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.

Ouch.

Long time friend of the blog, Jeff Yang, has just lost his far reaching and influential column, Asian Pop. He writes in today’s farewell post:

So this is it, I guess: The final installment of “Asian Pop.” After nearly eight years beneath the masthead, the Gatekeepers have decided that “the economics of our business have changed in a way that doesn’t support online-only columns.” (And maybe not offline ones either: These are parlous times for the news biz.) [...]

As you might guess from its title, Asian Pop began with a focus on Asian media and entertainment, treating “Asianness” as something alien to the American experience, and “pop” as a reflection of passing fancies and ephemeral trends.

Over time, however, with the encouragement of three successive terrific editors, the column moved beyond those original boundaries, transforming Asianness from a spectacle into a perspective, and making “pop” shorthand not for popular but for populi.

Last week, I accompanied Doris Truong to drop Jeff off at the airport, one his way to a retreat to go walk up a mountain and think about things. Knowing Jeff, he will come back bursting with excitement and ready to embark on a bunch of new projects. But this decision by the powers that be to kill his column (and all other online-only long form columns) is heralding more bad business to come. I’ve been engaged in journalism work for the last two years, ever since Poynter made the decision to make me a Sense Making Fellow. In many ways, I’ve had a front seat to watching the freefall of legacy media. Diversity was one of the first values on the chopping block as expendable.

As the American Society of Newspaper Editors reported earlier this year:

[W]hile the study showed a slight increase in newsroom employees overall (from 41,500 in 2009 to 41,600 in 2010), the number of employees of color was actually down half-a-percent, making 2010 the third consecutive year that the percentage of minority journalists declined, explained MediaBistro. The total number of journalists of color declined from 5,500 in 2009 to 5,300 in 2010.

“At a time when the U.S. Census shows that minorities are 36 percent of the U.S. population, newsrooms are going in the opposite direction. This is an accuracy and credibility issue for our newsrooms,” said Milton Coleman, ASNE president, in a statement.

What’s more, 441 newspapers that were part of the ASNE survey reported no full-time minorities whatsoever — a number that has been increasing since 2006.

Broadcast isn’t much better:

Out of 815 executive producers, assignment managers, managing editors, assistant news directors, news directors and general managers at the ABC, CBS, Cox, FOX, Gannett, Hearst Argyle, Media General, Meredith, NBC and Tribune stations 713 (87.9%) are White, 64 (7.8%) are African American, 24 (3%) are Hispanic/Latino, 13 (1.6%) are Asian and only 1 is Native American. The management teams at 82 of the stations are all White.

“It is disheartening in 2010 that four of the media companies in the report have no African American news directors and so many of the companies have no black news director in some of the most diverse cities in America,” said NABJ President Kathy Y. Times. “It’s time for African American viewers to reconsider their support of media companies that do not appreciate or make diversity a priority.”

NABJ first began conducting its annual census as a way of encouraging broadcasters to commit to hiring more people of color for editorial positions. Still, the association believes true progress cannot be made unless the companies fully commit to developing talent who can then be promoted from within.

And digital media is following in the same path. I’ll write a bit more on this later, but it is amazing that at a time when ethnic media is rebounding, we still aren’t receiving anywhere close to to the resources and support that a moderately funded unit in a larger media organization enjoys. And Jeff’s column ending makes me uneasy in another way – specifically, the AOL Way. If you aren’t familiar, Media Beat breaks it down:

Business Insider has published a leaked copy of what it said is AOL’s new “master plan,” a presentation outlining the company’s goals and processes for the next few months. What comes across is an intense focus on numbers. And hey, that makes sense for a business document, but there is something both beautiful and scary about the way AOL is trying to streamline its entire “content generation” process (or, as I like to call it, “writing and editing”) for maximum profitability.

So what are AOL’s goals? Basically, to turn every blog post into a serious moneymaker. Specifically, by the end of March, AOL aims to increase the total number of articles published each month from 31,500 to 40,000, and to grow the median number of pageviews per article from 1,500 to 7,000. Meanwhile, the average cost of creating an article should fall from $99 to $84, and the profit margin on each article should increase from 35 percent to 50 percent.

When deciding what topic to cover, the AOL Way apparently involves weighing issues like traffic potential, revenue/profit, turnaround time, and editorial quality. Again, these are considerations that any for-profit publication is probably weighing, but what’s impressive is how specific AOL’s guidelines are — for example, there’s a “Demand Tool” that might, for example, predict that an article will earn $500, so under AOL’s guidelines a website can spend up to $250 for that piece of content.

The document also mentions a new “SEO Checker” that is supposed to be used on virtually all of AOL’s content, giving writers and editors guidelines on how to customize their articles to show up prominently in search engines.

Choire Sicha, of the Awl, termed it “spam labor camps,” but I fear that’s kind of optimistic. And it’s having ripple effects. While most mainstream media outlets expressed disdain at AOL’s policies, my editor friends have told me they are facing the same considerations. Budgets are slashed, so a few celeb/marquee writers are making tons of money while most pieces are paying between $100 – 300. In addition, original content that is reported, far reaching, or establishes a framework has been devalued – if consumers are voting with their pageviews, most people just want entertainment and op-eds. So the focus on quality is shifting – it’s no longer a necessity, it’s more like a luxury. So not only are there less opportunities for newsmakers of color to get in the game, there are far less opportunities to distinguish one’s self and one’s work. And take it from someone on the entrepreneurial/indie media track – it ain’t sweet over here. Back then I wrote:

All the VCs stressed that they were there to invest in profit making ventures. They want to get in and get out, and many of them were looking for a sale price of at least three times the amount of the initial investment. So remember, they are going for high growth in industries like telecoms, health care, and entertainment media.

What I didn’t share at the time was that one of the VCs looked me in the eye, and asked me if I was going to keep wasting this platform on social justice or get serious about making money.

There is a lot of talent out there – and when Jeff gets back, in a week or so, I’m sure you’ll hear more from him on Asian American media. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is a harbinger of a new media age – and it isn’t gonna be pretty.

With all of the jokes about “Birthers” and Donald Trump’s toupee as well as the leftysphere excoriating the mainstream media for not taking Trump to task for his antics, Jack and Jill Politics’ Baratunde Thurston breaks down what we lost due to Trump’s BS.

Transcript after the jump.

It’s been a very difficult morning for me. Got the news that President Obama released his long-form birth certificate due to the increasing media circus surrounding claims that he is not one of us. That he is not an American. And it comes at a very interesting time for many reasons, one of which is, it’s April 27 2011 and this just happened. So that’s really interesting to me. Also because I’m reading, right now, a book by Manning Marable called Malcolm X a life of reinvention and he unearths a lot of amazing detail and correspondence around this exceptional American. But through this book you also get a window into the civil rights movement throughout this country’s history – especially the 40s 50s and 60s and you are reminded if you read this book or see a documentary special or know anything about the complete history of the United States, you’re reminded of the extraordinary level of sacrifice that has been involved in allowing all Americans to exist as, be treated as, participate as Americans. To be that which they are took a lot of work. A lot of tears, a lot of pain, a lot of death.

There were people who dropped out of their ordinary lives, sacrificed their personal safety, their reputation, their ability to earn money, to intervene on behalf of those who they also saw as American. They got on buses and Freedom Rides. They sat in, they died in waves and waves of domestic terrorism so that someone like me could go to a voting booth and not be asked by some racist poll worker to pay a tax or prove that my grandfather wasn’t a slave or pass a literacy test that got increasingly difficult the more I passed it. And today, the President of the United States had to prove that he was an American, to the satisfaction of the 75 percent of Iowa republicans who doubt that or the 43 percent of National Republicans who believe that or the one heinous low-class individual who took credit for it after: Donald Trump.

A man who was given every advantage – who inherited millions and lost it all twice but had that opportunity because no one’s ever had to ask him to prove anything. A man who lacks intelligence, compassion, common sense, respect, decency, or an understanding of WHAT THE FUCK it means to be an American that he would come out moments after the President of the United States – and I stress that: the President – released his long-form birth certificate – and Donald Trump comes out moments later and says, “I’m really proud of myself – but it shouldn’t have taken so long. I wanna see the birth certificate for myself. I want to test it for authenticity. I don’t want the press asking me about birth certificates anymore.”

I find it hard to summarize in mere words the amount of pain and rage this incident has caused. It’s humiliating – not just to Barack Obama, not just to the office of the President, not just to Black Americans who died and those who supported our quest for freedom. It’s embarrassing to the entire nation that we would sit and let this nation. We have all been debased by this incident. By a charlatan, by a con man, by a mere promoter of himself. And for him to take credit for this, and for him to revel in it, and yet not be satisfied makes him no better than a Klansman. No better than a Bull Connor. No better than an anonymous, privileged white man in the 1950s who, regardless of his position in society, knew his position was higher than that of a common nigger. And that is what the fuck Donald Trump has done to the President of the United States. To the office of the President of the United States. To me. And to you.

I am disgusted. I have cried, because I know my own ancestors paid a very high price, and never would have imagined that we might have the President that we do, but certainly, part of their joy in the ancestral, celestial skies right now has been greatly diminished by what has happened here today. I hope that eventually, not just in the post-mortal world of karma and spiritual justice, Mr. Trump pays an exceptional price. I hope that price comes during his life. To then be able to walk around, a super-free, super-white, super-privileged man lording over all who would pay attention – which is far too many – at what you have done has got to cost you something in this life, as well.

I don’t wanna hear about The Apprentice. I don’t wanna hear about your new cologne. I don’t wanna hear about the new tower you’re building in whatever fuckin’ town. That cologne smells of racism. That tower is built on the blood of disrespected slaves and freedom fighters, and that show is merely a showcase for the dishonor you have brought among anyone who would call themselves an American.

My name is Baratunde Thurston. I’m heartbroken over this.

Earlier this month, I was mulling over a piece in The Atlantic about the decline of the news, and Google’s attempts to assist the ailing industry. I found this tidbit fascinating:

“If you were starting from scratch, you could never possibly justify this business model,” Hal Varian [Google's chief economist ] said, in a variation on a familiar tech-world riff about the print-journalism business. “Grow trees—then grind them up, and truck big rolls of paper down from Canada? Then run them through enormously expensive machinery, hand-deliver them overnight to thousands of doorsteps, and leave more on newsstands, where the surplus is out of date immediately and must be thrown away? Who would say that made sense?” The old-tech wastefulness of the process is obvious, but Varian added a less familiar point. Burdened as they are with these “legacy” print costs, newspapers typically spend about 15 percent of their revenue on what, to the Internet world, are their only valuable assets: the people who report, analyze, and edit the news. Varian cited a study by the industry analyst Harold Vogel showing that the figure might reach 35 percent if you included all administrative, promotional, and other “brand”-related expenses. But most of the money a typical newspaper spends is for the old-tech physical work of hauling paper around. Buying raw newsprint and using it costs more than the typical newspaper’s entire editorial staff. (The pattern is different at the two elite national papers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. They each spend more on edit staff than on newsprint, which is part of the reason their brands are among the most likely to survive the current hard times.)

