I really, really wanted to like CNN’s Black in America 4: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley (which premiered last night) as well as Miss Representation, a documentary currently airing on OWN. Both, however, left me feeling the same way, which looks something like this:

A couple of synopses before I state why I felt this way:

Black in America 4 explores the rarely discussed facts and stories of Black people in digital technology, especially those who are inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Host Soledad O’Brien frames this through the stories of eight African American entrepreneurs who move into together as part of digital business owners Angela Benton’s and Wayne Sutton’s NewME Accelerator program, which provides Black entrepreneurs time and (relative) quiet space—and possible connections with venture capitalists—for their business ideas.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Miss Representation connects some of the dots between the stats, the personal stories, and media images about women and how those images affect not only those in the media— Margaret Cho recounts the fatphobia and other drama around her 1994 comedy All American Girl — but also those consuming the media, meaning the rest of us.

Now, I know that both shows are, respectively, very much Black Studies and Women’s Studies 101, presented as and for those who may know very little to nothing about either Black tech innovators and owners or media literacy and feminism. So, I can see both try to provide a “hook” for their audiences with that in mind. However, the way their respective creative teams frame their stories does both topics a disservice.

When I asked O’Brien about the aim of this installment at a preview screening, she said, “First of all, [Blacks] are clearly using the technology, but we’re not innovating the technology. And Silicon Valley keeps saying how colorblind it is. So, this part of the series examines that statement.”

Watching BiA4, I felt like I was watching O’Brien trying to mash a news report with a reality show. (“Watch what happens when tech-y Black folks get real…with Soledad O’Brien!”) I can understand that the NewME Accelerator was a good (and, from a seeing-news-as-a-business standpoint, a fiscally feasible way) for CNN to gather a group of Black tech business owners (and the non-Black people who attempt to help and/or comment on them) to tell a relatable narrative about the dearth of Black people in the field.  (BiA4 states early on that less than 1% of digital entrepreneurs are Black. The majority, it says, are white, young, Ivy League and first-tier university drop-outs, which, as pointed out in the post-screening Q&A screening I attended, is a privilege unto itself as far as starting businesses.) But I actually think a better way to tell both stories is to decouple them. If I could reconstruct the story, I would have had O’Brien, say, follow one or two Black digital entrepreneurs in depth as they attempted to get investors and utilized Benton and Sutton as pundits— along with angel investor/philanthropist Mitch Kapor, who directly refutes Michael Arrington’s claim of the digital ownership as “meritorious.” Or I would have followed the NewME Accelerator crew as the main subjects of a full-length documentary to air on CNN.

Also, another questionable point is how Asians and Asian Americans are considered in this report. The show starts off by saying that the tech-innovation worlds are “white and Asian.” Though the presence of Asians and Asian Americans should not lead to Arrington’s erroneous conclusion that the tech world is, therefore, “colorblind,” the presence of Asian and Asian Americans shouldn’t be discounted as failing to bring racial diversity to tech communities. The more subtle equation BiA4 makes, however, is “Black=racial diversity.”

At least BiA4 addresses, albeit imperfectly, race and racism in the tech field, Miss Representation — for all of the visually racial diversity (you see Cho, former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, Dreamworlds director Sut Jhally, media-literacy advocate Malkia Cyril, and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, among others) — fails to talk about the issue of race and racism. When I asked why at a post-screening Q&A, the response was “We only had 90 minutes, though we’re planning a second movie to deal with race.” (Refer to image at top of this post.)

However, there were places in the film where race and racism could be mentioned, and it would have taken about 30 seconds. For example, a young Black woman talks about her hair and how media images make her feel about it. The narrator could easily say something like, “Far too many images we see in the media are of white women swinging long, flowing hair. Imagine how that would make a woman of color, whose hair may not do that, feel?”

I timed it: the quote took all of 15 seconds to read out loud. (I’ll be generous and give it about 30 seconds to account for dramatic voiceover.) Or even acknowledge that the majority of media images—both in the film and in entertainment itself, from news to shows to porn—are mostly of white women as both idealized and in variety of roles…and these are, quite a bit of the time, functioning in tandem. Again, all of a thirty-second voiceover or a statistic that could be one of many the film uses to further its argument on how the media hurts women and other people. The silence about race (actress Rosario Dawson is the only person who explicitly mentions “people of color”) — as well as class, gender identity, sexual identity, and  and physical ability, though the film does give a nod at how the media, especially television, fails to acknowledge women above the age of 35 as an audience or as characters — flattens the documentary’s discussion about women to the category of “woman,” as if female-presenting people all suffer from media images the same way. Of course, we don’t.

And I just quite can’t with Black in America 4 and Miss Representation.

Image credit: Bossip

Jay breaks down OWS, and its hidden benefit. According to Jay:

It reveals to us all who the ringers are at Wall Street’s 3-Card Monte Table. [...] Every three card monte set up has a ringer. The ringer’s job is to pretend they’re an objective outside observer commenting on the game, when they’re actually a part of the hustle who is there to help bamboozle the public into thinking this game is legitimate.

So naturally, if we stand next to the game and start telling everyone the game is rigged, the ringer is going to flip on us and start doing everything they can to make sure nobody listens to us. They’re going to tell everyone that we’re a bunch of losers who are just hating because we don’t know how to play the game, we’re a bunch of card-game hating socialists. They’re gonna try everything they can to discredit us, so they can protect that game they are so invested in.

And it feels like that’s what we’ve been seeing all month with Occupy Wall Street.

Four minutes and nineteen seconds of awesome. Go check it out.

