Dwayne Johnston, Norm Manger — are shown with smiles, wearing shirts and ties, looking more like avid church goers as opposed to the drunk rapists and murderers that they are. Is the effect to show that anyone can do such a thing? Or that the boys were the complete opposite of how Priest describes Aboriginal women: dirty, desperate, drugged up and lost?

The one photo in the book of Helen Betty Osborne is that of a reserved girl sitting with her hands on her lap. Priest paints a good picture of her. Osborne is described as “strong willed, bright, and humorous, someone who knew how to have fun.”

Osborne was also studious and a success story on her reserve, Norway House, a Swampy Cree community.

To Priest, Osborne is the one Aboriginal who was worth something and describes her as the complete opposite of the zombies she portrays Aboriginal women to be. “She was pretty, domestic, traditional, very pleasant are rarely traveled without her black-beaded rosary,” she writes. Osborne did drink and was in the drunk tank a few times but she was not down in the dumps the way Priest describes Aboriginal women to be.

For a book that is about the murder of an Aboriginal woman, much of the book is focused on the four killers and their lives before and after the murder. Priest gives in depth information on their childhoods, education, relations with townspeople, and their marriages and jobs during the sixteen years after Osborne was killed.

What is greatly missing from Priests book are the lives of Osborne’s family and her community in the sixteen years after she was gone. What did they do? How did they go on after Osborne was killed? How did Osborne’s murder affect future generations? Why focus on the white people and leave out the Aboriginal side?

There are things Priest points out that reflect issues still present today:

1. Native and Metis women felt unsafe around white men after Osborne’s murder
2. The Native community felt cops and government did not pursue the case the same way they would if it was a white woman who was murdered
3. 40 percent of peoples incarcerated in the prairies at the time were Aboriginal. That figure has now risen to 70 percent.
4. White people of The Pas lived on like nothing happened
5. The case, Priest says, “reeked of racism” with its “police laziness”

A major point made in the book is that Osborne was not a victim. She was a warrior who fought four men the best she could. The killers are quoted at various points telling how Osborne never gave in to their requests for sex and never gave up trying to escape through throwing punches at her kidnappers and yelling for help until her end.

“No white man will ever have sex with me,” she yelled to her killers. She is described as having “resisted fiercely”, saying “No!” from the start, pushing away the bottle the killers were trying to force her to drink from, and exchanging punches with Dwayne Johnston: “Betty and Johnston swung at each other while she continuously screamed for help.”

Priest also takes the town to task throughout the book. She tells of how the entire town knew who the killers were and stayed quiet for ridiculous reasons. Steve Maskymetz, a friend of killer Lee Colgan, said to Lee after he confessed about the murder, “I know about it — everybody in town knows about it … Maskymetz said he didn’t go to the police because he thought they already knew about it and, if they didn’t, it wasn’t his responsibility to tell them.”

Would it have been Maskymetz’s responsibility if four Aboriginal men killed a white woman?

A desk clerk at a hotel in The Pas is quoted as telling a reporter during the trial, “It’s nothing we aint heard before,” referring to the town knowing about the murder all along.

According to Priest, Lee Colgan bragged to the town about killing an Aboriginal woman, glorifying the murder through detailed accounts at parties, bars, and one on one conversations with people. Priest aptly describes the conspiracy of silence she named her book: “The townspeople, now familiar with gossip that Lee Colgan, Jim Houghton, Dwayne Johnston, and Norm Manger had been involved, were tight lipped with the Mounties.” As Priest writes, that knowledge didn’t stop the townspeople from carrying on as if nothing had happened: “The rumors however, didn’t stop townspeople from talking to the boys and their parents or inviting them out to parties, dinners, and Sunday barbecues: they just never mentioned that very unfortunate evening.”

Unfortunate? That is a large understatement. And how could the white townspeople live with themselves? Priest makes it obvious how Aboriginal women were not valued by the white people of The Pas. Again, her descriptions of Aboriginal women did not, and do not help matters.

Priest does point out a reality that held then and holds now: If the killers murdered Osborne for fear of police and townspeople finding out they had kidnapped an Aboriginal woman and tried getting her drunk so as to rape her, there was no need. During the trial, George Dangerfield, the Crown Attorney for the case, said “…do you think that anyone would have taken any real note of her complaint.”

The tone Priest’s writing conveys is one of a town that saw Osborne as the victim of her own demise, the implied reasoning being that if she had allowed the four men to assault her, she would have survived. Under this worldview, Aboriginal women have no rights, should comply to what white people want them to do, and are expendable sex objects for white men.

An all-white jury was chosen for the trial of Dwayne Johnston and Jim Houghton. Lee Colgan and Norm Manger were given immunity in exchange for their testimonies. Houghton was found innocent due to a lack of of evidence. Dwayne Johnston was given a life sentence with eligibility of parole after serving ten years.

