Long Journal Ahead! You Have Been Warned!
Intro. Sorry I Am Still Angry....Yes, I know that we are supposed to be over a lot of things. But I am part of
Generation JFK, the term I use to describe those of us born between 1956 and 1964. Remember how the Jesuits claim that if you give them a child until age seven, they control his mind forever? I believe that you can lump together any American child (that was not raised Amish or a member of the KKK or a staunch Republican) who was aged 5 (since we grow up so quickly nowadays) at any time during the JFK presidency, assassination or the LBJ presidency that followed in which the martyrdom of JFK was used to win passage of landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare etc. People from this group seem to me to be especially idealistic but also especially skeptical. They have expectations of the federal government that you do not often see in other groups---except for those who were aged five during the FDR administration. Note that both Obamas fall into this category.
I was born in 1959. My Catholic grandparents in Atlanta had a photo of Jack Kennedy on their wall pre-assassination. My earliest political memory was of him being shot and then of the funeral---it was the first time I recall seeing my father cry. We were in a motel room, traveling across country to live in LA. I can remember every detail of that motel room. After that, I developed my lifelong obsession with politics. By the time I moved to Alabama at age five, I knew all about segregation and George Wallace and what police officers could do to kids with fire hoses. When we drove through Birmingham, I crouched down in the car as if it was 1980s Beirut. Luckily, we were just passing through on our way to Huntsville.
No one has a right to turn hoses or dogs on children. No child should live in a country where the police use such tactics against other kids. It makes young folks grow up fearful of authority. It makes them even more vigilant than the Founders demanded that they be. In some ways, that is a good thing, but it gets tiring, too, always having to watch out for your own elected officials, never trusting them to do the right thing, because you never know when they will do the absolute
worst thing that they could possibly do. Like kill a hero or attack children or lie to start a war.
BTW, did I mention that we camped out on the desert on that trip west? I recall sleeping under the stars with my parents and sister. I loved the feeling of being on the open road, having all that space around me. It was like a beach that went on forever.
I. If Someone Tells You Racism Is a Thing of the Past, Put Him in Blackface and Have Him Drive Through Tenaha, Texas Today’s Fort Worth Star Telegram has a feature that is mostly depressing, though with a tiny ray of hope. The depressing part---for some time, small towns in East Texas have been making money by pulling over out of state
African-American motorists, seizing their cars, cash, jewelry on the grounds that the goods are evidence in an ongoing drug investigation. No case is ever filed, but under the law, the owners have to file a civil suit with an attorney to get their stuff back. Since these
out of state motorists have jobs and since most of them would probably prefer to never think about much less see another small town in East Texas as long as they live, the Texas highway bandits with badges get to keep the stuff they have stolen.
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/1197211.html It’s the jackpot seized from any motorist vaguely connected to a police drug investigation. In Tenaha, according to the San Antonio Express-News, police seized money and property even when they never filed cases or documented any evidence.
The mayor of Tenaha says that is all fine with him.
"Anytime you get money you can use in your department to enforce police laws — anything always helps," Mayor George Bowers, 80, said on Lufkin TV station KTRE.
The print version of the story mentions that in Montgomery County, Texas, they used the money to throw a beer and margarita party. Another county “took prosecutors to Hawaii”.
“One county constable alone seized more than $70,000 in a year.”
That little glimmer of hope I mentioned? The state of Texas Senate might do something to crack down on the problem this year, presumably because Texas tourism will suffer if the Obama Department of Justice under new Attorney General Eric Holder steps in to punish these small town pirates.
Oh what a difference a change in administration makes.
II. Get Your Kicks (and Lumps) on Route 66 The ability to get into your car and hit the open road in your prized motor vehicle is a cherished American luxury, as fiercely protected as free speech and religious expression. The network of highways that ribbons the country spells temporary freedom from family strife and day to day care---for most of us. The chance to leave it all behind and make a fresh start in a small town out west---that is the hope that allows us to continue to get out of bed each day.
However, for a minority of U.S. citizens, the only safe places are urban population centers. The nation’s highways might as well be hot stretches of lava if you carry the mark of Abel---the easy target, whom no one will defend.
We have known for decades that police use quotas to target African-American motorists, both for stops and searches.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/192.html To summarize: African Americans made up 13.5 percent of the turnpike's population and 15 percent of the speeders. But they represented 35 percent of those pulled over. In stark numbers, blacks were 4.85 times as likely to be stopped as were others.