The framing of cases is so important, as it shifts judgements in the court of public opinion. Since Diallo has chosen to step forward as the accuser (perhaps in response to the media backlash around her life and reputation), news outlets have clamored to get the scoop. Newsweek published an exclusive interview a few days ago, with some telling language:

“Nafi” Diallo is not glamorous. Her light-brown skin is pitted with what look like faint acne scars, and her dark hair is hennaed, straightened, and worn flat to her head, but she has a womanly, statuesque figure. When her face is in repose, there is an opaque melancholy to it. Working at the Sofitel for the last three years, with its security and stability, was clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have, after years braiding hair and working in a friend’s store in the Bronx as a newcomer from Guinea in 2003.

Only in cases involving rape or assault is how the victim appears a subject for commentary. This is part of rape culture, the idea that we have to evaluate the attractiveness of a person alleging assault along with the other facts in the case. Melissa McEwan so succinctly put it, rape is not a compliment. Neither is sexual assault. Yet time and time again, we see people accused of sexual assault, abuse, or rape try to weasel out of it by saying that they weren’t attracted to the person in the first place. (We see you, Albert Haynesworth.) It’s disturbing to see reporters play into the same idea. This is why feminists continually stress that rape is a crime of power, not desire. Rape is not related to the attractiveness of the victim. Rape occurs because one party does not consent to a sexual encounter, but they are forced into it anyway.

Also, that first discussion of “clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have?” It sets the stage for more prejudical plays on class, race, and immigration status later in the piece.

Diallo is about 5 feet 10, considerably taller than Strauss-Kahn, and she has a sturdy build.

This inclusion is also somewhat perplexing. The idea that she’s sturdy and tall again introduces the idea of doubt to her story, which falls into another common trope about rape and sexual assault cases – why didn’t the woman just fight him off? Interestingly, the authors do not bring up the fact that generally, most jobs don’t allow workers to assault guests, even if the guests are violent. And, in the moment, there are many different ways people will react to being assaulted, particularly if the first act of violation has already begun. This portrayal of Diallo also subtly plays on the idea of fragile, thin, small victims as the only real victims – and goes hand in hand with the idea that black women are “unrapeable.”

DNA evidence in suite 2806—the result of all that spitting that mingled the maid’s saliva and Strauss-Kahn’s sperm—makes it virtually impossible to deny there was a sexual encounter between DSK and Diallo. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers raised the possibility early on that it was consensual and have left it to others to speculate about the circumstances under which that might have been the case: that Diallo expected money that she did not receive, or that the sex got rougher and more aggressive than she would accept. The New York Post published stories attributed to an anonymous source that claimed Diallo was at least a part-time prostitute. Her lawyers, Kenneth Thompson and Douglas Wigdor, are now suing the Post, saying the story is false. The newspaper stands by its story.

When crime, power, and scandal combine, there is always the idea that the more powerful person is being set up by the person with the least amount of power. And, commonly, the victim in sexual assault and rape trails finds themselves subjected to invasive probes about their own sexual background, mental health history, and any other improprieties. For Diallo, her background as a new immigrant to America increases the amount of scrutiny she is subject to:

In her interview with NEWSWEEK, Diallo didn’t disguise her anger at Strauss-Kahn. “Because of him they call me a prostitute,” she said. “I want him to go to jail. I want him to know there are some places you cannot use your power, you cannot use your money.” She said she hoped God punishes him. “We are poor, but we are good,” she said. “I don’t think about money.”

Perhaps. But on the day of the incident, by Diallo’s own account, she made two telephone calls. One was to her daughter. The other call was to Blake Diallo, a Senegalese who is from the same ethnic group but no relation. He manages a restaurant, the Cafe 2115 in Harlem, where West Africans gather to eat, talk, politic, and sometimes listen to concerts. Nafissatou describes Blake as “a friend,” and one of the first things he did for her after the incident was to find her a personal-injury lawyer on the Internet.

All of her associates are heavily interrogated, as were her tax statements…and her application for asylum:

In late 2003 Diallo applied for asylum. Because she had suffered genital mutilation as a child, and doctors confirmed that fact in a medical report, she probably would have qualified for asylum in any case, given current law and practices. And she insists she was raped after curfew by two soldiers. (This is not unheard of in Guinea. In 2009 soldiers conducted mass rapes and killed as many as 160 people in a Conakry sports stadium, according to human-rights organizations.) But bad as the realities were in Diallo’s homeland, she admits the account that she gave the U.S. government on her asylum application was heavily embellished. Her fictionalized narrative worked to get her a green card and allow her to bring her child to America. But her past misstatements may make it impossible to win a criminal case against DSK based on her testimony.

The only saving grace in this situation is that DSK has also had a long public life, punctuated with “situations,” improprieties, one inappropriate (and mostly, but not fully, consensual) relationship with a subordinate that put Strauss Kahn on trial as well. Normally, only the accuser is interrogated, with past indiscretions held up to light – but Strauss Kahn is receiving an equal grilling in the press.

It is always difficult to fairly represent all sides of painful matters like assault or rape. It is especially fraught since no one can truly know what happened except for the people involved, and juries and arbitrators are trying to weight highly subject evidence. But it is disturbing that the deck is stacked so hard against victims of sex crimes – particularly when those victims are women of color. Jamie Leigh Jones, who just was dealt a crushing decision in her lawsuit against KBR and the contractors she accused of rape, was initially believed and had powerful support from many corners, including the media. The Latina girl in Texas who was gang-raped did not have that same support. The article written was heavy on victim blaming, prompting the NYT to apologize for the “lack of balance”. And here again, Newsweek has subtly framed Diallo as guilty by employing the usual tactics of rape culture and the usual stereotypes about class, immigration, and women of color.

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.