Conspiracy of Silence is titled appropriately. Priest tells the story of the most well known case of an Aboriginal woman murdered in Canada and how a town helped cover it up. Sadly, there are over 800 more, and counting, who have experienced, and will experience, similar brutalities like the one Helen Betty Osborne did. A new book linking all this would be great.

Questions do remain: How does Priest view Aboriginal women today? Has she checked her own racism and sweeping generalizations? What does Priest think of the 800+ Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada? How many more Aboriginal women in The Pas or nearby towns have been murdered or gone missing since Helen Betty Osborne? What is life like now in The Pas? Have Aboriginal and white relations improved in The Pas? Where are the Helen Betty Osborne’s killers now? Do people know they killed a woman and got away with murder? Have the police in The Pas changed the way they investigate violence against Aboriginal women? How are Osborne’s family and community doing today?

Priest’s summation of the case is as apt of the title: “Justice failed Betty Osborne; four white boys and a silent town conspired against her,” she writes. “A foreign world stole her dignity little by little, until finally, it killed her. Then it tried to ignore her murder.”

By Arturo R. García

Kelley Williams-Bolar was released from jail on Thursday, a day ahead of schedule. But the attention – and outrage – over her case shows no sign of ending anytime soon, even garnering notice from some celebrities.

Williams-Bolar had originally been sentenced to 10 days in jail, out of a possible five years, on Jan. 18 after being convicted of forging documentation allowing her children could attend school in a more affluent, mostly white school district than the one she resides in in Akron. Williams was also required to two years of probation, and ordered to complete 80 hours of community service.

According to Change.org, which has been petitioning Ohio Governor John Kasich to pardon Williams-Bolar, her father said her decision to enroll her children in another district was made because of concerns over their safety – her house had been broken into, he said, and she’d had to file 12 different police reports because of crime in her neighborhood – and not the educational quality of her local schools.  Williams-Bolar told WEWS-TV, “When my home got broken into, I felt it was my duty to do something else.”

Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove, who delivered the sentence, told the Akron Beacon Journal that Williams-Bolar received jail time because local county prosecutors rejected lesser sentences:

Cosgrove said the county prosecutor’s office refused to consider reducing the charges to misdemeanors, and that all closed-door talks to resolve the case — outside of court — met with failure [...]

Cosgrove said numerous pretrial hearings were held since last summer.

”The state would not move, would not budge, and offer Ms. Williams-Bolar to plead to a misdemeanor,” the judge said in an interview Wednesday.

”Of course, I can’t put a gun to anybody’s head and force the state to offer a plea bargain.”

County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh declined requests from the Beacon Journal to respond to the judge’s comments.

Cosgrove also said she was not responsible for Williams-Bolar’s conviction preventing her from earning her teaching license, a process she was 12 credits shy of completing, and that she would write a letter to the Ohio Board of Education asking it not to revoke her license.

‘I did not mandate or order that her teaching license be suspended or revoked,” Cosgrove said Wednesday. ”That is absolutely inaccurate.”

Cosgrove said Williams-Bolar’s nonviolent felony offenses do not necessarily mean that she will lose her teaching certificate. She said Ohio law only states that a felony conviction ”may” be grounds for such action.

The judge said the Ohio Department of Education will hold a hearing and make the final decision ”whether or not they will revoke her license.”

”I have nothing to do with that as a matter of law. Once she was convicted by a jury of any felony, that conviction has to be reported to the state, and then it’s up to the state at that point in time to decide whether or not they’re going to revoke her license,” Cosgrove said. ”This is the Ohio legislature who wrote this law, not [this] court.”

Cosgrove said her reading of the statute leaves open the possibility Williams-Bolar can be a teacher ”because she was not convicted of an offense of violence [or] offenses of moral turpitude.”

In the week-plus after Williams-Bolar’s initial sentencing, her case became the latest cause célèbre out of Ohio, following the Ted Williams story late last year. Actor Donald Glover discussed his own empathy for her on both Twitter and tumblr:

This really hit me close to home because my mom did the exact same thing to make sure I got into a school where I could experience something as small as going to a county fair or just studying around people and places I felt safe.

One day the school found out and kicked me out. My mom argued with the principal for an hour, but I ended up going to a very shitty school for a couple years.  It sucked.

This sucks FAR more.  It really makes no sense.

Questlove, the twitter-active drummer for The Roots, also drew attention to the Change.org petition:

In the wake of her release, Williams-Bolar will reportedly seek to appeal her conviction, while the Akron chapter of the National Action Network has started a donation drive to pay for her legal fees. In another indication of how much attention the case has gotten, the Rev. Al Sharpton has agreed to help the Akron NAN in its’ efforts.