We did not obtain data on the race of drivers and passengers searched after being stopped or on the rate at which vehicles were searched. But we know from police records that 73.2 percent of those arrested along the turnpike over a 3 1/2-year period by troopers from the area's Moorestown barracks were black--making them 16.5 times more likely to be arrested than others.
We have known for over a decade that it is illegal for law enforcement to use quotas. That has not stopped state and local governments from using them. Here is more on the sad and sorry tale of New Jersey under Gov. Whitman, whom the press has lead us to believe is one of the
good Republicans.
http://www.counterpunch.org/drivingblack.html In fact, Whitman has sedulously ignored the problem for most of her term, insisting that racial profiling is not a practice of the state police. Even after two New Jersey state troopers fired eleven shots into a van carrying four black men on their way to a basketball clinic last winter Whitman clung to her contention that the action was not racially motivated. In 1995 a New Jersey state judge threw out charges against fifteen black drivers who, the judge said, had been pulled over without cause. During the trial it emerged that on a 26-mile long stretch on the southern part of the New Jersey Turnpike minorities accounted for 46 percent of the drivers stopped, even though they were only 15 percent of the speeders.
Whitman also kept her mouth shut in early February when Emblez Longoria, a New Jersey state trooper, filed suit against his department claiming that he was being pressured to make illegal stops of black and hispanic drivers in order to fulfill his arrest quotas. Longoria, who is hispanic, alleges that he was denied promotions and harassed by his superiors when he refused to pull over drivers using racial profiling. Ultimately, Whitman's hand was forced by the racist remarks of Col. Carl Williams, the head of the New Jersey state police. Responding to a report showing that 75 percent of all motorists arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike in the first two months of 1997 were minorities, Williams told the Newark Star-Ledger that cocaine and marijuana traffickers were most likely to be either black or hispanic. Williams was canned, but don't expect much more action than that. The investigation of his Department has been in the hands of Attorney General Peter Verniero, who has fiercely denied that New Jersey cops use profiling. Black leaders in New Jersey have demanded that Verniero's investigation be taken up by an independent panel. But Whitman has refused and instead has nominated Verniero for a spot on the New Jersey Supreme Court.
For all you non-Southern law enforcement types out there, do not get smug. Things are just as bad out on the other coast, in LaLa Land.
In San Diego, the police are ever vigilant to pull over black people driving expensive cars. In October of 1997, a black man named Shawn Lee and his girlfriend were stopped by the California Highway Patrol on Interstate 15. Lee, a member of the San Diego Chargers football team, and his girlfriend were handcuffed and held by police for more than an hour. The patrolman said that they were detained because Lee was driving a car that fit a description of one that had been reported as stolen that night. This story was false. Lee was driving a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. The stolen vehicle was a Honda.
A similar kind of racial typing is evident up the coast in supposedly liberal Santa Monica. In the fall of 1996, two police cars tailed Darryl Hicks and George Washington, two black men, as they pulled into the parking garage of their hotel. The police cruisers turned on their lights and at gun-point ordered the men out of their cars. The men were handcuffed and placed in separate police cars. Washington and Hicks' car was searched. The police claimed the men were being detained because they fit the description of suspects wanted in a string of nineteen armed robberies. The officers also said one of the men appeared to be "nervous". Washington and Hicks later sued the police officers for false arrest and civil rights violations. In ruling for the two men, the court determined that the armed robberies had not occurred in Santa Monica and that neither of the men fit the descriptions of the robbers.
Two anecdotal cases from the 1990s do not a trend make. This study from the ACLU released last month does prove a pattern of racial profiling in Los Angles.
http://www.aclu.org/racialjustice/racialprofiling/38567prs20090114.html The report showed that black and Hispanic residents are stopped, frisked, searched and arrested by LAPD officers far more frequently than white residents. These racial disparities aren't explained by differing crime rates in predominantly black or Latino neighborhoods, or the likelihood that a search of a person of color will yield evidence of a crime, the report concluded.
The LAPD’s response? Deny the evidence. Hide the bodies. Change the subject.
The federal government exists to keep a watchful eye on these kind of abuses, right? Tell that to Ashcroft/ Gonzales/Mukasey. While these Mafia style enforcers were throwing the book at any high profile African-American celebrity with skin pigment darker than pecan who spit on the sidewalk ( see Wesley Snipes, Barry Bonds among others for examples of their selective prosecutions), they studiously ignored civil rights crimes committed against minorities by local officials. This included such activities as voter suppression and arrest quotas. This is why small towns in East Texas came up with their money making scam. When Justice is not colorblind it is not just.