On March 30 hip-hop producer Calvin “Mr.Cee” Lebrun—he of Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die fame–was busted by New York City police allegedly receiving oral sex from a sex worker. Reports said Lebrun supposedly received the sexual favors from “a man” .  This got some people feeling some kind of homophobic way, complete with saying that “we all should have seen this coming” because of his alleged “golden showers” kink.  As Sister Toldja wrote earlier this week :

To be totally fair, this isn’t the average gay rumor; not only was the other person in the case allegedly paid for the act, the writer who dropped this gossip also claimed that Mister Cee has a thing for urinating on female strippers. So while much of the chatter is about Mister Cee being (allegedly) infected with The Gay, folks are aghast by this pee thing, too. Considering our attitudes about sexuality, that’s no surprise.

With homophobia and anti-kink sentiments roiling—and Lebrun and his supporters doing the NYPD Hip-Hop Conspiracy Step —hip-hop artist and critic dream hampton provided some level-headed analysis about the situation:

While highly regarded in the hip hop industry and in New York, Mister Cee is not necessarily famous. Still, his arrest gave opportunity to talk about the persistent poking around hip hop’s “closet,” where speculation about sexual orientation is practically a sport. Charlamagne actually elevated the conversation by asking why a married 44-year-old man was seeking sexual favors from a 20-year-old, professional or otherwise, and if that, then why in a parked car? I argue that none of this would be a discussion, viral or anywhere else, had Cee been arrested with a 20-year-old woman, be she prostitute or not. I also don’t believe, 2011 or not, that hip hop is a safe space for anything other than aggressively heterosexual public behavior or affirmation. While obviously lesbian women MCs and personalities remain silent if not closeted about their sexuality, there is even less space for men to appear bisexual or homosexual.

I believe that Mister Cee’s sexuality is a personal matter, one he must reckon with himself and his wife. But Charlamagne’s co-host Angela Yee took the position widely held by heterosexual women—that closeted bisexual men are a health hazard, exposing trusting women to AIDS and more. While I’m not dismissive of those concerns, particularly in a marriage, where condom use is expected to be abandoned, I do know that we heterosexual Black women don’t exactly offer safe spaces for bisexual men to express their desires.

I’m also far more concerned that the transgendered 20-year-old who allegedly serviced him be safe, particularly if he is a sex worker. I wished aloud on my own Twitter feed that the discussion about Mister Cee would be one about decriminalizing sex work and focusing on harm reduction rather than speculating if Mister Cee is closeted.

Hampton is right in this respect.

The sex worker who is said to have provided the service, it turns out, is–based on the clues and cues I have picked up on from the media as well as personal education around trans issues and media literacy–a trans woman named Brooke-Lynn Pinklady not a “transvestite” that the first link’s source and other news and gossip sites—both cisgay and presumably cisstraight–thought to misgender as “a man.” (Even hampton refers to her as a “transgendered male.”) There’s a difference—a big difference—between a cis man, a “transvestite,” and a trans woman. (And, for the 50-11th time, the word is not “transgendered.” As several trans activists have point out, no one says “gayed” or “heteroed.” It’s “transgender” or “trans.” And I’m not going to go there about the word “trannie.” Suffice to say: don’t. It’s a slur. Don’t.)

To make the whole matter much worse, several outlets—and even the NYPD, never known at the bastion of tolerance, let alone acceptance and advocacy of trans people–refer to Brooke-Lynn by her government name instead of, like this post, honoring her as how she presents gender-wise.  Since too few people accorded her any sort of respect around her gender identity, we’re getting transphobia–specifically transmisogyny–twisted in the homophobia. Because of the constant misgendering of Brooke-Lynn as a “he,” out comes the assumption that Mr. Cee supposedly had sex with a “man.” No, Mr. Cee had sex with a woman, full stop—regardless of how he sexually identitfies. As Monica Roberts at TransGriot writes:

Many of us still have ID’s with mismatched name and gender code info or are in states that despite us having legal name changes, refuse to change gender codes until the person undergoes GRS.

…

SRS is not the end all and be all to determining gender identity or when a person transitions to the other gender.

As far as I’m concerned, the second you swallow you first hormone or take your first shot of testosterone, begin living in the opposite gender and make moves to harmonize your body with that gender role that may or may not include surgical options, you ARE that gender.

Many transpeople who would like to have it either aren’t able to afford genital surgery or have health issues that prevent it. There are many transpeople successfully living in our new gender roles despite possessing neoclits in our panties.

To break this point down for you: gender is between your ears, not your legs.

With that said, let’s bring this back to hampton’s concern.

According to a landmark report from the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force , sixteen percent of trans people of color (TPoCs) who responded to the organizations’ survey have turned to selling sex and drugs in order to survive. Furthermore, the report states:

• Respondents who were currently unemployed experienced debilitating negative outcomes, including nearly double the rate of working in the underground economy (such as doing sex work or selling drugs), twice the homelessness, 85% more incarceration, and more negative health outcomes, such as more than double the HIV infection rate and nearly double the rate of current drinking or drug misuse to cope with mistreatment, compared to those who were employed.
• Respondents who had lost a job due to bias also experienced ruinous consequences such as four times the rate of homelessness, 70% more current drinking or misuse of drugs to cope with mistreatment, 85% more incarceration, more than double the rate working in the underground economy, and more than double the HIV infection rate, compared to those who did not lose a job due to bias.

I agree the cruel parlor game of Suspecting Teh Gayz, especially on spurious reasons like being down with kink, needs to cease within some Black communities as well as a conversation around decriminalizing sex work needs to open up.  I also think what happened with Mr. Cee is a perfect opportunity to talk about transphobia, gender identity, and gender policing, too—which, as an ex-friend pointed out to me, tend to be the “what’s really going on” when some want to go homophobic because they want to judge what a “real man” or a “real woman” is supposed to look like and act like.

We’re wrecking too, too many lives with this basic disrespect.

Photo Credit: thesmokinggun.com

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 Guest Contributor Tasnim, cross-posted from Muslimah Media Watch

On Friday, the President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia fled his homeland as it was engulfed by an uprising, sparked by the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate who had taken to selling fruit in Sidi Bouzid.  When authorities confiscated his wares for not having a license, Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of a government building. Protests followed, as thousands took to the street in a movement fueled by rage over corruption among the elite.