By Guest Contributor Eric Arnold, cross-posted from Colorlines

I am hip-hop!—KRS-One

I am Oscar Grant!—anonymous graffiti

As the Oscar Grant saga has played out over the past 22 months, the Bay Area hip-hop community—a multi-ethnic, multi-generational coalition of musicians, visual artists, activists, students and ‘hood kids—has stood at the forefront of the movement to hold police accountable for his death. Within a day of the New Year’s morning 2009 shooting, Oakland rapper Mistah F.A.B. and singer Jennifer Johns recorded a tribute song, which addressed not only the shooting, but the larger issue of violent deaths of young black men at the hands of police.

Over the past months, F.A.B. and Johns’ initial response has grown in the hip-hop world to encompass rallies, benefit concerts, panel discussions and lectures, spoken word ciphers, blog and vlog posts, even bike rides in honor of Grant’s memory. When former transit cop Johannes Mehserle’s trial was moved from Alameda County to Los Angeles, youth activists and organizers in L.A. picketed daily in front of the courthouse. It’s not a stretch to say that Grant has become the Lil’ Bobby Hutton of his generation—a young black man, killed by a police bullet, who has become representative of a larger struggle for self-determination.

“People have kept Oscar Grant on the public’s mind,” says Boots Riley of the Coup.

So, why? What has made Oscar Grant so resonate within the hip-hop community?

For one, as Riley says, “There’s no sidestepping the egregiousness of the act. It was a brutal murder.” But Grant’s youthfulness also can’t be ignored. Just 22 when he was killed, Grant was part of the hip-hop demographic. When other youth looked at pictures of him, they saw themselves, their siblings and their friends reflected in his toothy grin, black hoodie and watch cap.

Police accountability has long been a theme in hip-hop. For decades, rappers have decried racial profiling, brutality and corruption by law enforcement officers. Yet those efforts have been undermined on a national level by rightwing coalitions whose targeting of gangsta rap has also caught activist emcees in their crosshairs. By focusing on violent, sexually explicit lyrical content, hip-hop’s critics have muddled rap’s accountability message—while major labels, commercial radio and cable TV have shied away from promoting political themes in rap. As Mistah F.A.B. says of his Grant tribute (“My Life”), “The major corporations who have the ability, they’re not gonna play a song like that. That’s the last thing they want to do, is rally the troops.”

But while hip-hop’s engagement around police accountability may not have coalesced into a national movement, it has taken hold in the Bay Area’s activist-infused environment, where social justice and hip-hop have long overlapped.

The Bay’s unique combination of street-level organizing and numerous independent hip-hop groups that are unafraid to express themselves politically has come together around Oscar Grant. According to Riley, “The organizing hasn’t really stopped.” He adds: “I don’t accept this idea that people are apathetic.”

The legacy of Black Power is well-evident in Oakland, where ex-Black Panthers have become parents, in many cases, of hip-hop generationers. Add the Bay’s history of radical labor and student protest movements, and you have an explanation of why its hip-hop community has maintained a grassroots awareness and political consciousness not always present in major urban areas.

The Panther influence has clearly rubbed off on rappers like F.A.B., who says he recorded the Grant tribute out of respect and concern for the community. “Instead of going out and ignoring [the issue],” he says, “I felt I needed to bring awareness to it outside of Oakland, Calif., and outside of the Bay Area.”

F.A.B. adds that while he’s known for his street anthems and party songs, “There are many people who don’t know that I do conscious songs, uplifting songs, community awareness songs.” His tribute to Grant, he says, “got great reviews from family members and close friends of his.” And he certainly helped bring national attention to the cause by wearing an Oscar Grant t-shirt during an appearance on BET.

But F.A.B. wasn’t just riding the Grant bandwagon to boost his own fame. He solidified his grassroots status by appearing at a rally held at the site of Grant’s death—the Fruitvale BART station—a week after the incident, when the community was still in uproar and before Mehserle had been charged with a crime.

Other local musicians, including Zion-I and Kev Choice, volunteered their services to perform at subsequent justice rallies held in downtown Oakland, where many of the crowd donned Oscar Grant masks. I am Oscar Grant.

When ranks of police assembled in the Oakland streets, a young, dreadlocked African-American man bravely confronted a phalanx of officers dressed in full riot gear. Laying down in front of the officers with his hands behind his back, symbolically recreating Grant’s last action before his death, the gesture made for a powerful image, one widely circulated by mainstream media outlets. It was a scene reminiscent of the student who faced the tanks at Tiananmen Square—with a hip-hop twist.

In the weeks and months that followed, F.A.B. was joined by many other Bay Area rappers who also referenced Grant in song, from socially-conscious artists like Choice, Ise Lyfe, Native Guns, D Labrie, and The Burnerz to turf-identified rappers not usually associated with cries for justice, like AP.9 and Beeda Weeda. Instead of telling us to dance, sell drugs, get stupid, or wear clothes we can’t possibly afford, the emcees who tackled the Grant topic were  reporters for GNN—Ghetto News Network—giving listeners a street-level perspective sorely lacking in much of the mainstream press coverage.