Krishna Bharat (Distinguished Researcher at Google) puts an even finer point on the problems with the existing news model. Bharat runs Google News, the aggregator that sifts through “25,000 sources in some 25 languages” daily. And considering he has watched the type of news trends that receive coverage, his next comments are old news to many of us dissatisfied with how our communities are portrayed in the mainstream media, but hopefully illuminating to those in the industry:

In this role, he sees more of the world’s news coverage daily than practically anyone else on Earth. I asked him what he had learned about the news business.

He hesitated for a minute, as if wanting to be very careful about making a potentially offensive point. Then he said that what astonished him was the predictable and pack-like response of most of the world’s news outlets to most stories. Or, more positively, how much opportunity he saw for anyone who was willing to try a different approach.

The Google News front page is a kind of air-traffic-control center for the movement of stories across the world’s media, in real time. “Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time,” he told me. “Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.” He didn’t mean that the publications were linking to one another or syndicating their stories. Rather, their conventions and instincts made them all emphasize the same things. This could be reassuring, in indicating some consensus on what the “important” stories were. But Bharat said it also indicated a faddishness of coverage—when Michael Jackson dies, other things cease to matter—and a redundancy that journalism could no longer afford. “It makes you wonder, is there a better way?” he asked. “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” He said this was not a purely theoretical question. “I believe the news industry is finding that it will not be able to sustain producing highly similar articles.”

I’ve been thinking about this in light of the Stanley-Jones tragedy, and in light of South Philadelphia High School.

Bharat’s quote – “Why is it that a thousand people come up with approximately the same reading of matters? Why couldn’t there be five readings? And meanwhile use that energy to observe something else, equally important, that is currently being neglected.” – is highly important when we discuss the problems with discussing issues of grave importance. The reality of the current news model is that major stories are being neglected. When I ran a search for Aiyanna Stanely-Jones on the Washington Post website, a total of six articles were returned. Five were republished or summarized from the AP. One was a television column by Lisa de Moraes, on the influence of the television crew at the scene, and looking at the crime through a “what does this mean for reality tv?” perspective. Over at the New York Times, there was one reported piece focusing on the use of the flash grenade and the influence of cameras on police reaction, and an op-ed. Op-ed author Charles M. Blow sparked a conversation around the fall of Detroit, as a city. But it is only in alternate spaces where Aiyana Stanley-Jones’ death is put in the context of the larger picture.

The blog over at the Center for Investigative Reporting has a great piece up about the new reality of police raids:

A house raid by law enforcement in Michigan that led to the killing of a 7-year-old girl May 16 sheds new light on the question of whether police have become overly militarized in the post-Sept. 11 age of terrorism. The Detroit Police Department was executing a “no-knock” search warrant intending to nab an alleged murderer with the help of its SWAT team when authorities say Aiyana Jones was accidentally shot by one of the officers. [...]

The show’s website features images of Detroit’s special response team dressed in military-style apparel and carrying sub-machine guns capable of spraying 800 rounds per minute. One officer wields an intimidating, large-barreled “multi-launcher,” which fires tear-gas projectiles “to disorient potential threats” and “less-lethal rounds,” such as sand bags that are used for crowd-control situations.[...]

Police departments across the United States have used federal homeland security grants to equip these teams with armored vehicles, battering rams, modern devices for conducting surveillance, incident-command trucks resembling RVs on steroids and SWAT attire that seems to visually transform local police into the armed forces.

In one area of Hawaii, police use a 19,000-pound armored BearCat purchased with $240,000 in grants “mostly for executing high-risk search warrants,” according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The vehicle has detectors on board for radiation and methane gas, and it’s followed on “missions” by a $330,000 mobile-command post.

New Hampshire spent $378,000 for two armored vehicles, and police in the town of Nashua there acquired a $250,000 mobile-command unit. Hidalgo County in southern Texas used federal cash set aside by lawmakers for border security to snap up a $346,000 “ballistic engineered armored response” vehicle, according to grant records Elevated Risk obtained this year.

Kimora Lee Simmons (yes, that Kimora Lee) took to the blog at Global Grind to air her frustration:

As the family has said, and I agree, the officer who shot Aiyana is not a “monster”. I do not believe that his actions were intentional, but the slapdash techniques with which these kinds of raids are executed concerns me.

We have militarized our police force, and in doing so, created a war between those who are suppose to protect AND serve our communities with the men, women and children that live in them! We break down doors in our own neighborhoods, the way we break down doors in Baghdad or Kabul. We treat our very own citizens as if they are on the other side. We have lost the connection we once had with our police force. We are afraid of them and they are afraid of us!

Adrienne Brown provides a guest post on the Global Grind, with similar sentiments:

why do the grieving faces of people on this street look so unsurprised?
and when 17-year-old Jerean Blake was killed Friday, wasn’t that equally devastating? did we do enough as a community at that moment?
do we know how to keep our children safe?
can we admit that we don’t know anything about how to be the kind of society where this could never happen?

to step back from the immediate events is to see what happens in communities who internalize the corporate military worldview that some people are expendable. the way we function as an economy that places profit first is that it’s normal for people in uniform to throw bombs into the home of civilians and shoot children.

an economy that valued people first could never justify those tactics.

i think of the children in my life – those blessed and loved and safe, and those who will never really be safe because of how the world sees them. the way aiyana died, the last minutes of her life – that is terrorism.

to know that that kind of terror and pain can happen to a child in this time – IS happening to children, funded by our tax dollars, right now, in iraq, afghanistan, palestine, arizona, and here in detroit – is to understand that as things stand, there is no justice.

Akiba Solomon, over at Colorlines, discusses the dual nature of the tragedy:

Cargill’s conflicted reaction is gut wrenching. “I’m sorry what happened to the 7-year-old child, you know my sympathy [goes] out for 7-year-old. But they knew the guy killed my son [Je'Rean Blake],” Cargill charges about the Jones family’s relationship with Owens. “Everything got started because that guy killed my son. That girl would have been living right now and my son would have been living too. … They don’t think about my son. They talk all about the 7-year-old girl. What about my son?”

This situation is too much, too sad, too unfair, too senseless to intellectualize about the moral equivalency this grieving mother is expressing. Too much, too sad, too unfair, too senseless to harp on how excessive police force—not her child’s murder by a civilian—led to the death of Aiyana. Who am I to question her anger at the lack of public focus on Je’Rean? After all, his killing should be just as aberrant as Aiyana’s—not just business as usual in the poor, Black neighborhood both children called home.

So here we all are, a week later. Facebook pages with thousands strong, hearts reaching out to families of two brown children who died at the hands of foolish predators, sloppy police work and reality-show preening. Aiyana’s in the ground, buried in a pink suit. Je’Rean laid to rest Monday.

Where are these perspectives in the mainstream media? The Stanley-Jones case, like South Philadelphia High last year, deserves better treatment. Both of these stories dealt with matters of national importance.

For Aiyana Stanley-Jones, her senseless death should have sparked a much better conversation than the rumination of reality television crews. While that area is ripe for exploration (and I would personally be interested to know if producers on cop reality shows use the same manipulative tactics as they do on regular competition shows), that should not be the only angle taken in the realm of the news. Look at the excerpts above. Police violence, state sanctioned violence, the militarization of police forces in the aftermath of 9/11, cycles of violence – there are many different angles to discuss with this story, but it appears that there is no interest in looking at those who are marked as “others.”

It was the same with South Philadelphia High School. Here was a golden opportunity to discuss some very complicated issues: the realities facing recent immigrants and children of immigrants in America, the declining state of South Philadelphia, class politics and how they create schools of last resort, the fact that many children cannot go to school in safety, the needs of overtaxed teachers for support, cycles of bullying, the declining infrastructure in urban cities — and yet, that chance was missed. A search on the New York Times website pulls up one story on South Philadelphia High, with the headline “Philadelphia: Racial Tensions at School.” The tragedy? This sole mention was a summary of an Associated Press article.

Google is doing their best to fix the news – but I am starting to wonder what parts of our current media model are worth salvaging.

Related: 5 Ways to Channel Your Aiyana Outrage

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…

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

On a fluke a few of weeks ago, I picked up a dvd about the Black Panthers and the student and employee strike at SF State that created the first Black Studies department in the country.

It was in watching this video that realized that both crack and hip hop politically underdeveloped young people. Much of this statement comes out of my reading two or three books a week along with five or six articles last month, while simultaneously watching the fall out from Sasha Frere Jones’s post about the end of hip hop and a post about rap critics. Blog posts, long blog posts take a lot of work. At least coherent ones do.

Reading and writing is labor and I am thinking about to which ends, those of us who are in our twenties and thirties, are reading and writing.

While watching the responses percolate, I wondered what would happen if we invested the same time in rap blogs in making politics to address our lives?

What is our investment in a music that has made it clear that it doesn’t give a fuck out us in a time where we live in an unsustainable world?

For the folks who say that hip hop is related to a political project, I would say, place a link in the comment section. By political I mean a group of people organizing to serve a communally determined group agenda. This doesn’t mean that it hasn’t served as a conscious raising tool, in the past, but Post Chronic or even Post Blueprint, the music has ceased being for itself and currently exists for Black respect and White dollars.

Given that this is the case, what does this mean for Black people and what does it mean for Black music?

To the extent that this applies globally, remains to be seen.

Chuck D has argued extensively that young people globally have used rap music as tool to make sense of their position is society. Based a couple of documentaries that I have seen about hip hop in Cuba and North Africa, to a certain extent this is true. Given the impact of AIDS mass incarceration and the systemic undereducation of Black, White and Latino students, what are the ways in which that the music, at least since The Chronic, has helped us make sense of our world?

I come from the Leroi Jones school of Black music, which looks at Black music both as it relates to our history in this country, and as being representative of a particular point in time in this country.