Anger in Tunisia has been building up for years, with Laila Al Trabelsi, former first Lady of Tunisia and infamous as “The Queen of Carthage,” becoming a lighting rod for much of the dissent.  As Larbi Sadiki puts it “The First Lady is almost the Philippines’ Imelda Marcos incarnate. But instead of shoes, Madame Leila collects villas, real estate and bank accounts.” Laila and the Trabelsi extended family are often referred to as “The Family” or “The Mafia” in Tunisia, and  “No to the Trabelsis who looted the budget,” has been a popular slogan in the protests.  The irony is that the references to Laila al Trabelsi have been the only mention of Tunisian women in the events leading up to the ousting of the regime. Unlike in Lebanon or in Iran, where Neda Agha-Soltan became a symbolic figure of resistance, there was little mention of the women who took part in the protests in Tunisia, or of the victims of the security forces response, such as the woman who was shot and killed in Nabeul.

What explains this disparity? This was very much a media event, and perhaps this in itself was part of the reason. In the Arab world, and to a lesser extent in French media, there has been a month of in-depth coverage of a developing story, but in English-language media, the real coverage began only as Ben Ali began making concessions. Consequently, there was no narrative to frame events, so a disproportionate amount of the analysis has focused on the new media’s role in the uprising, from Wikileaks to Twitter.

Yes, social networks had a huge role to play, as did bloggers and sites such as Nawwat. However, to suggest that social media “caused” the revolution, is ridiculous to say the least, and to call this the first Wikileaks revolution is to suggest the Tunisians were not informed of what was going on in their own country and needed to be told that the Trabelsi clan was corrupt. It also ignores the role of pan-Arab satellite TV, which was at least as important as the internet, as was recognized when activists acknowledged Al Jazeera for its part in presenting the story as a people’s struggle, rather than dismissing it as “unrest” over unemployment.

In focusing on the new media and its part in the uprising, the English-language media has diverted attention away from the people in the street, other than as an undifferentiated mass of angry Arab men. With so many deaths, and the revolt starting in more conservative regions, perhaps there were initially few women on the street. The lack of attention to the role of women may partly be because Tunisia’s revolution focused on issues, with little attention paid to the importance of circulating images of “liberated” women to get the West on its side.In Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, activists consciously created a particular image of liberal secular youth in revolt, a campaign one blogger extended to Tunisia recently, in a compilation of “Tunisia’s revolution babes.” Obviously, Tunisia’s revolution babes do not include older women or the hijabis, who were excluded from public spaces during the regime and had one more cause to celebrate the fall of Ben Ali.

While the vocal position on Iran’s Green Revolution was fueled by media focus on women seeking liberation from a repressive Islamist regime, Tunisia’s revolution was a secular, popular people’s movement. Tunisians were fighting a secular oppressive dictatorship, which was a U.S. ally in the war against terror. The difference in both the media coverage and the official response was only underlined when Hillary Clinton declared on the 12th of January that Washington would not take sides.

Now that the regime has been ousted, much has been made of “the unique nature of Tunsian society” in the media. Or as as one blogger puts it, Tunsia is “much more modern than the rest of the Muslim world: You were more likely to see a Tunisian woman walking down the streets of Tunis wearing a tank top and tight jeans than wearing a burqa.”

For another commentator, this modernity was threatened by the revolution against the secular regime: “What will be the result of this? Probably an Islamic country where women have few rights. Whatever the creep president’s flaws and corruption, he was fighting that.” When reminded that this revolution is a good thing, the commentator responds “tell that to the women of Iran” apparently making little distinction between the Islamic Revolution and Tunisia’s secular, grassroots uprising. This confusion over Tunisia’s “secularity” and its uprising against a secular oppressive regime, and the simplistic binary underlying it, is incisively analyzed by Haroon Moghul in “Secular Good, Muslim Bad: Unveiling Tunisia’s Revolution.”

Tunisia’s revolution and Iran’s revolution do have one thing in common however: like the Shah, Ben Ali has fled his homeland. In a region full of “creep presidents” and dictatorships, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution has electrified the Arab world. As part of the opposition, and as part of creating a new Tunisia, women are playing their role. The opposition leaders who are now analyzing the situation from both within Tunisia and abroad include many women, currently appearing in interviews on pan-Arab satellite TV, and at the grassroots level, women are taking part in the forming of neighborhood watches, protecting their property from Ben Ali’s forces and gangs, as well as criminals set free to add to the chaos.

As activists have stressed, this is not yet over, Tunisia has not yet achieved freedom, and what comes next politically remains unclear. However, the fact remains that an Arab regime has been toppled, not by a coup, but by a popular uprising of people, both men and women.

From the “some good news for once” files, here’s a piece from the Washington Post on how Towson University is one of eleven schools nationwide where graduation rates for minority students “meet or exceed those of whites.”

In 10 years, according to school data, Towson has raised black graduation rates by 30 points and closed a 14-point gap between blacks and whites. University leaders credit a few simple strategies: admitting students with good grades from strong public high schools, then tracking each student’s progress with a network of mentors, counselors and welcome-to-college classes.

“Regardless of your background, there’s people here for you who understand what you’re going through,” said Kenan Herbert, 23, an African American Towson senior from Brooklyn, N.Y.

The data used by The Washington Post was provided by The Education Trust, an educational think tank and watch dog group that is taking an honest look at how our institutions of higher learning measure up.

The Education Trust published a brief on this subject, and has some strong words for educational professionals who seem far too willing to just accept gaps between black and white students:

[W]hen we see data suggesting that the average graduation rate for black students in four-year colleges and universities is about 20 points below that of their white peers, we are hardly surprised. The average black student, we know, leaves high school with a weaker academic record than the average white graduate, so where’s the mystery? Until somebody fixes the
high school problem, there’s not much colleges and universities can do.