These artificially generated arrest numbers serve a purpose, since they lead to higher conviction numbers, which in turn are used to generate a public perception that Blacks are somehow more
guilty than whites, which in turn is used to justify racial profiling. And so the scam perpetuates itself. The Criminal Industrial Complex generates its own work. Judges are bribed to send juveniles guilty of nothing more than free speech to prison. Kids (disproportionately minority) incarcerated in camps for youthful offenders are victims of pedophiles who are protected by the Republican Governor in Texas and his Republican Attorney General. And the nation’s employers are assured a steady supply of ex-con low skilled, low wage workers. The system ends up being a lot like slavery, except instead of restraining each “slave” with shackles, the young men and women are penned up inside urban areas and told
If you try to leave, we will nab you and put you to work on a prison farm, so you had better accept whatever work your city has to offer. Hmmm. Sounds a lot like old fashioned Medieval serfdom, to me.
Oh, and it benefits the Republican Party, since attempts to disenfranchise Black voters, almost all of whom vote for the Democrats, are tolerated by the press as somehow
right since Blacks are, by their very skin pigmentation
wrong . Doubt me? Pay attention to how much attention the mainstream media will lavish on any single
white voter whose vote is not counted as opposed to any group of 100 to 1000 African-American voters (even soldiers on active duty in Iraq!) who are disenfranchised. Note how outraged they were over Janet Jackson’s breast---as if an African-American woman’s mammary gland had the power to corrupt men’s minds in a way that a white woman’s never could.
The presence of racial profiling in LaLa Land carries a double whammy, since Hollywood produces the myths that power America. If that city continues to write fictions in which the man with the face darker than a medium brown is a likely criminal, then that is what Main Street, USA is going to see when a stranger drives into town.
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/1580.html III. Post Modernist Notes from Post-Racist America Speaking of convenient fictions, get a load of this.
http://townhall.com/columnists/DineshDSouza/2009/01/28/obama_and_post-racist_americaI could have held up any one of a number of right wing idiots for ridicule for their claims that the election of a Harvard Law School graduate, best selling author, charismatic, big state U.S. Senator biracial Democrat to be president after a Republican had just blown the job in a spectacular fashion proves that racism is dead. I guess it was Dinesh O’Souza’s lucky day. A moment of irreverent laughter at Mr. O’Souza’s expense, please.
It won’t be so funny the next time some one gets beaten up, maybe even killed in some small Southern town, and a chorus of O’Souza’s chime in
It can’t be racially motivated. There is no more racism in America! That boy must have done something. . And if you are denied job after job, because employers do not like the color of your skin, being told that you traded affirmative action for the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from having a brother in the White House is just going to make the despair and hopelessness worse.
That is the subtext of all Post-Racist writing. The Racial rapture has come. If you did not wake up already and find yourself among the elect, then you must not be good enough.
Note that Blacks and Hispanics continue to suffer from poverty at much higher rates than whites in the United States.
http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm#groupsPoverty in America kills. It kills by assassinating the spirit. It has a mean little voice that whispers
In a land of plenty, you don’t amount to much, do you? Your kids are poor. Your wife has to work. There is no road out for you, except booze and pills that help you forget for a few hours . The Bush recession was engineered to kill the spirit of the American working class, and especially the American working class of color that has been struggling to emerge from its cocoon ever since the New Deal.
People like O’Souza appear to be buffoons, but they are absolutely necessary---as are the mainstream media producers who choose to show only Black “perps” and white “victims” and the police who racially profile. All play their part in crafting the myth of the imperfect race. From
Mythologies by Roland Barthe
We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason.
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes04.htmIn other words, if you tear apart the myths which the nation’s law enforcement and its Hollywood producers and its O’Souza’s have given us using the formula supplied by M. Barthe, you realize that this shocking equation has been driving racial relations in America for many decades.
Blacks have to be kept down by law, because they have always been kept down by law. And we wouldn’t want the law to be wrong now, would we?
IV. Bittersweet I am very, very happy that Barack Obama is our president.
I am very sad that anger may eliminated from our national dialogue. Some people have a right to be angry. They have put up with a lot of crap. They deserve to have someone acknowledge their anger. If we start telling people
Only bad folks get angry that is just another way of saying
Bad things only happen to bad people .
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