Three months ago, Rafi said that rap music used to be the street talking to the street. In commenting on the ways in which Nike used Cube’s “Today is a Good Day” for a skateboarding commercial he writes,

It’s just another example of hip-hop’s transformation to lifestyle marketing tool and its astonishing disconnect from the reality it used to represent….Three years ago I saw a big hip-hop show in New York City just days after Sean Bell’s murder. The city was buzzing with rage and confusion everywhere except inside the show where the incident wasn’t even mentioned. I said back then that there was “a time when rap was supposed to speak to and speak for the streets”. But shows like that Rock the Bells performance and ads like this one from Nike show how far we’ve come from that.
The acts and songs of that era are being used to market to aging hip-hop fans like myself but it is all sound and no fury.

Rhythm & Blues affirms Black humanity, modern rap music affirms our subhumanity.

This doesn’t mean that Rhythm and Blues was all warm and fuzzy as Black humanity encompasses both the aspects that we are proud of and our collective darkside as well.

Birkhold thinks that this is really crude statement, and criticizes me for saying so. Yes it is crude. But I stand by it, because Black music has changed from a being for itself to being for others. Rafi’s comment
is an illustration of this.

This isn’t a conscious vs. thug dichotomy. My argument is a little more nuanced than that. Cube, Dre, Too Short, were dudes, street or not, talking to the street. Peep the VH1 NWA documentary, “The World’s Most Dangerous Group”. Popular gangster rappers wanted to make some money but they weren’t trying to become corporations themselves. That wasn’t an option, so it wasn’t a goal.

I mentioned the content of this piece to Birkhold shortly after I wrote it and he disagreed with my statement that rap use to exist for itself, and is now existing for others (thuggin’ for cash).

His issue was with the fact that rap has always been, for the most part, about Black men performing Black male, machismo, fantasy. Being for others. Cold Crush brothers, Funky Four Plus One, Africa Bambaata were either on some party shit, some machismo steez, or some super Black masculinity. He tried to say that Cube was from the suburbs, but he’s from South Central, according to Wikipedia. However he did attend Phoenix Institute of Technology in the fall of 1987, and studied Architectural Drafting. Chuck D, Russell and I believe, Run DMC were middle class cats from Long Island and Queens respectively. In rap, Black men have always been performing some other ‘ish and I agree with that.

However, I responded that, while it very well may be true that early rappers were performing a macho, fantasy, partying, Black masculinity, the scale, risk and harm in the1970s and 80s isn’t analogous to
1990s and 2000s.

The fact that Byron Hurt made a movie, Barack and Curtis, about Black masculinity comparing 50 to President Obama is indicative of this.

Currently, rap music is conflated with Blackness. As a result some Black children who are not from the ‘hood feel compelled to perform thuggery in order to be accepted. After all the sacrifices their parents have made, pursuing higher education, moving to the suburbs, working the corporate gig, the children want to be exactly what their parents have been sheltering them from, a thug. The pervasiveness of rap music in 1990s and 2000s plays a big role in making this possible.

The notion of acceptance and assimilation is an important one. In fact, much of the homophobia that we observe in both American culture and in Black culture stems from the resentment that a gay man or lesbian woman has the audacity and courage to walk around being who they want to be, not who others expect them to be. We have been socialized to resent the courage to be queer. We are angry because they refuse to fit into the box that society has created for them, and we are uncertain of how to get ourselves out if it.

Back to Huey. Watching the documentary on The Panthers, the irony of fact that Huey Newton was murdered in a dope deal gone bad on the streets of West Oakland isn’t lost on me.

In listening to Eldridge speak in the documentary, it became to clear that while I was familiar with his open and aggressive misogyny, as he famously
stated that he practiced raping Black women, as preparation for raping white women. He was also charismatic, extremely handsome and in some ways the clip of his speech reminded me of many of the rappers that I grew up listening to.

All these cats accomplished a lot in their twenties and their thirties.

What are we doing?

How can our generation build a movement when we can’t even be honest with ourselves about where we are?

There has been very little analysis about the ways in which Black communities have been impacted by 20 years of the war on drugs. There has also been very little analysis of the ways in which crack wiped out the last vestiges of 60s and 70s era Black resistance.

What does it mean that 30 years later our young people and many older people are more concerned with whether the music is dead than with whether neighborhoods that birthed the music will survive over the next ten years given the impact of globalized gentrification of ‘hoods in the US and around the world?

Have you been to Biggie’s old block lately?

How was the FBI able to eliminate the Black Panthers but unable to contain The Crips and The Bloods?

If Black people’s contribution to this country has been music and free labor, what does it mean when our music is a lifestyle marketing device, and that Black men are systemically under and unemployed?

Thank you for reading this. Clearly, I am trying to work some thangs out.

In proofreading this piece it has become clear how Sociology of the Self is teaching me how to look at the person and society simultaneously. WOOT.

The media reform movement is an offshoot and part of the civil rights movement. It was born in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King and Rev. Everett Parker of the United Church of Christ initiated a lawsuit against white-owned TV stations in the South for consistently portraying African Americans in a racist manner, while refusing to show any coverage of the civil rights movement.

Because of their pressure, the FCC shut down a Mississippi TV station, stating that the power and influence that media companies have gives them the responsibility to operate with the broader public interest at heart – with special consideration given to oppressed minorities.

Since then, political pressure has been brought to bear against the FCC and Congress on a wide variety of issues: female and minority ownership of stations and publications, the dangers of consolidation of the media, the need to build public communications infrastructure like cable access stations or city-owned Internet networks, and the need for everyone to have broadband access.

The percentage of our time that the American public spends with media has been steadily climbing for 40 years, and with that, its influence over our lives. The media is our environment, and the battle I am engaged in is over the nature of this environment: whether it is an environment in which ordinary people have a voice – or whether we are to passively absorb content controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Whether the media is democratic, and reflects a variety of voices.

Why is this important? I will take an extreme example of the media’s power, when it is used by one group over another. In 1994, radio stations played a significant role in the Rwandan genocide, broadcasting hate-filled rants and giving directions to how to kill Tutsis, resulting in a genocide that killed approximately 500,000 Tutsis in 100 days.

I use this example because it is similar to a battle we are fighting now: hate speech online. Researchers at UCLA have just completed a study that shows a recent rise in hate speech online and in broadcast media, particularly against Latinos, while the number of hate crimes against Latinos has been rising. The report is pretty harrowing – a short summary is posted here.

I’m just gonna put in one quote, from neo-Nazi radio host Hal Turner, who wrote on his website in March 2006:

“We’re going to have to start killing these people. I advocate using extreme violence against illegal aliens. Clean your guns. Have plenty of ammunition. Find out where the largest gathering of illegal aliens will be. Go to the area well in advance, scope out several places where to position yourself, and then do what has to be done.”

This is illegal, and the FCC currently does nothing about this.

The National Hispanic Media Coalition is asking the FCC to open a docket to take comments on hate speech in order to determine what action, if any, needs to be taken. As an organization of writers and producers, the NHMC itself is very concerned about upholding freedom of speech; but NHMC and many of its partner organizations think that the FCC has a moral obligation to enforce current law, and find other ways to turn down the volume of hate speech that reinforces racist hatred and keeps many people from even participating online.

I’d like to make an appeal to you folks especially to write a note to the FCC, or through NHMC, or blog about it, in order to open a docket. They won’t do this unless they hear from the community – and site managers are the best people for them to hear from. The FCC has not studied hate speech seriously in 15 years – since before the popularization of the Internet!

Here is how to get in touch with Inez Gonzalez, of the NHMC: igonzalez@nhmc.org.

We are working on a lot of stuff right now, and I will be sure to highlight things as they come up. What you are doing, by presenting platforms by which people can freely communicate, is a democratic act in and of itself; my job is to make sure that the system is set up so that you can continue doing that.

Hannah Miller is the National Field Director for the Media and Democracy Coalition.

A month or two ago I commented on the New York Times Upfront magazine for high school kids. I recently came across their latest, which features a cover story titled “What We Eat.” The story is really just an interesting collection of photographs of families from nations all over the world, but with each family sitting with all the food in their house, like this family from Kuwait:

However, although the title of the article inside the magazine is “What We Eat,” the title listed on the cover of the magazine is “What They Eat.” The picture selected for the cover is not one of the family photos, but is, instead, a photo apparently selected to elicit the maximum negative visceral response possible from American kids:

So the cover separates an “us” and a “them,” and shows the American high school students how gross and weird “they” are.

Check out the issue that preceded this one by just two or three weeks:

Here American high school students learn that people around the world with dark skin are violent, dirty, and poorly dressed.

No wonder American kids grow up to be American adults whose voting habits reflect the view that American foreign policy should be paternalistic.

Note from Sociological Images:

This reminds me of some of Catherine Lutz’s and Jane Collins’s arguments in their book Reading National Geographic, in which show how that magazine represents other cultures in ways that reinforce the idea of the non-Western world as the Other. These images would be a useful accompaniment to the book and a discussion of how we represent people from other countries and what those representations justify, obscure, or challenge.

For those of you who are interested in learning more about Brazil beyond what I cover here, which is mainly from the pop culture/race perspective, check out this awesome site: Eyes on Brazil . The author and blog moderator Adam covers many facets of Brazilian life and culture, and gives the perspective of an estrangeiro (“foreigner”) without patronizing, belittling, or exoticizing Brazil and its people. It’s also a great site if you have general questions about Brazil and/or want to work on your Portuguese as Adam is highly responsive to comments and posts short video clips on Brazilian Portuguese colloquial expressions and slang. Here’s a bit more about the site from the author:

Eyes On Brazil exists in order to give a deeper understanding of the Brazilian arts (as well as all things Brazilian) to an English-speaking audience. Personally, I’ve spent almost 10 years studying (and dreaming of) the sleeping South American giant known as Brazil. Seven of those 10 years were focused teaching myself Brazilian Portuguese, and as such, I consider myself fluent.

Adam also has sibling sites on Belem (Brazil), Salvador (Brazil), and even Colombia.Veja já!

I was riding through Ohio the other day on a road trip to Michigan.

Filthy was looking for NPR but we settled on the Michael Baisden show. I was intrigued because the show was about whether a woman, a wife, has the right to “Go on Strike” and hold out on sex from her husband. Seeing as my research interests are women and sexuality, I was intrigued about the possibilities that the discussion presented.

So, I am listening to the show, and at 6:40 Baisden says to a caller, “If you were my woman, not feeling like it is not a reason to give me some.” Word?

At 7:53 Baisden says, “If you are not in the mood, just lay there and take it.” [Laughter].