Their influence eventually extended across cyberspace—over 2,400 YouTube videos were tagged with “Oscar Grant” and everyone from Pittsburgh rapper Jasiri X to the Vancouver website GetGrounded to the Helsinki music blog Multitunes weighed in on the issue. As the legal process played out, constant hip-hop updates reacting to new developments in the case—from the shooting to the verdict to the sentencing—kept the community engaged.

Grant’s memory was also kept alive by the efforts of numerous graffiti artists; the motto “I Am Oscar Grant!” began appearing all over Oakland, along with aerosol renditions of Grant’s now-iconic face. One of the more notable visual representations of the Grant movement was a huge mural painted on plywood sheets—ironically erected to deter possible rioters—at the Youth Radio offices at the corner of 19th Street and Broadway. The mural’s creators, known collectively as Trust Your Struggle, are a multiethnic group of artists, activists and graphic designers who had painted another mural in New York after they heard the news of the shooting.

Another example of hip-hop activism around Oscar Grant has been the numerous community-engaging events thrown by West Oakland non-profit Bikes 4 Life. In July, B4L’s annual “Peace Ride” led a 300-strong contingent of cyclists to the Fruitvale BART station for a candlelight vigil.

“We see ourselves as agents for change,” explains B4L founder Tony Coleman. “Everything that we do, since we hip-hop, it just has that flava. And we use that to our benefit, because we’re able to reach those other folks that are also a part of that hip-hop culture.”

What differentiates Oscar Grant from Bobby Hutton, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Michael Stewart, Aiyana Stanley-Jones and the many others who have died at the hands of police is the fact that his death was captured on video and posted on the Internet for the world to see. This, too, speaks to Grant’s relevance to the hip-hop generation.

Since its inception, one of hip-hop culture’s underlying themes has been repurposing technology as a tool for community empowerment. In an age of cell-phone cameras, social media and viral Internet memes, technology in the hands of the people has the potential to impact both the legal system and mainstream media perspectives—as the Grant case has shown.

The emergence of eyewitness videos depicting the events leading up to the shooting, as well as the actual incident, not only fueled public outrage, but changed the tone of media reportage around the case. Had Karina Vargas and the other BART passengers who documented the events that fateful New Year’s Day acceded to police demands to hand over the footage, it’s not only possible, but probable that Mehserle never would have been brought to trial.

During the trial, defense attorney Michael Rains’ tactics were fairly typical of such cases. Grant, he seemed to argue, was a petty thug whose disobedience caused his own death. But the most powerful testimony of all remains in the public mind. Over and over again, civilian videos have contradicted police testimony. Grant’s uncle Bobby Johnson has said the picture taken with Grant’s own cell phone, showing Mehserle with his Taser drawn minutes before he un-hosltered his handgun, is what ultimately brought some measure of justice for his nephew.

Mehserle’s conviction, even for the minimum charge of involuntary manslaughter, will be remembered as a win for the police accountability movement. But it’s also a win for the hip-hop community. The fact that hip-hop has continued to organize around Oscar Grant for almost two years restores faith in the culture’s ability to promote social change, if not systemic reform.

I am living in Toronto for the summer, where the press is going wild over a local case of sympathy-fraud:

Ashley Anne Kirilow, a 23-year-old Burlington native, admits she faked cancer, ran a bogus charity and collected thousands of dollars from hundreds of people. She shaved her head and eyebrows, plucked her eyelashes and starved herself to look like a chemotherapy patient. She told anyone she met she had been disowned by drug-addicted parents, or that they were dead. Both parents are alive and well, each in separate marriages with three young children… While volunteers claim she raised $20,000, she said it was less than $5,000.

Since this newspiece a fourth fraud charge has been added to Kirilow’s list.

Kirilow is young, thin, sweet-faced and white: over the year that she convinced people to donate money to her cancer cause, she was given trips to Disneyworld and took a paradise trip to Australia; she is alternately described as an angel and a princess.

When I first saw this news case, I thought to myself (yes, rather cynically): there is no way that anyone other than a young, attractive, normative person could have pulled this off. If Kirilow had been—for example—fat, in her 30s, plain-looking and homeless, few would’ve given her the time of day. Much of Kirilow’s success seems attributed to the fact that she easily roused pity with her little lost girl story and her brave smile. Kirilow embodied a version of white womanhood that we want to believe in (or at least we’ve been socially conditioned to embrace it): pretty, plucky, determined, and in need of rescue.

Kirilow is a prime example of a sympathy grifter: a grifter who uses racist/sexist/classist/etc beliefs in their favor, to get money, affection and attention, or to (literally) get away with murder.