Or is there?

For the past several months, we’ve been digging beneath the averages and looking at data from individual institutions in our College Results Online database. We’ve found that some institutions have horrendous graduation-rate gaps between white and black students—well above the national average. And it turns out that other institutions have no gaps at all. Indeed, in dozens of colleges, black students graduate at rates equal to or higher than their white counterparts.

In other words, it’s not entirely about preparation, and wide gaps in the graduation rates of white and black students are not inevitable. Our analysis strongly suggests that what colleges do with and for the students they admit matters a great deal.

The data set in the report explains the horrifying statistics:

The graduation rate for African-American students in the private colleges and universities in our analysis is 54.7 percent, compared with 73.4 percent for whites—an 18.7 percentage-point gap.

Similarly, at public institutions, only 43.3 percent of African American students graduate within six years, compared with 59.5 percent of whites—a 16.2 percentage-point gap.

However the researchers over at Education Trust point out that some of the data patterns reveal disturbing trends:

[I]nstitutions on our “big gap” lists—the 25 public and 25 private
colleges and universities with the largest white-black gaps(see Tables 5 and 6). These institutions all have gaps larger than average, and some have gaps upwards of 30 percentage points.

Some institutions—such as the University of Akron in Ohio and Wayne State University in Michigan— are not serving white students particularly well, but black students fare even worse.Only about four in ten white students at these universities graduate within six years, and only about one in ten black students do.

Other institutions—Michigan State University and
Indiana University-Bloomington, to name two—graduate
white students at high rates but have large gaps for African-
American students. At Indiana University, 73 percent
of white students graduate within six years—well above
the national average—yet only half of its black students
do.

The full brief is well worth the read. The Trust takes pains to note that the most successful colleges on the list acknowledged there was an issue and took responsibility to close that gap.

By Arturo R. García

Like any good journalistic outlet, NPR prides itself on thorough coverage and accuracy. Which makes the errors in its’ 40th-anniversary retrospective, This Is NPR, stand out even more.

(Note: As mentioned in the past, Racialicious Editrix Latoya Peterson is a consultant for NPR, and has contributed a piece to one of their blogs.)

First, as St. Petersburg Times columnist Eric Deggans reported Friday, there’s no mention in the book at all of All Things Considered host Michele Norris, the first black woman to earn a regular hosting slot on the network. From the story:

Norris was asked to contribute a chapter, along with other staffers or people who appear regularly on NPR for the book, which weaves the stories into a chronological history. Other contributors include Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, P. J. O’Rourke and Paula Poundstone. But because she was writing her own book, The Grace of Silence: A Memoir, Norris couldn’t contribute an essay and was not included anywhere else, said NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm.

It was an inexcusable mistake,” Rehm added. “She should have been in the book.”

Deggans also notes the book’s omission of the recently-released Juan Williams, who had been a news analyst with the network for more than a decade before his firing last month; and of the African-American Public Radio Consortium, the group that helped NPR develop The Tavis Smiley Show, which first aired on the network before Smiley and NPR parted ways in 2004. Smiley doesn’t have an essay in the book, either, though he is referenced three times.

The only POC mentioned in the book who contributes an essay is Tell Me More host Michel Martin, who writes about covering the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. Oddly enough, though, the picture running alongside the story is of reporter Audie Cornish, who isn’t mentioned at all otherwise.

By Arturo R. García

Soledad O’Brien and Almighty Debt come closest to the program’s stated goal toward the end, when she asks Pastor DeForest “Buster” Soaries if he “pulled strings” to help one of his parishoners, Fred Philp, get into college, leading to this exchange:

Soaries: I picked up the phone to make sure that nothing got lost in the sauce and that Fred didn’t fall between the cracks.
O’Brien: What’s that mean, “lost in the sauce”?
Soaries: well, Fred was not your classic college applicant, and he was not heavily sought after in colleges. He had academic challenges, financial challenges, and I didn’t want to trust his high school counselors to be his primary advocates. And so when I heard that Fred was having some difficulty with the college of his choice, I thought it probably would help if I let the president know that Fred is with me.

Unfortunately, aside from that sequence and a couple of other statements later in the show, the issue is ignored. The irony of her church-oriented report is, the devil isn’t in the details – it’s in the lack thereof.

Though O’Brien’s latest Black In America special is, supposed to be another “conversation-starter” piece, she spends most of her time derailing her own story. In the opening seconds, she declares African-Americans to be “the most religious group in the United States”  and the (Christian) church to be “the soul of black life in the United States.” It’s possible she’s alluding to studies of church attendance by race, like this one, or attempting to explain her approach to the story, but these statements, bereft of context or even sourcing, come off as bombastic.

The show’s biggest misstep is ignoring almost everything that is particular about the situation to the community; we get snippets of commentary regarding the misuse of programs like the G.I. Bill to exclude African-Americans from greater participation in the housing market, but otherwise, experts like Dr. Melvin Oliver of UC Santa Barbara (Black Wealth/White Wealth) and Bennett College president Dr. Julianne Malveaux make all-too-brief appearances. In one infuriating moment, Dr. Malveaux is explaining the principle of generational accumulation of wealth when O’Brien tries to finish her sentence for her, bogging down the rest of the clip.

Instead, O’Brien takes the viewer through the stories various members of the congregation at First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens, New Jersey, led by Soaries, a former New Jersey Secretary of State.