The woman caller says that if she doesn’t feel like it she isn’t doing it.

Then Baisden’s co-host says, “Your feelings are obselete, your feelings don’t matter for 30 minutes.” [Laughter].

Record scratch.

I understand that withholding sex from your partner is a very serious matter and typically indicative of other issues going on in the relationship.

However, “You should just lay there and take it” is a very serious line of thought and action for Black women for many reasons .

Think about it this way.

We are raped at a higher rate than all other women in the United States.*

We are murdered at a higher rate than all other women in the United States.

We are beaten by our intimate partners at a higher rate than all other women in the United States.

According to study conducted by the Department of Justice, African American women:

* …were victimized by intimate partners a significantly higher rates than persons of any other race between 1993 and 1998. Black females experienced intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than that of white females, and about 22 times the rate of women of other races. Black males experienced intimate partner violence at a rate about 62% higher than that of white males and about 22 times the rate of men of other races.

According to the study published by the Africana Voices Against Violence, Tufts University:

* The number one killer of African-American women ages 15 to 34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner.

* In a study of African-American sexual assault survivors, only 17% reported the assault to police.

I was waiting for Baisden to insert some kind of disclaimer, and say, “Ya’ll know I am just playing, I don’t want you all to call here
cursing me out”, but he didn’t.

Baisden’s comments got me to thinking. I am currently in the middle of writing a review to Steve Harvey’s Act Like A Lady, Date Like a Man and I couldn’t help but think about about how the Black male talk show hosts are just as patriarchal as some of the rappers.

Really what is the difference between Snoop saying “Bitches Ain’t Shit But Ho’s and Tricks” and “Just lie there and take It?”

Granted the show mellowed out a bit when Baisden brought on a therapist, Dr. Gail Saltz who specializes in relationships and sex, but the statement had already been made.

Baisden’s comments are also interesting because, in the United States, it has historically been permissible for a husband to have non-consensual sex with his wife.

We had no legal standing to refuse to have sex with our husbands.

The court’s position was that getting married meant a lifetime of permanent consent. This meant that a wife could not be raped.

So you mean to tell me we have rappers, blogs and talk show hosts trashing us? I’m cool on those.

My contention is that every time you visit a site, play a tape, listen to a show, you are voting.

Why vote for a man who thinks that non consensual sex with your husband is okay or that you should just lie there and take it, is okay?

Why do we passively accept Baisden’s actions?

What does a healthy Black Female sexuality look like if we are just lying there and taking it?

Who is he getting money with?

—
*Latoya’s Note: This statistic is actually a bit inaccurate. Indigenous/Native American women actually have the highest rates of rape out of any other ethnic group. However, most statistical analysis leaves out Indigenous/Native American women because of small sample sizes and/or a focus on the four main racial groups (Black/White/Latino/Asian).

This weekend, I received the following breathless entreaty through a listserv that I subscribe to:

Ebony/Jet Magazine on The Verge of Financial Collaspse (J P)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:45:31 -0400

One of the most notable permanent fixtures in every black household (back in the days), was the Ebony and Jet magazine. If you wanted to learn about your history, the plight of Black America, current issues facing Black Americans, how the political process of America affects you, how politics works, who the hottest actors were, what time a particular black television show aired, who got married recently, who were the most eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in your town, what cities had black mayors, police chiefs, school superintendents, how to register to Vote, what cars offer the best value for the buck, who employed black Americans, how to apply for college scholarships, etc., more than likely, Ebony or Jet magazine could help you find answers to those questions.

We have recently been informed that the Johnson Publishing Company is currently going through a financial crisis. The company is attempting a reorganization in order to survive. Many people have already lost their jobs with a company that has employed thousands of black Americans during the course of its existence.

In order to support this effort to save our magazine, my friends and myself have pledged to get a subscription to both Ebony and Jet magazine, starting with one year. We are urging every other club member who comes across this plea to do the same. Please post, repost, and post again, to any blog that you may own or support.

Please email this to every person that you know, regardless of their background. Let them know that Ebony and Jet magazines have been part of the black American culture for three quarters of a century, and that there is a lot that they can learn about black American culture from reading them.

We are currently discussing the idea of throwing an Ebony/Jet Party, where people can eat, drink, and sign up for their subscription on the spot. Please spread this idea around to all that you know. Your Sororities, Fraternities, Lodges, VFW Posts, Churches, Civic Groups, Block Clubs, Caps Meetings, Book Clubs, etc.

It would be a crying shame, to lose our historic magazine, during the same year of such an historic event as the election of our first black President of the United States.

Now, like a lot of other black people, I grew up with Ebony and Jet magazines on the family coffee table. I remember fondly sitting in the brown recliner in my grandparents’ back room reading a then-oversized Ebony with Billy Dee Williams, James Earl Jones and Richard Pryor on it. (Don’t know why I specifically recall that issue of the magazine, but for some reason it is one that remains etched in my mind.) I say this to illustrate that these magazines are part of my cultural history. Nevertheless, when I read the missive above, my first thought (after wondering if the message-writer understands that subscriptions generally account for far less of a publication’s revenue than advertising does) was…”Meh.” I’m not so sure that Ebony and Jet, as they stand today, are institutions worth going to the mat for.

To be sure, John H. Johnson, founder of the Johnson publishing empire that produces Ebony and Jet, represents an inspiring success story. When the 27-year-old entrepreneur launched Ebony in November 1945 (Jet was founded in 1951.), he did so in a climate of mainstreamed racial injustice. Black GIs, like my grandfather, were returning from fighting for “freedom” in World War II to find they were less than free at home in America. Real black voices and black life were obscured by stereotype in American media. Local black newspapers, such as another iconic Chicago publication, The Defender, and Johnson’s magazines were among the few places where black people could see their lives and culture reflected and read news important to them. We mattered to these news and lifestyle outlets. Forget the New York Times, these were our publications of record.

Today, Ebony enjoys a circulation of more than 1.4 million, while Jet reaches nearly 1 million people each week. But I suspect neither magazine is as ubiquitous in the homes of my generation of black folks (GenX) as they were for my parents and grandparents. The truth is, like many Civil Rights-era institutions, both publications began feeling irrelevant a long time ago. Yes, black people still need someplace to see their lives and culture reflected and to read news important to them. (Today’s media is much better in covering people of color, but far from perfect.) But are Ebony and Jet the go-to places for that anymore? No, because while black America has changed over the last 60-some years, these publications have seemed largely the same–like museum pieces. I think of them fondly (like my grandparents’ old recliner in the back room), but emphatically not as publications-of-record.

An example of Johnson Publishing’s out-of-touchness? Sunday at the neighborhood Wal-Mart, I picked up a Jet for the first time in forever, in preparation for this post. I wanted to know if it was still there. In an age when black women are fighting stereotyped images of ourselves as Jezebels, playthings and acoutrement for the latest hip hop star whose cuts are banging in the whips of white, teenage suburbanites–it couldn’t still be there. But, yeah, centerspread, there it was–that paean to black woman thickitude–the Jet Beauty of the Week, a young, black woman in a teeny swimsuit giving sexy face. Is this what I’m supposed to rush to the battlements to save?

The forefront of the black communications revolution is now on the Web, where brothers and sisters are breaking news (Jena 6), championing causes and serving up provocative opinions. Ebony and Jet, I think, have failed to keep pace with a world where there is Ta-Nehisi Coates and What About Our Daughters and Racialicious and Aunt Jemima’s Revenge and Womanist Musings and TransGriot and Something Within and Color of Change and Pam’s House Blend and The Root and Black and Married with Kids, and, hell, Bossip. Today, black readers can get superior writing about politics, black life, marriage, parenting, sexuality, pop culture, identity, racism, sexism, spirituality, finance and a host of other issues, for free, everyday, all day, online. The topics covered (or not covered) by Ebony and Jet, the lack of depth in writing, the formats, the frickin beauty of the week, make these publications seem frozen in time, while the world speeds up around them.

Beyond all that, how is Johnson Publishing going to adjust to the new digital age? It’s not the only print purveyor facing this question. Local newspapers across the country need to answer it too. America has changed the way it consumes information, and so far, print media hasn’t found a profitable way to adapt. That’s a shame, because we desperately need the Fourth Estate. We need in-depth reporting. Marginalized folks need these things more than most. God knows that black folks could use the shot to our collective self-esteem that Johnson Publishing’s products offer. But taking extraordinary life-saving measures to rescue publications like Ebony and Jet is merely stalling the inevitable unless ailing publications put strategic plans in place to innovate and evolve.

Look, the older I get the more pieces of my past mean to me. (That’s probably why I spent the weekend watching old episodes of “Columbo,” “Quincy” and “MacMillan and Wife” on Netflix.) But nostalgia isn’t enough reason for me to join the charge to save Ebony and Jet. All the Ebony/Jet parties in the world won’t make a difference if these black cultural icons aren’t making the changes necessary to save themselves.

This post’s title is a rhetorical question. Of course poor whites exist, but not that you’d know so if you’re informed by the mainstream media. While Ronald Reagan was successful in painting urban black women as “welfare queens”, whites receive nearly 2/3 of all welfare benefits administered by the federal government. Still, Shaniqua Jackson, not Samantha McMullen, is the face of American poverty.

Last Friday’s edition of ABC’s 20/20 tried to shed some light on the woes of dirt poor rural white Americans, a group of folks so routinely (and IMHO, intentionally) ignored they’re damn near considered invisible. And while A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains is a fairly nuanced portrait of life in the hills of Kentucky, it both informs and pisses off at the same time.

The promo trailer:

A young girl discusses her Mom’s drug problem.

Notice how Whoopi is literally biting her tongue as Sawyer pitches her special on The View. Peep her under the table remark about the tooth-rot. I love me some Whoopi, mane.

I’ll admit, despite having grown up in an area with lots of impoverished white folks, even I didn’t realize the depths of the issues in Appalachia. Children out-of-wedlock, awful graduation rates, incest, generational curses, excessive prescription drug abuse, abysmal heath statistics, rampant crime, broken families, and joblessness abound. If you closed your eyes, you’d swear they were talking about Detroit. It’s all packaged together in a pretty intriguing (albeit depressing) 60 minutes.

The thing that sorta pisses you off is how the one hour story is told. ABC’s Diane Sawyer, a Kentuckian (from Louisville, not the hills) herself, tells a well-rendered story of the invisible residents of her homestate with the sort of compassion and restraint seldom afforded when the media depicts poor minorities.