While Kirilow’s case has only covert markings of the way that biases around race, culture and gender enable fraud, another highly publicised “it wasn’t me!” case from a few years back was more overt: Belgian teenager Kimberley Vlaminck accused her tattoo artist, Rouslan Toumaniantz, of putting 56 stars on her face without her permission. The case got a huge amount of press which only escalated when it came out that Vlaminck had lied; all along she had requested the stars. This is the twist to this case:

The Belgian [Vlaminck] blamed the Flemish-speaking tattooist for not being able to understand her French and English instructions.

There has long been tension in Belgium between French and Flemish-speaking communities in Belgium: in other words, Vlaminck appealed to linguistic tensions to rouse sympathy for the fact that she’d had 56 stars tattooed on her face “against her will.”

And another sympathy grifter—Amanda Knox, an American student who was convicted of murder in Italy—deconstructed by my fellow Racialicious blogger Nadra Kareem:

I’ve no idea if Amanda Knox is innocent or guilty of the charges leveled at her—a jury’s already deemed her the latter—but some American journalists decided that she was innocent long before a verdict was reached. What’s disturbing about some of these journalists is that Knox’s race, gender and class background played central roles in why they considered her innocent…

While waiting to be interrogated, Knox reportedly did cartwheels. [American journalist Timothy] Egan chalks this up to Knox being an athlete. But if Donovan McNabb or LeBron James were being investigated for murder and did cartwheels during an interrogation, would their behavior be taken as that of a benign athlete or make them look unfeeling and flippant? Egan attempts to undermine Italy by making it appear as if sinister Italians were angling to punish this girl who not only reminds him of numerous girls from the Pacific Northwest but also of his own daughter…

…The problematic racial overtones in the reporting of the case not only involve Italians but black men. Following her November 2007 arrest, Knox wrote to police that bar owner Patrick Lumumba killed Kercher…Because of Knox’s repeated insinuations that Lumumba murdered Kercher, he spent two weeks in jail. Police ended up releasing him because he had a solid alibi. Lumumba sued Knox for defamation and won.

While Egan has mentioned that Knox mistakenly linked Lumumba to Kercher’s murder, he quickly let her off the hook for it, as did a commenter at women’s Web site Jezebel who remarked:“I don’t judge her for that at all. She was held in an Italian prison, questioned for days, and encouraged to ‘confess.’”

But to ignore Knox’s transgression on this front is to ignore the history of sympathetic (but guilty) white Americans fingering black men for crimes the men never committed. In 1989, for instance, Charles Stuart shot and killed his pregnant wife, Carol, but told police that a black man was responsible. Two years later, Susan Smith murdered her young sons but told police initially that a black man had carjacked her and kidnapped the boys.

A sympathy grifter succeeds (at least temporarily, since Kirilow, Vlaminck and Knox were all eventually caught in their lies) by using and fulfilling “positive stereotypes.”

A “positive stereotype” is any generalized belief about your gender, race, ethnic, class etc group that is positive, rather than negative. So for example, both the beliefs that Asians are intrinsically spiritual, (please see the Buddha of Suburbia) or that white women are docile, are positive stereotypes. I put quotes around “positive stereotype” because it is an an oxymoron to me, in that it is never positive to have a stereotype applied to you; whether a stereotype suggests something pleasant or unpleasant, it is a vast generalization that dehumanizes you and ignores who you are as a person.

There’s a huge range of people for whom sympathy grifting is just not possible: those for whom primarily “negative stereotypes” exist. It is fairly unusual for a young man of color to get away with sympathy grifting, since our cultural stereotype of young men of color is that they are violent and criminal. There are exceptions to this; for example David Hampton, the young gay black man that the the movie Six Degrees of Separation is based on.

While sympathy grifters then, more often than not, are young white women, Korean American Kari Ferrell—also known as the hipster grifter—hit the news pretty hard last year after scamming a total of $60,000 off of suitors and admirers, largely by fulfilling every hipster yellow fever wet dream across the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. Google her even now, you’ll find naked pictures of her on hipster news sites labelled AZN p****. On second thought, don’t google her.

Because a “positive stereotype”  is complete nonsense, a lie, it makes an excellent scaffolding for a web of lies. And while I have zero sympathy for Kirilow, Vlaminck, Knox, and Ferrell, I am fascinated by how they managed to turn stereotypes that delimited them, into weapons. A bizarre byproduct of each of these strange and sad cases is that all these women consciously or not (I’m going to go with not) punished their advocates for having preconceived cultural notions; their notions made them dupe-able.

While these women’s successes must have relied heavily on personal magnetism, I really cannot believe they would’ve gotten as far without the fuel of stereotype.

Just one more reason to dismantle the kyriarchy.

I took this white dude to the hospital seven years ago; he’d left his apartment door unlocked and then got pistol whipped when he came home to find someone going through his stuff.