Though the people profiled here are sympathetic, and, as author Terrie Williams points out late in the show, courageous for allowing themselves to be seen in the midst of their struggles, O’Brien – as she did in the Latino In America mini-series – neglects to ask them crucial questions:

• Why would the Jeffries, upper-middle class by profession if not earnings before the recession affected them, seemingly wait two years before calling on the church’s foreclosure-prevention program?
• What makes them and their daughter think they’re going to be able to pay for her to attend Georgetown or Princeton or any of her other “dream schools”?
• Has Carl Fields, seen with a stack of hundreds of applications, considered freelancing or temporary employment to supplement his regular job search?
• And why is young Fred relying more on the church’s youth minister in his ill-defined quest to attend Kean University, when his school guidance counselor could tell him “his C grades” – as described almost derisively by O’Brien – would probably be good enough to get him into a junior college, where he could continue his education with far less pressure and debt than at a four-year university?
• Furthermore, why would his pastor distrust professional educators, who might have agreed with him that Fred would have to get a job and take out student loans to afford to study at Kean?

As the program’s narrative portion closes, by which point we see Soaries step in to help Fields meet with potential employers and attempt to act as a surrogate landlord for the Jeffries, O’Brien declares that he’s been doing what the church has been doing for decades. But, again, without much of any historical sourcing over the preceding hour, other than the requisite MLK images, O’Brien lets the matter drop.

Soaries is also featured during the show-closing “town hall” question, but it’s telling that no economists are included in the discussion; neither are educators Malveaux and Oliver. Instead, he’s joined by Bishop T.D. Jakes, leader of The Potter’s House in Dallas, along with Williams, Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary and Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who contributes nothing of note. Frankly, O’Brien squanders another opportunity to ask some good questions of both Soaries and Jakes:

• Do they both “make calls” to make sure everyone who asks doesn’t get “lost in the sauce”?
• Is it ethical of them to use their position as leverage in a case like Fred’s? What if he can’t handle the strain?
• Will their churches use their membership and economic resources as recruitment tools?
• What if they each find themselves “making calls” on behalf of students applying to the same school?

It’s fitting to learn on Halloween week that O’Brien’s next project will be called Muslim In America. Because given her history, that’s a legitimately scary prospect.

By Guest Contributor Lisa Wade, Ph.D, originally posted at Sociological Images

Leontine G. sent in a troubling example of the framing of children’s deviance, and their own complicity in this framing. While we usually try to keep text down to a minimum on SocImages, this one needs to be handled with care. So please forgive the unusual length of this post.

Leontine included two links: one to a Today show story about a 7-year-old boy who took his family’s car on a joyride and got caught by police, and one to a CNN story about a 7-year-old boy who took his family’s car on a joyride and got caught by police. Different 7-year-olds. One white, one black.

The white boy, Preston, is interviewed with his family on the set of the Today show.  Knowing his kid is safe, his Dad describes the event as “funny” and tells the audience that if this could happen to a “cotton candy all-American kid like Preston,” then “it could happen to anybody.”

When the host, Meredith Vieira, asks Preston why hid from the police, he says, “cause I wanted to,” and she says, “I don’t blame you actually.”  With Preston not too forthcoming, his Mom steps in to say that he told her that “he just wanted to know what it felt like to drive a car.”  When Vieira asks him why he fled from the police, he replies with a shrug. Vieira fills in the answer, “You wanted to get home?”

Vieira then comments on how they all then went to church. The punishment?  Grounded for four days without TV or video games. Vieira asks the child, “Do you think that’s fair?” He says yes. And she continues, “Do you now understand what you did?” He nods and agrees. “And that maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing?” He nods and agrees. “You gonna get behind the wheel of a car again?” He says no. Then she teases him about trying out model toy cars.

They conclude that this incident just goes to show that “Any little kid, you never know what can happen …” and closes “I’ll be seeing you at church buddy boy!”

The video:

All in all, exactly what you’d expect from the Today show: a heartwarming, human interest story with a happy ending. The child is framed as a fundamentally good kid who was curious and perhaps a bit impetuous. When he has no answers for Vieira’s questions, she slots in innocent ones. And the mild punishment is seen as incidental to the more important idea that he learned something.

This story contrasts dramatically to the CNN story about Latarian Milton, a black 7-year-old who took his family’s car on a joy ride. I’ll put the video first, but be forewarned, it’s disturbing not only because of the different frame placed on the boys actions, but because of the boy’s embracing of the spoiled identity:

With an absolutely polar introduction of “Not your typical 7-year-old,” this story is filmed on the street. Whereas the Today show screened the chase footage in real time, this one is sped up, making it seem even more extreme.

The interviewer, off-camera, asks Latarian why he took the car. He replied: “I wanted to do it ’cause it’s fun, it’s fun to do bad things.” The interviewer asks further, “Did you know that you could perhaps kill somebody?” And he replies: “Yes, but i wanted to do hoodrat stuff with my friends.”

The interviewer asks him what punishment he should receive and Latarian offers a punishment very similar to Preston’s: “Just a little bit… no video games for a whole weekend.” The reporter then explains that the police plan to go forward with charges of grand theft against him. While he’s “too young to go into any type of juvenile facility,” he says, “police say they do want to get him into the system, so that they can get him some type of help.”

The implication here, of course, is that this child is not innocent or impetuous like Preston, he’s a pre-criminal who needs “some type of help.” The sooner they get Latarian into “the (prison?) system,” the better. No cotton candy kid this one.

Unfortunately, Latarian says all the right things to make the narrative fit. He says he likes to do “bad” things, calls himself a “hoodrat,” and seems unremorseful, even defiant, for at least part of the interview (he looks a bit sheepish in the end when he finds out his grandmother is going to have to pay for the damage he did to other cars).

One way to interpret this is to say that Latarian IS a pre-criminal. That he DOES need to get into the system because he’s clearly a bad kid.  Someone inclined to believe that black people were, in fact, more prone to criminal behavior could watch these two videos and feel confirmed in their view.