The drug problem is blamed on pharmaceutical companies who systematically dump OxyContin in the mountains as a catch-all pain reliever.[1] The declining coal industry leads to unemployment. Poorly-funded schools lead to high school dropouts. An epidemic of toothrot is blamed on Moutain Dew addiction.[2] A football player who feels alienated and leaves behind a college scholarship (after just 8 weeks) does so because of the pressures from back home, not because he found himself suddenly overmatched on the gridiron. These issues all accumulate and take their toll on the ties that bind the families featured. It’s almost as if there’s a logical explanation for why everyone’s so f*cked the f*ck up. They’re victims of circumstance and products of their environment. Personal responsibility isn’t even discussed. The word “bootstraps” isn’t uttered a single time.

Contrast this with the way poor blacks are blamed for everything. Pumping drugs into their communities. Leaving their children behind with single moms. Killing each other. Leaching off the government when they should really just get off their lazy black asses and do better. Hell, some folks are even blaming Negroes for the recent mortgage crisis. No, really.

Never mind the fact that merely 6% of all “risky” loans were given to minorities. It sounds so much better to say the gubb’ment was forced at gunpoint to hand these shifty, lazy Negroes keys to a duplex, for fear of otherwise being tabbed as racist. As if the GOP was ever concerned about being accused of racism.[3] Also never mind the fact that the Republican who presided over this nonsense was the main dude claiming that minority home ownership reaching all-time high levels in the mid 2000′s was proof of his commitment to leveling the “soft bigotry of low expectations”. That’s right, when you’re writing revisionist history, you can have it both ways. Those are the rules.

The next portrayal of blacks as “victims of circumstance” I see at the hands of the MSM will be the first. I’m not holding my breath, because that would be pointless. A similar Diane Sawyer expose about poor minorities in Camden, NJ a few years ago was pockmarked with the typical “violent, babypoppin’, lazy gubb’ment leachers” nonsense. And lest anyone get it confused: inner-city poverty is hardly an exclusively black thang. If you’ve been to Fishtown in Philly[4], or any random backstreet from B-More or Beantown, you’ll know exactly what I mean. You can attempt to marginalize it to your liking, but white poverty isn’t just some epidemic confined to a handfulla’ folks up in dem’ dar’ hills. Lets change that tired narrative for once and for all, please.

Just so nobody gets it confused, I’m emphatically not saying black folks don’t need to claim personal responsibility for their own destiny. Of course I agree with that, this blog more or less says so everyday! The problem is, when that very same set of expectations isn’t extended to poor whites, we’ve got a really big disconnect. And I don’t know bout’ ya’ll, but I smell a Grand Hu$tle here.

Question: Did you see ABC’s A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains? Why do you think the MSM portrays poor blacks as shiftless and lazy, yet chooses to completely deny the existence of whites living in even more dire situations?

Watch ABC News 20/20 A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains [ABC.com]

[1] Hmmm, but saying the gubb’ment might could have something to do with the crack epidemic in inner cities is batshit crazy?!?

[2] No, seriously. They more or less blamed toothlessness on the soft drink industry.

[3] Barack The Magic Negro CD’s anyone?

[4] I had the misfortune of taking a couple of wrong turns off I-95 once. That sh*t looked like Beirut with white people. I had no idea this sorta thing even existed before then.

White ladies have a bunch of kids and get TV shows. A Hispanic woman pumps out eight babies and gets scorn – and maybe a few high-profile interviews.

California woman Nadya Suleman birthed octuplets late last month after having six kids earlier this decade – all through in vitro fertilization. Having 14 kids isn’t the soundest family planning – throw diaper subsidies into the stimulus package, Barack! – but we’ve seen this before, and we’ve seen a celebration, not a simultaneous national gag reflex.

The 2003 remake, “Cheaper by the Dozen” and its 2005 sequel track the craziness and hilarity of a couple with 12 quirky, good-looking kids. Audiences saw that it was tough managing a small army of mouths to feed, but in the end, it’s all just really quite funny and heart warming.

“John & Kate Plus Eight” on TLC has tracked the trials of the Gosselin family as they manage their eight little offspring. They somehow manage, and viewers send money.

Another TLC show based on overactive ovaries and warrior sperm is “Seventeen Kids and Counting,” a reality program about Michelle and Jim Bob – yes, Jim Bob – Duggar, who have 18 children.

Every episode is a new way of praising the family for its relationships and unflappable faith.

Then Suleman, who is Hispanic, goes and has eight kids all at once. People freak. Someone asks me, “What color is she?” Unsure how to respond, I tell him she’s Hispanic. He nods his head in disapproval and makes a tisk, tisk sound.

Let’s not forget the sexism – how can a woman raise that many kids without a bread winner, without a brawny man to bring home the bacon? And lots of it.

In an interview on NBC’s “Today Show,” Suleman admitted having a platoon of babies can be perceived as “selfish,” but I’ve never hear anyone call the Duggars selfish or irresponsible. The sentiment seems to be the Duggars and their ilk might be freak shows, but damn it, they’re lovable, respectable freak shows.

Columnists and talking heads have taken their shots at Suleman, too. Phyllis Chesler called Suleman’s baby-bearing “a Frankenstinian moment.”

“It is grotesque, a freak Circus Act,” Chesler writes, pointing out that “Osama bin Laden’s father had 57 children.” Hear that, TLC? A pilot of “Suleman and bin Laden Plus 71” for spring sweeps? Ratings gold.

The Daily Mail, a British paper, quoted a perturbed doctor calling Suleman’s pregnancy a “medical disaster.” Another baby guru said the births were “clearly not a medical triumph.” I know the white families referenced above didn’t have octuplets, but Suleman having 14 kids to raise is cast in an unwaveringly negative light when compared to the predominately Anglo-Saxon baby makers starring in their own shows.

If you’re going to hate on families with enough kids to run Halliburton, hate equally. It shouldn’t matter what “color” the baby machine is or whether she’s hitched.

—
Ed. Note – Reader Calisha wrote in about this story as well, pointing our attention to this LA Weekly blog post which summarized some of the racially motivated vitriol surrounding the births. There were a lot of assumptions that Suleman was not in this country legally, with one reader asserting “she looks Middle Eastern” and implying a terrorist connection.

Calisha also notes:
Aside from the obvious race issues here, the thing that most concerns me is that many, in their need to govern others based on their own moral code, have declared that they will boycott any companies that provide support to the families. It concerns me that we would punish the children because we don’t agree with their mother’s actions.

I agree. It’s interesting to see this story slide from “oh, babies!” to “she just had them for the welfare checks.” The fact the Suleman is a single mother who had these children as a result of IVF treatments fuels a lot of the hatred, but the significant racial component of this is not to be discounted. – LDP

Update: Cynthia and Rchoudh in the comments clarified exactly why there are mixed racial insults. According to Rchoudh: “It’s turning out that Nadya’s father is Iraqi and her mother Ukrainian. Her being considered as Hispanic is due to her keeping her ex-husband’s last name after the divorce (he was hispanic).”

UPDATE 2: This thread is now closed to comments.

This could have been a good op-ed.

Reading through Jeff Jacoby’s rant about how some people have the nerve to wonder about racial parity in the press corps, I just kept shaking my head. One could have argued that if journalism, in general, is on the decline it follows logic that minority journalists will be disproportionately affected and start disappearing from the rolls. So, one could then logically argue to fix the racial gaps in the press corps, we would need to start by fixing the foundation of the press corps.

Or, one could have argued that as old notions of district boundaries and “ethnic” enclaves are eroding away, so should the idea of “ghettoizing” correspondents. So, it would be reasonably expected for a white reporter to be able to cover an issue outside of their community with the same level of insight and aplomb as a community insider. (I would say vice versa, but many minority writers, self-included, are expected to be able to “write white” already.)

Or, I could have even accepted yet another “post-racial” America type of commentary where they argue that since whites proved willing to cross the color barrier in voting for Obama, it means that journalists should be able to venture out and cover all issues, regardless of race, because a new level of understanding has been reached. (I would disagree with this, but I could accept it.)

But Jacoby’s piece is the same old, same old.

But why should it matter to anyone but a racist whether a White House reporter is black or white? Well, says Michael Fletcher, a colleague of Kurtz’s, “you would want to have black journalists there to bring a different racial sensibility.” By the same token, more evangelical journalists would presumably bring a different religious sensibility to the White House, more journalists from the Deep South would bring a different regional sensibility, and more Republican journalists would bring a different political sensibility. Do you know of any news organizations that are fretting over the “relative paucity” of evangelicals, Southerners, or Republicans on their payrolls? Me neither.

As if these things were equal. As if evangelicals, Southerners, or Republicans were systematically excluded from society (and the press corps) for years due to institutionalized racism and the pervasive idea of segregation.

Carmen often argues against this idea that “thought diversity” has come to replace “racial diversity” – proponents of this theory often argue that it is more important to have a diverse group of thinkers, rather than people of similar thought process with different ethnic or racial backgrounds. While there is a little merit to this theory, it still ignores the strangely persistent disparities in compensation, advancement, and opportunity to enter these fields.

I just finished reading an advance copy of Gwen Ifill’s “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama” for a review I need to complete. In the book, Ifill details far more than Barack Obama’s rise in politics – she talks about the shift in the ideas surrounding leadership in the black community, the tightrope candidates have to walk, and the ideas associated with “crossing over.” She documents the issues faced by politicians seeming both “not black enough” and alternately “too black” and the collective memory of the subjects in the book stretches from the early 1900s to the present day. We are still dealing with “firsts.” Or, as Colin Powell notes in the book:

“I’ve never distanced myself from Buffalo Soldiers, from any of those guys, ’cause I’m here because of them and I’m not going to let youngesters forget, or white people forget, what we went through. So when they say, ‘Well, how can you still support affirmative action?’ I say, ”Cause I saw the affirmative action the other folks had for about two hundred years.” (p. 176)

This applies to journalism. It applies to everything in our society, but it especially applies to journalism where white reporters and white writers (particularly white male writers) are seen as objective and everyone else just brings their minority bias to the table. And I don’t see how Jacoby can argue that there is no need for racial parity in journalism when his racially tone-deaf article proves that reporters will bring their own bias into whatever they will report.

It’s just strange how some biases are perceived as objective.

I do agree with Jacoby on one thing – we need more quality journalists. Reporters like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair do journalism a grand disservice. A bad journalist is a bad journalist, regardless of color, and we need more people – of all races – who take the idea of the news and the public trust seriously.