Now why would I so clearly remember a minor injury from ages ago? Because in my eight years working EMS in Bed-Stuy, East New York, Harlem and the Bronx, that was the singular, solitary white patient I’ve had who was a victim of violence at the hands of a person of color.  I remember sitting in the Woodhull ER with him. He was holding an ice pack to his little forehead gash and going “God! I can’t believe I got pistol whipped! It’s like…it’s like a movie!” At that point I had already given up checking the newspapers in the morning to see if any of my crazy jobs from the night before would show up. They never do; the patients are all black and brown and their tragedies, no matter how gruesome, are automatically deemed run-of-the-mill and unworthy for news attention.

In general, the white patients we get are either little old ladies; drunks who tried to play frogger across McGuinness Boulevard; college kid anxiety attacks and overdoses. We also get the occasional “All these Black people are trying to rape and kill me so I can’t leave my apartment!!” and sometimes “I stopped taking my meds and I’m about to do something really really bad.”

All this is to say that the amount of time and energy that white culture puts into being afraid of the crimes that will be committed against them in the ghetto could be better spent thinking about something that actually happens.

For instance, white-on-black crime, which we see faaaar more frequently. A lawyer was interviewing me the other day for a case they wanted me to testify in. A patient I’d had who’d also been pistol whipped, also seven years ago, this time by cops, was suing the NYPD and this lawyer was trying to take apart the guy’s story.  He showed me a picture of a middle aged black man with a swollen lip and busted eye and asked me if I remembered him.

I had to laugh. “Do you have any idea how many times a week I go to the precinct to take care of black men who’ve been beaten by cops? Plenty. Times fifty-two times eight. No I don’t remember that dude.” Or the kid I met last night, who’d been cardoored by a police cruiser and then arrested before he could get up, all for riding his bike on the sidewalk. Or Iman Morales, who was naked on a fire escape in Bed-Stuy having a psychotic fit when PD tasered him, causing him to fall to his death. Or Sean Bell. Or Oscar Grant.

And then there’s the entire 81st Precinct of the NYPD, whose institutionalized racism was recently unveiled by a defecting whistleblower and thoroughly detailed here.

Most white-on-black crime happens without the majority of whites having to perpetrate a single violent act. Another unspoken benefit of white privilege is the ability to win without even having to fight. Gentrification, and the uprooting of communities that it entails, will happen regardless of how the incoming hipsters feel about their neighbors; the pieces are already in place, the gears turning. 911 doesn’t get called- it’s a slow motion race riot, which history has proven can be the most devastating kind.

Compiled by Site Lead Arturo R. García

A white former transit officer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter Thursday in the videotaped shooting death of an unarmed black man on an Oakland train platform in an encounter that set off days of rioting in the city.

Prosecutors had wanted Johannes Mehserle convicted of murdering 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was shot once in the back as he lay face-down.

The jury’s conviction on the lesser charge raised concerns of a repeat of the unrest that followed the shooting on New Year’s Day in 2009.
- KRON-TV

What happened to Grant is every black family’s worst nightmare for their children — especially their sons — in a country where racial profiling and police brutality of black folks is rampant and still unchecked. Being hassled by the cops for driving while black or in Grant’s case, breathing while black is almost a rite of passage for young black men. It usually happens somewhere in the neighborhood of 14-25. In my brother’s case, he was with a friend as a 16 year old just driving to another friend’s house when he was pulled over by a cop in our quiet Washington DC suburb, accused randomly & without cause of stealing the car and found himself facedown in a large intersection with a gun pointed at his head. It’s said here in the Bay Area that Oscar Grant’s mom actually encouraged him to ride the subway New Year’s Eve — because she thought it would be safer. There’s not a black mother in the United States, no matter your socioeconomic or educational level, who does not look at Oscar Grant’s mother and say — there but for the grace of God…goes I.
- Jack & Jill Politics

Photo by MC Kev Choice, musician (via Twitpic)

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when we have to take to the streets. I am down to march, chant, rally, block an intersection, commit civil disobedience- what ever it takes. But not just to make myself feel better. When we take to the streets, we should be saying what we want, clearly and resolutely- not just point out the problems but also demanding the solutions. I know too much to protest the sky, to mistake commotion for motion.
- Jakada Imani, Executive Director, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

There ABSOLUTELY were narcs up in that crowd. Taking pics, askin questions, pretending to blend in … and stickin out like a sore thumb.
- Jeff Chang, journalist

Photo by Aldrin Bulayo, photographer (via Twitpic)

Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts said two to four people had been arrested, but he expected the number to rise.
The arrests come after protesters broke into a Foot Locker near the city’s downtown.
Protesters have also set some garbage cans on fire.
- The Oakland Tribune

paraphrase corp news TV anchors: “OMG YOU GUYS FOOT LOCKER HAS BEEN LOOTED! THIS IS AMAAAAAAZING! ALSO, COPS ARE AWESOME!”
- Nora Barrows-Friedman, journalist

Stephen Allen, a 22-year-old protester from West Oakland, got caught near a mob that broke through the gate of the Foot Locker shoe store and looted the store of sneakers and sportswear. Moments later, a masked man, in one swift and violent blow of a long object, broke the window of the Far East National Bank across the street.