But there is good evidence that people, beginning as children, internalize the stereotypes that others have of them.  As Ann Ferguson shows in her book, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, black children, especially boys, are stereotyped as pre-criminals; not adorably naughty, like white boys, but dangerously bad from the beginning.  And studies with children have shown that they often internalize this idea, as in the famous doll experiment in which both black and white children were more likely than not to identify the black doll as bad (see this similar demonstration of white preference on CNN and a discussion of the original doll experiment at ABC).  So I think this terribly sad story of Latarian is showing us how children learn to think of themselves as deviant and bad from the society around them.  Latarian, remember, is seven, just like Preston.  They’re both children, but they are being treated very differently, as these programs illustrate, and it is already starting to sink in.

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

I’m taking a moment from my usual sexing-it-up posts because of the little girl pictured above.

For those who don’t know, her name is Aiyana Stanley Jones. And she’s dead. Her family just buried her this week.

She didn’t die from leukemia or in a drunk-driving accident or at the hands of an abusive or negligent parent or guardian.

She died for the sake of entertainment.

For those who haven’t heard the story: Detroit police raided her home on May 16 in what the department said their “executing a search warrant” of a murder suspect they eventually found in the home. According to the Detroit Free Press:

Police said that they threw an incendiary device known as a flash bang through a front window of the home to create a distraction.

After entering, a Detroit officer got into a tussle with Mertilla Jones, Aiyana’s grandmother, who was in the front room.

The police gun went off. Aiyana was killed.

According to family members, Aiyana was sleeping on the couch, which sat near a window that faces the street. The explosive device the police threw in landed on that couch and burned her, said her father, Charles Jones. He and others say the girl was burning when she was shot.
…

Aiyana’s dad, Charles Jones, said he rushed into the living room after hearing the explosive and gunshot. He says police made him lie face down on the ground, his face in shattered glass and the blood of his daughter.

The Detroit police department has offered an apology for Aiyana’s death and says they are conducting an investigation.

Meanwhile, understandably righteous outrage, several countercharges, and downright ridiculousness came out as the Stanley-Jones family and circle of supporters prepared to bury Aiyana: people utilized social media to voice sadness and upset over this senseless death; the alleged suspect who touched off this tragedy is a 34-year-old man who is accused of shooting a 17-year-old youth because he didn’t like the way the teenager “looked at him”; Aiyana’ grandmother, Mertilla Jones, said the police lied about the gun firing because she was trying to wrestle it away from the officer (new video evidence allegedly suggests the fatal shot coming from outside the home); Jones contends she was inside during the raid and tried to protect her grandchild but was too late; politicians did their usual grandstanding; celebrities took the cops and the community to task for Aiyana’s death and to stop further senseless killings, especially of young black children.

But, as I said, I also blame Aiyana’s death on the media complex: of the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” infotainment ethos that seems to pass for news—especially local news—nowadays; the perpetuating of the meme that black people are always and inherently entertaining to watch, especially if there’s an element of criminality and punishment to it and it’s getting “handled”; of the physical erasure of women and girls as watchable; the deaths of women of color, cis and trans, as not worthy of discussion–let alone activism–outside of PoC communities.

Or, perhaps, it would be more correct to say that Aiyana’s death is really our collective fault, if we continue to accept these conditions as part of our pop-culture consumption. If we do, we do not bury her with whatever deities she and her family believe in. We sacrifice her, again and again and again.

With that said, what I want to do is simply cry for her…

If we do our work well, we should expect similar attacks and know that long track records won’t protect us.

I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop in the matter of South Philadelphia High School. And it did.

Reader Carleandria points us to an article in The American (the American Enterprise Institute’s Journal) which wastes no time with the headline: “Are Some Races More Equal Than Others?”

Readers, if my eyes rolled any harder, they would be stuck permanently at the top of my brow.

Abigail Thernstrom and Tim Fay feel like they understand the real reason why South Philadelphia High School isn’t getting any play from the press:

Will the Obama administration act aggressively to ensure Asian rights to a public education free of intimidation and actual violence—surely a basic civil right? Or will such action be taken only when blacks are the victims rather than the perpetrators? If the administration acts in the interest of the Asians, black students will be singled out as racially hostile troublemakers—a conclusion that neither the Department of Education nor the DOJ will welcome, if Duncan’s announcement means what it says. [...]

The anti-Asian attacks at SPHS began in October 2008, and prompted Asian advocacy groups to beg for help from the Philadelphia school administration. None was forthcoming, according to AALEF. Three months ago, in early December, tensions came to a head. Trouble started on December 2, and the next day, black students reportedly began to hunt for Asians, checking classrooms were they might be found. A group of apparently organized black students reportedly rushed the stairwells to the second floor where many Asian students were located. Security camera footage from the lunchroom showed a group of 60 to 70 students—most of them black—surging forward with a smaller faction attacking a small group of Asian students.

The AALDEF complaint describes a complete breakdown of adult leadership. One Asian student has charged the lunch staff with “cheering happily,” and others have described security officers as looking the other way. In truth, those charges have been disputed, and other facts are equally hard to pin down. Police and volunteers did try to contain the mounting violence, and at some point the school was “locked down.” School officials later decided to have classrooms dismissed one-by-one, and contacted police to provide extra protection outside the school. The ranks of the police thinned, however, when some had to respond to another emergency, and by the time a group of Asians were heading home they were insufficiently protected. Escorted out of the school by the principal (perhaps only for a short way—another disputed fact), the Asian students spotted blacks lying in wait; they made a futile attempt to run from trouble. In the ensuing attack, one Asian student’s nose was broken, and as many as 13 ended up needing treatment at the local hospital.

While Thernstrom and Fay make token references to not blaming blacks for these issues, the undertone of their article is clear – this group of low income black students are being unfairly preferenced in the press and in the school system, leading to this situation. They pulled quotes from Asian American students but seemingly forgot any discussion of who was targeted (mostly children of immigrants), student responses to this type of race-baiting (which is to focus on the issue and culpability of the administration) and any cross cultural organizing (like the multiracial group of students who came to the striking students and asked them to return to class).