We need more reporters who are engaged and informed, and are willing to challenge themselves on their own biases. But until that day comes, what is the solution?

Would a white journalist, like Jacoby, be able to tell with conviction Cory Booker’s story? Booker, the current mayor of Newark, has a story layered with racial nuance. In The Breakthrough, Ifill notes that “In order to move into Harrington Park, his parents, a pair of IBM executives, hired a white couple to pose as them.” (p. 142) Now, an informed white writer (or a writer who knows their beat, and has been reporting in the area for the years which is another dying breed) would probably be able to piece that together, either from background knowledge or doing further research. And an informed white writer would be able to paint a picture of some of the intra-racial tension Booker faced, from being perceived as “too light” to be black, of the static he received for having grown up in the suburbs, away from the city, or for his top-tier education.

An informed, curious, white writer could conceivably write that story.

But a white writer who is convinced racism is in the past, has a negligible effect on modern life, and subscribes to the “only racists bring up race” school of thought can never tell that kind of story. Their bias prevents them from seeing what is there.

And so, Jacoby’s op-ed actually makes my case for me. In his insistence to do away with talking about race, he notes:

“Washington journalism will not be improved by seeking out “journalists of color,” but by seeking out journalists of integrity, talent, and thoughtfulness.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

Especially on the thoughtfulness aspect. Journalists who understand the inequities in society that revolve around gender, race, class, sexuality, gender orientation, and ability – even if they don’t fully understand or live that experience – will produce better, more nuanced pieces that speak to a large segment of the population. Journalists who deny these inequities become editors who deny these inequities who reject pieces that explicitly deal with this bias and support pieces that validate their worldview.

And while that continues to happen, we will continue to have the same boring op-eds airing asking “Why Should a Journalist’s Race Matter?” when the subtext is really “I’m tired of talking about race” instead of having a more productive conversation asking “why haven’t these issues of inequality been resolved?”

(Photo credit: NY Mag)

Note: This video was created by Chaobunny12 in response to the ongoing Avatar controversy. In the beginning slide for the video, she writes:

This video is for those of you who argue that the Avatar characters look white, not Asian or Inuit. It’s for people who claim that he culture of the Avatar world is essentially American and don’t see any Asian culture in Avatar.

The video has no sound, but the images speak for themselves.

For those of you who can’t see the video, this is a great visual essay that does the same thing.

(Thanks to readers JSConnect and ali_wildgoose for sending these in!)

Update: For the readers that haven’t been paying close attention to the links, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a popular cartoon that is heavily influenced by Asian/Inuit cultures (see above.) A movie was recently announced based on the anime, featuring an all-white cast. Hence the ensuing controversy.

First, I have to say that this isn’t a critique.

It’s a serious of observations, an analysis of my viewing, and a reflection on one of the warmest and most electrifying movies I’ve seen in a while. Slumdog Millionaire wasn’t perfect, but I know that after I saw it, I felt incredible. I had already known I would like it before I had gone in, because it fit the type I liked—the interesting premise, the quirky storytelling device, and, of course, the overall familiarity of the subject matter, but it defied my expectations. The hopeful, love-themed story was at Bollywood levels of intensity (though better made), and I easily identified with the setting and characters.

Here is where I realized that I saw this movie differently than how perhaps my non-Indian college friends at college did. I saw layers underneath certain scenes in the movie that I doubt they would’ve.

When Jamal answered the question about the Hindu god Rama, I predicted the clash of religion. As the pulsing beat of the music and the main character’s mother’s anxious face forecasted the riots, frustrated emotions burst in my chest, the fatigue of the age-long conflict between Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan pressing me with its weight.

Wasn’t it just a little more than a month ago that my family and I had watched the news about Mumbai on fire during our Thanksgiving holiday? I had felt uncomfortably separated from it—India felt so far away, but I still felt a scrambling anxiety at the events, nervous about what this changed.

Pakistan used to be part of India. When the British set up arbitrary lines dividing the country, these lines were religious as well. After the Partition, there were violent riots between the Hindus and Muslims in both countries and along the border. This history deeply affects relations between the countries today. What followed the Mumbai terrorist attacks indicated the changes that it would have: tensions between Pakistan and India rose, and the idea of “conflict” frightened me, when I allowed myself to think about it.

The scene of the Hindu extremists yelling with their weapons and the scurrying Muslim children were very easy reminders of these past events and facts.

And then there was Maman’s gang of children, trained (against their will or knowledge) to become expert sympathy seeking beggars. My mouth went dry as I felt a cavalcade of anguish inside. I had seen these children in the street when I would visit India, imploring me for a rupee, because as their belly-rubbing and palms pressed together suggested to my non-Hindi speaking self, they were poor and hungry—unlike me. There were so many of them too; crowding around us as we walked down the street, squished together and crouching across from the idols in temples, patting and pulling our clothes when traffic stopped. Their presence and suffering in the movie gave me guilt—it almost felt like my fault, because I knew this sort of thing happened, and these kids existed, but I hadn’t done anything to help them.
With this tumult of emotions, I came to a realization: most of the other people who would see this movie wouldn’t feel so much, or as deeply, as I did. They would view this scene with a certain amount of distance that I couldn’t have, because of the knowledge that I possessed.
The guilt went deeper—that I couldn’t just feel sympathetic to the characters and wonder at their predicament; instead I saw them in a different perspective, examining the world that director Danny Boyle presented through a filter of my own experience.

If this story had been set somewhere else, I would’ve just felt the usual consideration in the characters and the interest in the culture. But it was set in India, infusing the story with that which was permanently ingrained in me. My view was set to a certain slant of light that I couldn’t stop myself from seeing.

But as I ruminated on this idea, I wondered if this difference was actually a bad thing. My study of media in college had revealed the idea of “active audiences,” where certain people would see media in different ways, creating their own impressions and making their own conclusions. Everyone had their own special filter through which they viewed the world, and this film; it was a lens built from their own experience and personality and mind process, and it wasn’t the wrong way of seeing, just a different one.

However, there are ways to analyze this type of differences in perception. With these “active audiences,” there are three basic ways that people can take in certain types of media.
First, there is the preferred and usually dominant position, which is how the producer of that certain type of media wants you to absorb the media. Most people recognize Danny Boyle’s vision as one of a fiercely hopeful movie that would be uplifting and beautiful, which is evidenced by its critical acclaim and box office status.

Then there is the viewpoint of the opposite side, the oppositional position, which sees the movie in the opposite respect that Danny Boyle had in mind. They might find the movie to be a mere “feel-good” movie without any real value in its story or construction. There are also others who see that Boyle’s incorrect depiction of India is one of extreme poverty and corruption. Some of these people may even go as far as saying it “ennobles [this] poverty”, as Owen Gleiberman does in his Entertainment Weekly review of the movie, because it “turns the horror of broken Indian childhoods into a whooshingly blithe, in-your-face picaresque.”

Then there is the third type, the negotiated position, where the interpretation is independent of the producer’s intent. I didn’t need to be influenced into feeling for the characters or properly informed of Jamal’s life hardships and sufferings. I already identified with the people onscreen because of their familiarity and the background they shared with me, even with the multitude of differences between us, and I recognized the hardships as problems my parents would discuss with other family members or ones I would witness when I visited India.

And then there were the cultural additions that Boyle added to the film that were more than pieces of artistry and added more than worldliness for me—I knew them. Little things would make me smile, like the way I sometimes didn’t even need the subtitles (though my Hindi is still hazy), and how the main characters exclaimed over famous actor Amitabh Bachchan (and how Salim’s character mirrored the “Angry Young Man” archetype the actor always played in his youth), and the wondrous music composed by the much loved and well known AR Rahman, especially the usage of Sonu Nigam’s “Aaj ki Raat” and the earnest Bollywood-like dance sequence at the end.

I also realized that I would always hold this “negotiated” position in my view of any media that referenced India and its culture. There was an everlasting connection between us, not just because of my family, but also because I felt a certain amount of responsibility to it, having visited India constantly and seen its separate existence outside of the usual American perspective, but grown up here with that said perspective.

Similarly, every one of us sees the world through their own lens; mine is just markedly unique in this instance because of the different and distinctly Indian American experiences that affect it, and the importance these experiences play in viewing this type of media.

Related: You’re the Man Now, Dog! The Racialicious Review of Slumdog Millionaire

Did United Statesians electing its first president of color become an implicit invitation for liberal/progressive media outlets to talk about Black and brown behinds?

According to two of them, yep.

Salon started off the conversation with Erin Aubry Kaplan’s essay, “First Lady Got Back,” where she waxes ecstatic about First Lady Michelle Obama’s behind:

“…while it isn’t humongous, per se, it is a solid, round, black, class-A boo-tay. Try as Michelle might to cover it with those Mamie Eisenhower skirts and sheath dresses meant to reassure mainstream voters, the butt would not be denied.

As America fretted about Obama’s exoticism and he sought to calm the waters with speeches about unity and common experience, Michelle’s body was sending a different message: To hell with biracialism! Compromise, bipartisanship? Don’t think so. Here was one clear signifier of blackness that couldn’t be tamed, muted or otherwise made invisible. It emerged right before our eyes, in the midst of our growing uncertainty about everything, and we were too bogged down in the daily campaign madness to notice. The one clear predictor of success that the pundits, despite all their fancy maps, charts and holograms, missed completely? Michelle’s butt.”

As my friend Tom would say, “Stop, Miss Gurl.”

There’s more–infinitely more–to what makes our new First Lady beautiful and a challenge to the white-beauty standard than her boo-tay. If Aubry Kaplan would have delved into the beauty-brains combo she started to discuss (“She has coruscating intelligence, beauty, style…”), the piece would have been sort of all right. Nope, just Michelle’s ass.

Then here comes Alternet with Myra Mendible’s “Big Booty Beauty and the New Sexual Aesthetic. Her take on the ass thang:

“We should not underestimate the symbolic value of buttocks. Butt metaphors helped European cultures categorize and describe their others, ascribing bodily differences certain moral and intellectual attributes. Gilman argues that, “Beginning with the expansion of European colonial exploration, describing the forms and size of the buttocks became a means of describing and classifying the races. The more prominent the more primitive…” (Making the Body Beautiful). British culture, in particular, identified the buttocks with primitive or debased sexuality (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex). Non-Western women were associated with the “lower regions” of the body and characterized in terms of their abundant backside. Similarly, in American culture, the U.S.-Mexico border marked a figurative divide between Northern mind and Southern body, rationality and sensuality, domestic and foreign. This bodily trope culled associations between the lower body and the inferior, more primitive “under” developed “torrid zones” south of the border; it often served to rationalize U.S. military interventions or corporate exploitation of Latin American labor and resources.”