Allen was upset.

“Before the sun went down I was happy with everything,” he said. “It’s no longer about Oscar Grant. The people who went in there and came out with shoes; that’s not about Oscar Grant anymore. What we had before the sun went down, that was justice. This is just pure stupidity.”
- The San Jose Mercury News

“I’m not shocked,” said San Francisco resident Ian Slattery. “The whole case has been really troubling. I think communities of color in the East Bay in particular, and understandably, are upset. Not because of this one instance but because of how the police interact with communities as a whole.”

“This [verdict] makes it difficult to have any trust between the community and the police,” Slattery continued. “This matters to all Californians. Not just in our communities here but around the state.”
- Buzzy Times

To begin with, I do think it’s myopic to call this verdict a total miscarriage of justice. The district attorney pursued a case of a white police officer’s (admittedly blatant, caught-on-tape) killing of a young, black man, and then saw the case through to a guilty verdict. That’s more progress than we’ve seen in cases past (for e.g., in the case of Rodney King).

From that perspective, I’m heartened by this evening’s verdict. I’ve long believed that the answers to racial injustice in America are far more complex than our an eye-for-an-eye moral code could ever offer anyway. Mehserle is just one man — an individual who’s part of a much larger justice system — and what matters is demanding accountability from law enforcement beyond this case alone.
- Anna Hirsch, Change.org

Immigration may be a deeply divisive political discussion, but there’s one point upon which everybody from Barack Obama to Jan Brewer seem to agree: America’s southern border is a lawless, violent land. The guns have followed the premise. Obama has beefed up border cops, sent in National Guard troops and launched unmanned drones—all that’s missing are the Marines, for now.

Increased violence has predictably followed the increased militarization. Two border patrol encounters in the past two weeks have ended in the deaths of unarmed civilians, sparking outrage from Mexican authorities and immigrant rights groups who say that Border Patrol officers routinely use excessive force.

On June 7, a 15-year-old boy named Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca from Juarez, Mexico, was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent at Puente Negro, an international bridge that joins El Paso, Texas, and Juarez. On May 26, a Border Patrol officer at the San Ysidro, California-Tijuana border shot a 32-year-old man named Anastacio Hernandez with a stun gun. The San Diego County coroner has ruled his death a homicide.

Attorney General Eric Holder called the deaths “extremely regrettable,” and the FBI formally initiated a civil rights investigation on Friday into the teen’s death in Jaurez. Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar told The Hill newspaper that his subcommittee may investigate as well, but also conceded, “As you have more presence of Border Patrol and other federal officials on the border, you’re going to probably run into more types of incidents like that.”

Largely quiet on the “incidents like that,” however, are the elected officials who have spent the year drumming up reports of border violence to create political space for anti-immigrant policy.

When Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB1070 into state law in April, she described the border as a lawless, violent war zone. “Our international border creeps its way north,” she warned. “We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels.” Last week, a Louisiana sheriff—St. Bernard Parish’s Jack Stephens—justified harassing immigrant oil spill workers by asserting that “illegal aliens” were posing as workers to set up gangs in the area.

National Democrats and Republicans alike have echoed the local officials. President Obama implicitly acknowledged the supposed dangers of life at the border when he announced in May plans to send 1,200 National Guard troops and an extra $500 million to the border. That’s not nearly enough for electioneering Sen. John McCain, who has wedged funding for 6,000 more border troops into the Senate’s pending defense authorization bill.

The same week Obama announced his troop increase, Texas Sen. John Cornyn—who wants to redirect $2.2 billion from the stimulus for border security—wrote in an op-ed: “Our porous border endangers every American, yet Washington refuses to make border security a priority.” When reporters pressed Cornyn in a phone conference about the violence he so feared, the senator got stuck. “As far as the Texas border is concerned, to my knowledge, we have not had spillover violence, per se,” he told reporters. It was actually “the threat of potential spill over violence,” he later clarified.

More accurately, it’s the perception of that violence. Because the realities simply do not support the rhetoric about public safety in border states. As ColorLines’ graphic illustrates, crime in key cities near the U.S.-Mexico border is on the decline—just like it is all over the country.

The murder rate in San Diego, Calif., dropped by 25 percent last year. Phoenix’s decreased by 27 percent. El Paso saw a 29 percent drop in murders, bested by Tucson, Ariz., which saw a 46 percent decline in murders. The national murder rate went down just 10 percent from 2008 to 2009.

When it comes to violent crime more generally, all four of these border cities hover around four to six violent crimes per capita, just under the national average of 6.6.

“[Politicians] are creating the artificial reality that the border is out of control, that it spills over. None of that is true,” says Fernando Garcia, the executive director of the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights. “We have a very sustainable sense of security in the community, good relations with local law enforcement.”