And their article ignores the most obvious reason why South Philadelphia High isn’t getting more publicity: The mainstream media doesn’t care about South Philadelphia High School because the situation doesn’t involve white people.

Let me say that again.

The mainstream media does not find this story compelling because it is the story of the brown, the story of the poor, the story of generation 1 and generation 1.5, the story of kids with accents, the story of violence between two groups no one wants to talk about anyway.

The media wants relateable characters and xenophobic and racist sentiments held by media creators and consumers create no winners in this narrative.

And, most of all, no one cares about poor kids, housed in what my friend Elizabeth Mendez Berry would call “schools of last resort” based on her work with gangs and school penetration. The demographic shift at South Philly High tells the story. The percentage of low-income kids tells the story. Unless the narrative being told about these kids serves in some way to prop up the idea of the American Dream, no one wants to hear it.

No one wants to talk about the struggle, only the triumph.

What’s most infuriating about articles like Fay and Thernstrom’s is that it effectively takes the focus from South Philadelphia High and places it on reinforcing racist beliefs. Articles like this rob the kids of their agency, their organizing, and courage, and instead ask “What’s the matter with black people?” – which, in this situation, is really the wrong thing to ask.*

The picture illustrating this post is the same one illustrating Angry Asian Man’s post from yesterday, for a reason: because these kids need answers, not racist bullshit.

They need accountability.

They need community support.

They need a safe school to attend, even if none of their parents can afford to wave around money or privilege to make it so.

What they do not need are some fuckers trying to piggyback on their suffering to justify racist beliefs.

*I also find it fascinating in an article about the situation at South Philadelphia High School, the statistics offered for consumption aren’t on Asian Americans being bullied at school, or instances of violence toward APIA kids in the communities they call home, or the specific targeting of new immigrants to the US, but discussions on black suspension rates and how to read that metric.

Earlier: How Do We Solve a Problem Like South Philadelphia High?
South Philly High Asian Students Testify On Assaults

Colourface fatigue, I haz it.  Who here is tired of reading about blackface? Because I sure am tired of writing about it. And at this point I don’t know what more there is to say.

Well, come to think of it, there was never much to say in the first place.  Because here we tend to deal more in the subtle nuances of racism; when something is as out and out wrong as painting yourself black for a lark, you don’t need us to deconstruct it for you.

But I ask this: why is a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who colourfaced it up as Lil Wayne for Halloween causing so much of a ruckus? It might just be because I live in Texas, but all day Monday I heard reports about white cheerleader Whitney Isleib and her poor choice of costume.  The team even received a request from a Texas media outlet for an interview.

News, by definition is (among other things): a person, thing, or event considered as a choice subject for journalistic treatment; newsworthy material. This is pretty elementary: there has to be something spectacular about your behaviour for it to make headlines.  Simply behaving badly or cluelessly – which Isleib most certainly was – is not enough to get you in the news.  You have to behave badly in some kind of unusual way.

But colourface is not unusual. It is reprehensible and grotesque, but it’s not unusual. Who here was out and about on Halloween, and saw some colourface? *raises hand*

So. Why the attention for Isleib’s dressup? Yes, Isleib is sort of a public figure. But that’s just it: she’s only sort of a public figure. I can’t imagine her getting this much attention for anything else.  Isleib’s situation is markedly different from biracial colourface on ANTM, Vogue painting white supermodel Lara Stone black, and Harry Connick Jr putting his foot down at Australian blackface.  These are all examples of public performances of blackface.  Isleib on the other hand was at a private party. Why is this news? Why is it even local Texas news?

A minute ago, I said that in order to get on the news, you have to behave badly in some kind of unusual way.  I should correct that: you have to behave badly in some kind of way that is perceived to be unusual.  Or further, you have to behave badly in some kind of way that we like to perceive as unusual – regardless of the truth.

Partly Isleib is news because it’s an amusing “quirky” newspiece.  Uh oh! Another example of Facebook Fail! And partly Isleib is news because there are still some lucky souls who think that blackface is unusual – clearly they haven’t been following the colourface epidemic.

But I do think that there is something deeper here than just a slow news day.  What do we get out of perceiving Isleib’s blackface to be newsworthy or shocking?  What cultural function does shock fulfill?

Consider this: violence against women is incredibly common, yet when a serial killer kills multiple women, media outlets go to town.  Cases get blown up, and the 24-hour news cycle analyses every grisly detail of an individual case – instead of turning an eye to the broader culture that engenders such violence. And people react with shock and horror – How could this happen here? Can you believe this? – to something that happens every single day, something that is terrifyingly ordinary.  Definitely we should report terrible murders.  But acting shocked about them is an inappropriate response when violence is such a way of life for us.  There is something very hypocritical about shock.

As a culture, we go out of our way to express shocked disapproval, when we want to demonstrate distance between ourselves and some extreme act of hatred.  It’s a smokescreen that masks the hatred we carry out everyday.

As a culture, we pay attention to the most heinous – or most clueless – examples of patriarchy and racism in order to ignore the daily insidiousness of oppression and suffering.

We pay attention to Isleib’s stupidly ordinary costume because it allows us to pretend that blackface and all its disturbing connotations are out of the ordinary.  But they’re not.  While publicly we feign surprise, on anonymous internet message boards people are talking about how awesome Isleib’s costume is.

So again. I’m not saying that what Isleib did is no big deal.  It’s just that I hate that it’s news.

–
Incidentally since the writing of this article, some of the news pieces I was looking at of Isleib have disappeared. If you enter “dallas cowboys cheerleader blackface” into Google News, the service tells you that there are 14 related articles. But when you click “More”, there are only 3. Damage control?