Analytically speaking, what Mendible wrote is what Aubry Kaplan should have written: a more nuanced reflection on the history and meaning of the colored butt in the erotic imaginations and racial and gender definitions of white people and Black men and Latinos and how that loaded image became a policy of exploitation for both groups. In other words, a little intersectionality would have helped Aubry Kaplan’s essay. (Though I find it interesting neither talk about what all this “ass aesthetics” means to some straight Asian American, Native American, and Arab American, and mixed-race folks. And for same-gender-loving folks of color. But that’s me.)

Like Aubry Kaplan, Mendible has her own We Women Should Be Taken More Seriously Moment:

“Either way, I’ll still be dreaming of a time when (to loosely paraphrase Martin Luther King), women will be judged by the content of their character and not the size of their butts. Now that would be truly bootyful.”

Huhn? If Mendible felt that way, then why did she write a 3-page essay on rumps?

Is The “Ethnic” Boo-tay going to be the new feature-story trend, starting in the “progressive” press and eventually working its way into the MSM? Or does “booty” become the mass-media meme for evasively talking about Black and Brown beauty?

To be fair, perhaps these outlets feel these articles and authors serve a two-fold purpose: 1) to give opportunities to marginalized voices and 2) to educate the mostly white readers about the concerns of women of color. But these articles reduce the complex conversations Black women and Latinas have about beauty and sex to a single body part–as if that’s all we talk about, that’s all we are. And these articles–when accompanied with a dearth of other writings and images in the mass media about the complexities of our lives–really do little more than stereotype us again as nothing more than big ol’ behinds. And a subtler message of these pieces appearing in these high-readership forums is that if a Black female or Latina writer wants to get heard, then writing about black and brown derrieres is the way to go. Or we become the default “experts” when a news outlet wants to talk about this topic.

(I’m just waiting for Dr. Melissa Harris Lacewell  or Maegan La Mala  to blog about her being on some left-leaning radio show and the interviewer starts talking about the “Booty Question.” “I could’ve sworn I was asked to come on to talk about Israel’s bombing of Gaza as it related to Hurricane Katrina,” they’ll write.)

The progressive media hiding behind these female writers of color under the guise of “giving voice” doesn’t excuse this perpetuation.

And isn’t it interesting, on the eve of Michelle Obama becoming First Lady–a woman whose own complexity can launch a thousand conversations about race, power, gender, class, and the collective erotic imagination in the US–that asses of color are the emerging topic for progressives….even her own?

So, I’ve noticed that a few readers have asked why Racialicious has been so quiet on the situation in Gaza. As the violence continues to escalate, it is hard to not post about what is happening.

However, as much as it troubles me to remain silent, it troubles me more to see the responses that the posts on Israel and Palestine receive. Generally, they are met with silence from normally chatty and informed commenters while the same six people rehash their opinions on thread after thread.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why this occurs. Why are so many people reluctant to discuss what is happening in Israel and Palestine?

Perhaps, they are too intimidated.

After all, this conflict is rich and multilayered, and most people new to the discussion exhaust their knowledge base within the first few minutes, lapsing into silence while those with the longest memories tend to dominate the conversation. However, I do not believe this is a worthwhile tactic – while those in the know debate strategies and bring up failed resolutions and broken promises, the majority of the people blink and begin to disengage. There is too much information. The opposing sides are ruthless in their arguments. And most tend to watch the conversation dispassionately, or click away.

On this blog, we try to break down social issues using a more human aspect to explain points of global policy or racial theory. But that has not been working. So it occurs to me that there may be a fundamental lack of information about the origins of the conflict and what is at stake. So, the question becomes how do we get more people this information in a way that they will find it accessible?

When I tuned in to the first episode of the IFC Media project, I didn’t know what to expect. I know I didn’t expect Gideon Yago to go off on a tangent about “missing white girls” dominating the news, or to see IFC clearly tackle race-based reporting bias.

And I didn’t expect the program to send someone to track down the issues involved in talking about Israel.

I initially transcribed most of the program to talk about the race related aspects of the first episode. In the 26 minutes of the show, I have about seven pages of notes. However, with the current situation, I think I will focus solely on the discussion of reporting on Israel for this post, and revisit the other items at a later date.

Segment: The Third Rail of Journalism

The segment opens with what appears to be an old movie reel describing the creation of “a new Jerusalem.”

Mark Levine, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at UC Irvine begins his voiceover: “These are images of Israel I grew up with.”

Movie voiceover: “Over an area of some 500 square miles, Jews from around the world have been bringing about a miracle in the desert.”

Levine: “What an amazing country. I was taught that Israelis made the desert bloom, and created a paradise out of empty land.

Movie voiceover: “To live happily and courageously as free men and women.”

Levine speaks as a photo montage plays showing his growth and faith: “This vision of Jews and Israel shaped me as a kid. But by the time I traveled to Israel as an adult, I’d found something different. There were these other people there, the Palestinians, and they told an entirely different story. For them, the founding of Israel was a catastrophe, al-Naqba, which pushed them from their homes, and began a cycle of misery that continues to this day. Why hadn’t I heard about this other history in the news? The Israelis at least talk about it in their news.”

A segment of an Israeli news show plays.

Levine continues: “So I was curious. Why don’t we have this debate here in America? What shapes the way we talk about Israel? Why does there seem to be so much that we can’t talk about?”

Levine travels to Chicago to meet with Professor John J. Mearsheimer, the co-author of The Israel Lobby.

Mearsheimer: “One of the reasons – just one – but, one of the reasons that Osama Bin Laden attacked us on September 11th is because of our support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians. But hardly anyone makes that argument. […] The real tragedy here is that Israel is becoming an apartheid state and the lobby is helping them drive itself off a cliff.”

Levine poses a question about how the lobby shapes the media and public landscape.

Mearsheimer: “First of all, there are a large number of people in important positions in the media who are deeply devoted to Israel. There are also a lot of people who are not inclined to support Israel no matter what it does and who would be willing to be critical. What the lobby does is that they monitor those people very carefully and everytime they say something that is critical of Israel, they land on them like a ton of bricks.”

Switching subjects, Levine says: “That ton of bricks fell on Rob Malley, when his efforts to bring the Palestinian point of view into the national debate drew the ire of the Israel lobby.”

Levine meets with Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group who explains: “You have to be careful when you talk about settlements […] You have to be careful about how you talk about Israeli actions in the territories.”

Malley notes that this discussion is very active and multifaceted in Israel, pointing out: “There was an Israeli government official who recently said ‘Either we end the occupation or the occupation is going to end us.’ “

A clip from the Daily Show airs about all the candidates attending the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference while on the Presidential campaign trail.

Levine’s voiceover from his hotel notes: “AIPAC. The New York Times called them the most important organization affecting America’s relationship with Israel. Why? What do they do?”

Levine calls Josh Block, the Director of Media Affairs at AIPAC and gets stonewalled. He is informed that AIPAC does not talk to the media. Block gets dismissive, calls him “Bro” and informs him this just isn’t something AIPAC does. Block: “I wish I was in a position where I was gonna help you, but I’m not.” Levine asks for someone else to speak to, Block shuts him down.

(Random note of awesomeness: Levine has a book open on the desk while he is speaking to Block called Heavy Metal Islam. This is a book he wrote about “Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.”)

After hanging up, Levine asks: “AIPAC is an organization that gets coverage on every major network. Why do they have a policy of not talking to the press?”

Levine then goes to speak to Morris Amitay, former President of AIPAC.

Amitay: “AIPAC, I know, does not work to try to influence the media. AIPAC basically works with the administration and Congress on issues affecting Israel and the relationship between the two countries.”

Levine brings up the heavily covered convention. Amitay responds: “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the media buys everything that AIPAC is advocating.”

Levine touches on “the ubiquitous feeling” that if you criticize Israel you find yourself on the wrong side of the pro-Israel lobby.

Amitay gives him a look, then says: “People who consider themselves friends of Israel, how [do they react] any different than any other interest group in Washington? You reward your friends and you try to defeat your enemies. Isn’t that the American way?”

(An IFC Note pops up on the screen: Since 1967, US Aid to Israel has totaled over $100 Billion.)

Levine goes into another voice over: “With our free press, journalists should be able to say anything they want about Israel, but they don’t. Is this the result of pressure from the lobby, or something deeper? When Ken Silverstein was at the LA Times, he wrote a potentially controversial article about the conflict. It never got published and he ended up leaving the paper.”

What Silverstein says here is illuminating (emphasis mine):

“Towards the end of the editing process, I had some very, very serious problems, where I felt like the piece had been significantly altered in ways that I wasn’t comfortable with. There was one key point that I really wanted to include that repeatedly was cut. [What was cut was] simply that one of the officials I interviewed who is with Hezbollah, we were talking about the question of Iran and the Holocaust came up, and he said ‘There’s no question this took place. I’m not denying that the Holocaust took place. My point though is that Europeans committed this crime and we paid for it with our land.’ And I thought ‘This is the Arab narrative.’

We don’t hear the Arab narrative very often at all. But it created a little bit of discomfort because it looked like it would be a little too ‘pro-Arab’ and I think that just made certain people nervous. And they just decided to ‘fix’ the piece. You know, it got to the point where I was just ultimately decided I would be uncomfortable publishing the piece as it was edited in its final version and I ended up just pulling the piece. “

Silverstein is currently at Harper’s.

A montage of videos culled from media coverage plays with varying people discussing actions to be taken against Hezbollah, the Palestinans, Arafat’s headquarters, and other targets, with Silverstein’s voice over: “There’s almost no point of view that would be pro-Israel, that would be deemed too extreme to appear in the American Media.”

Silverstein also says: “It’s hard to get my own head around it […] you’re always wondering do people consciously tell lies or not.”

Still traveling in search of answers, Levine explains in a voice over: “Despite tens of billions of dollars in aid to Israel and millions of lives at stake, Americans are still in the dark about what’s really going on.”

Levine ends up talking to Christopher Dickey, the Mideast Regional Director for Newsweek. The best points of the segment are made in their conversation. (Again, bold emphasis mine.)

Levine: “Why is it that the media has been so reluctant or unable or unwilling to get Americans to understand not only the reality that is there, but how we are implicated in it by our quote-unquote ‘special relationship’ with Israel?”