“There is a perception of the border that whatever ails the U.S. as a country has to come from the outside rather from looking internally,” adds Maria Jimenez, an immigrant rights organizer who works with America Para Todos in Houston. The expectation that more militarization will make the border safer is “unfair to Border Patrol and Customs people, too,” Jimenez says.

The national debate around border security is a classic case study in the ways that a twisted narrative can consume the less dramatic picture of reality. And in so doing, allow politicians to move policy that does not help the communities it’s supposed to protect.

Indeed, under Obama’s watch, the country now has a record number of Customs and Border Protection officers. Immigration enforcement spending has skyrocketed from $8 billion in 2008 to $11 billion in 2010.

“How come we need the National Guard?” asked Garcia. “We look around, it’s not true. However, it seems that the president and McCain, they have this macho pro-law enforcement attitude. It is really unfortunate, how they are playing with our communities.”

Heather J. sent along a nice illustration of white privilege, courtesy of PostSecret.  PostSecret features anonymous confessions on postcards and, in this confession, a person confesses that being white and female facilitates her shoplifting:

The card is a great example of the flip side of racial profiling: those who do not carry the stigmatized features aren’t simply treated fairly, they’re given a benefit of the doubt that allows them to get away with the very thing that others are suspected of doing.

Here’s a front page Philadelphia Inquirer story on South Philadelphia High School ninth grader Lindi Liu, who was assaulted in a bathroom last month. He was exiting a bathroom stall when another student kicked the door inward, bashing him in the head. A month later, he still has nosebleeds and blurred vision: Pain for Asian youth didn’t end with school assault.

As Liu picked himself up off the floor, he could hear the boy laughing.

The incident lasted only seconds, but for Liu, a 16-year-old immigrant from China, the consequences have been profound.

His vision frequently turns blurry, to where he can’t count fingers held in front of his face. He forgets conversations that occurred moments earlier, and sometimes struggles to identify everyday objects, like the chicken on his dinner plate. He gets sudden nose bleeds.

…

Liu was examined at Chinatown Medical Services on March 25, where the doctor wrote he had blurred vision and should be seen at a hospital. The next day, Liu underwent a CT scan of the head. A week later, a sudden loss of vision sent him to the emergency room for a second CT scan. More tests are pending.

Liu worries that his condition is permanent – and that he could be hurt even worse at school.

“I have this great fear that someone will attack me again,” he said.

The school district insists that Liu was injured “carelessly but unintentionally.” According to a school inquiry, the boy was kicking the doors of the stalls in turn, and didn’t realize Liu was there. However, a witness account contradicts that:

Dong Chen, 19, said the assailant kicked only one of five doors, the one with a broken lock, behind which stood Liu. Chen said when the door hit Liu’s head, “we could hear it, it was so loud. Pow!”

Liu’s parents are frightened for their son’s health.

“I’m so upset,” Liu’s mother, Hui Qin Chen, said through a translator as she wiped tears from her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

The school district has maintained a completely different, media-friendly version of the attack. And apparently, no one from the district has even formally contacted the family to explain what they found, clarify discrepancies, or even reach out and help the family deal with their son’s injuries. According to the district:

1. The incident was apparently a “careless” accident, not an assault. The District claims security camera footage indicates the boy was kicking in all the doors and didn’t know Lin De was behind one of them. Funny though that kicking in doors isn’t exactly a passive act, and an eyewitness’ account that the boys were cracking up at Lin De’s pain doesn’t exactly indicate insouciance. It’s also worth noting that the District’s interpretation of security camera footage has been wrong before. In a District investigation, Judge James Giles claimed that security camera footage showed Asian students calmly eating lunch while attacks were happening in the school cafeteria. He interpreted that as showing that the attacks were not widespread. He later recanted and said the footage was taken before any lunchroom attacks occurred.

2. Lin De’s mother was turned away from the school multiple times to try and speak to school officials, but the District claims it has no proof that she was actually there. Their proof? No footage shows her inside the building at one specific entrance. Oh and plus no one fessed up to turning her away. They recommended via the Inquirer that she specifically identify the person who turned her away – even though no one’s reached out to her to ask.

3. In an equally bizarre turn of events, the school informed Lin De’s family that the student who had committed the assault had been suspended and transferred, but the District denied that and said the family and a community advocate had “misunderstood.” That student had only voluntarily transferred out of the system.

4. And finally, although community advocates have counted a number of incidents of harassment at the school, the School District can only come up with one – the one in the paper.

Nearly five months after the December 3 attacks, the school district has held tight to their complete denial and refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation at South Philadelphia High School — and another student suffers. Be sure to read more in this blog post by Helen Gym at Young Philly Politics, where she talks about the school district’s “alternate reality”: South Philadelphia High: The School District’s alternate reality.