Dickey: “Is any news organization or reporter going to make it its cause to set the record straight on the Israeli occupation? So, instead of one report, we have lots of reports. We have daily reports […] If you do that then you’re not just telling the news. You’re creating a narrative and espousing a cause. It may be a worthwhile cause, but most American media don’t see it as their cause.”

Levine: “Perhaps one of the reasons why we have these boundaries that you can’t cross, these sacred cows about Israel, is because the sacred cows about Israel, and what it does, are actually in many ways the same sacred cows about who we are, and what we’ve done and what we do.”

Dickey: “There is a kind of understanding of America by Israel and of Israel by America that is almost unique. The fact that you’ve got two nations of immigrants, that you have a lot of different backgrounds, that there is, in a sense, original sin connected with the creation of the state, whether it is the extermination of the American Indians or the displacement of the Palestinians. All of that creates a kind of an affinity between the two that I think is much, much more complicated than the idea that a lobby, some insidious force […] just controls American people. It may know how to tap into that […] but that’s a different issue.”

Levine’s final words end the segment, and provide a much needed reality check on the current media situation:

“Israel was born out of the ashes of the Holocaust as a beacon of hope. But to really understand the country’s troubled present, we need journalists to look beyond one sided narratives and to offer up a more accurate picture of what’s happened in the past and what’s going on today.”

Oakland haunts me.

Last week, I started trying to convert my essays on the crack epidemic into a memoir and the above sentence came to mind.

As many of you know, on early New Year’s day , the BART police killed an unarmed man, Oscar Grant.

I felt my heart flip in my throat when I heard the woman say they just shot him.

Oakland haunts me.

I hate that moment. The moment in the hood where the violence sparks and we have no fucking idea of what is going happen next.

Richard at Fem-men-ist captures it when he writes about being at the riots,

I head down 14th street towards Webster… and that’s as far as i get. A couple blocks further down, the crowd looms, and its a riot crowd. i can smell something burning, and Broadway is obscured with smoke that could be the source of the smell, or tear gas. A metal hulk slowly rolls out of a backlit cloud of smoke. it is a paramilitary tank with a mounted water cannon. Is this my neighborhood?

It is really easy to think of Oakland as the home of side shows, The Black Panthers, the spiritual seat of pimp mythology. It is easy to think of Oakland as San Francisco’s pathologized other. However, there is a very strong thread of Wild Wild West street justice that permeates the culture of Oakland. A shoot first and maybe ask questions later steelo that is both reflected in how the police and how the hood resorts to violence to deal with rage and retribution. Furthermore, there is a shoot first and ask questions later attitude associated with American foreign policy. Operation Iraqi Freedom anyone?

In fact the confluence of rage, revenge and retribution is palpable in Oakland.

I shuddered when I read the account of a woman, Nia Sykes, wax matter-of-factly about violence at the riot. She sounds cool as a fan, but I know rage when I see it. Demian Bulwa and others from the San Francisco Chronicle write,

“I feel like the night is going great,” said Nia Sykes, 24, of San Francisco, one of the demonstrators. “I feel like Oakland should make some noise. This is how we need to fight back. It’s for the murder of a black male.”

Sykes, who is black, had little sympathy for the owner of Creative African Braids.

“She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life,” Sykes said. She added that she did have one worry for the night: “I just hope nobody gets shot or killed.”

Let’s be clear, the riots didn’t happen until a week passed without a word from BART executives.

Let’s also be clear that it wasn’t until the riots occurred that national news took an interest in what happened.

It is also important to note that the BART police are not OPD.

They are officers specifically hired, trained and compensated by Bay Area Rapid Transit. This merits being noted simply because they earn $64K per year, at the entry level. This is an important distinction because they are not under compensated $32K/year NYC cops.

That being said, Oscar Grant’s death is clearly personal to me.

December 28th 2003, at approximately 5am, the Oakland police tried to kill my brother.

I had just came home from New York, fresh with my new engagement ring. Ambivalent, proud, scared. In many ways, I felt grown.

My mother got the call at that deadly time of the morning. The it-could-only-be-bad-news time. My brother was at Highland Hospital. That we needed to come. We piled in her boyfriend’s truck and headed to Oakland’s public hospital, Highland. The sun was coming up. The sky was orange sherbet and periwinkle blue. Gorgeous, the way that the Oakland sky is notorious for.

I was in shock because we had just taken my niece to see Bad Santa at the Metreon in San Francisco on 27th.

The police knocked teeth out of his mouth. Cut his lip open. Opened his head. Handcuffed him to a fence and beat him, in front
of a group of eye witnesses in the heart of deep East Oakland.

I didn’t feel so grown anymore. I was scared of what the police had done to my brother’s face.

My brother ran from the police that night. Had been running for years. They caught him, and commenced to letting him know the
consequences of his actions.

I wrote the FBI, OPD’s internal affairs and John Burris (the attorney for The Rider Trials.) Burris’s office ultimately told me that while my brother suffered from being harmed by the police, a jury would not be particularly receptive to a formerly convicted D-Boy, even if he wasn’t hustling anymore.

I also became intimately acquainted with Bay Area Police Watch, which is a program run by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. They were the only institution that listened to me. They ultimately found an attorney to take my brother’s case pro bono, however, by that time the statue of limitations had ran.

In many ways Ella Baker has inspired me to start 100 Visionaries.

But back to Oscar Grant.

This video reminds me of both the historical worthlessness of the Black body, as it pertains to the state. Of lynchings, of Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the bombing of Black little girls in churches, of Sean Bell, of, of, of.

It reminds me of 1989, Task Force in my living room, my brother handcuffed, and feeling incredibly powerless.

It reminds me of how that situation on the BART platform could have gotten even further out of hand had someone else on that platform had guns and decided to use them.

You see, I was raised to believe that everyone had a gat.

In the flat lands of Oakland many people do.

Let’s be clear about how this is a teachable moment about who does and doesn’t have power in our society.

When you live in a society where the people who taken an oath to serve and protect you, can conceivably smoke a person who looks like you in front several witnesses, you feel powerless.

Furthermore, it is reasonable for you to feel powerless and want smash the symbols of the power that you do not have.

Rage can only turn to violence when unchecked.

In many ways, rage is violence.

For many young folks, the idea is to carry a gat, because it is clear that no one will protect them. This means always staying
strapped.

15 years ago, Ice Cube said on Death Certificate, “I would rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.” This is the code of the streets that I know.

Yes, there are major fallacies to this argument. To put it simply, it invites that eye for an eye logic, which is incredibly harmful, because if we all do an eye for an eye, we will all be blind.

But think about this, power is the ability to restore yourself after you have suffered a set back in life.

To right a wrong.

What power do the people in this situation have?

BART possesses and has and exercised the power to be silent.

Some folks in Oakland exercised their power to burn property and be destructive.

Think about this as well.

What does an Obama presidency mean to Oscar Grant, Oscar Grants family, or the people who were in Downtown Oakland on Wednesday night saying “We Are All Oscar Grant?”

I know that some of you may balk at my bringing Obama in this.

Think about it this way. Where does Oscar Grant fit in our “post racial” society?

I ask you all this question because last year it was revealed to me that part of my purpose is to ask the uncomfortable questions. Not just affirm what you already know.

On Wednesday morning, someone Twittered me a message asking if I was going to the protest. I responded saying that I was not in Oakland, and that I don’t do protests.

However, I also thought, if the BART police will smoke a man on a BART platform in front of arguably 20 to 30 witnesses, then what would stop the OPD from smoking other people at a rally/protest riot?

That being said.

Oakland haunts me.

But I am not only just haunted. Courtney stays on me about 100 Visionaries. Last week, I sketched the website and now I am just looking for a template and finalizing a color scheme.

Shooting incidents like these remind me that so much work has to be done. As individuals we can stand and be reactive, bumping gums all day about how horrible the police are. Or, we can be reflective, strategic and decide exactly which part of the system we are going to come together to analyze and change.

I ride for the analyze and change approach, because while Oakland still haunts me, my goal, god willing, is to be able to rest assured that at the end of the day I contributed something other than just hot air.

If you want to get involved contact the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. They are on the ground. They are organized
and they can use your help. Below I have attached an excerpt of an e-mail I just received from them.

This week, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights joined the call for justice in the shooting of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year old unarmed man shot dead by a BART police officer on January 1st, 2009, at the Fruitvale BART station. As an organization that has tackled the issue of police brutality and accountability for the past 12 years, we share in the anger, sadness, and frustration this tragedy has stirred within our community and beyond.

Several Ella Baker Center staff members — and many of you — attended the January 7th rally at the Fruitvale BART Station. We were joined by hundreds of other activists from all over the Bay Area, a crowd that mirrored the incredible diversity of our region. Youth read poetry inspired not only by their pain, but also by their hope for justice; elected officials stood with the community; activists led chants and local performers shared their souls through song. It was a sight to behold.

As you may have heard, some people then led a march from Fruitvale to the Lake Merritt BART station. While most of the march was peaceful — and at times even beautiful — a small number of participants succombed to their overwhelming anger, rooted in a long history of police misconduct and lack of accountability, and lashed out with inexcusable behavior. The Ella Baker Center believes the fight for justice must sometimes be taken to the streets, and does not condone vandalism or the destruction of property while speaking truth to power.

That’s why we must keep our focus on the issue of justice for Oscar Grant and his family. We’ll need your help as we continue to speak out in protest to ensure that this case is handled with respect and urgency.

Specifically, we demand:

* A thorough, independent investigation into the training, supervision, and arrest procedures of BART police.
* A full criminal investigation to be conducted by the State Department of Justice of all officers involved in the shooting that evening.

In addition, we’re joining forces with the Courage Campaign and ColorOfChange.org to support a bill by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Senator Leland Yee that would create a civilian oversight board for BART police. Senator Yee and Assemblymember Ammiano are ahead of the curve in calling for this kind of legislation, and they’ll need our support to get it passed and signed into law. Click here to sign the petition:

http://www.couragecampaign.org/NeverAgain

Please also join us in helping turn this tragedy into hope for change by making a donation to Oscar’s family. Checks should be made payable to “Wanda Johnson” (Oscar’s mother), and sent to Ella Baker Center at 344 40th Street, Oakland, CA 94609. We’ll then pass along all donations to Oscar’s family.

We are all deeply saddened by this tragedy and express our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Oscar Grant III. In the coming months we hope you’ll join us in demanding justice and continuing to work for peace and opportunity in our communities.

In solidarity,

Jakada Imani
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights