Opinion: The Reason Why Things Are The Way They Are

I've tried over the last few weeks to blog about the developments that have taken place since the grand juries in Ferguson and New York decided not to indict the officers involved in those shootings. I've started maybe seven different posts trying to express my feelings and with each attempt, there was a new incident to weigh in on. From Akai Gurley's shooting in Brooklyn, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, OH and John Crawford in Beavercreek, OH, amongst others that have gone unreported or underreported, there has been a biting rhetoric on both sides of the issue. But nothing has been more extreme than the views surrounding the Eric Garner situation in New York. While the Ferguson protests had gotten out of hand early with looting, riots, fire and violent clashes with police, the fallout from the grand jury deciding to not indict Daniel Pantaleo has crossed political lines as well as racial lines. When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that he had sympathy for those protesting the grand jury decision, many police officers felt that the mayor was taking a stand against them. One of de Blasio's election campaign initiatives that he ran on was police reform. The police union felt that if the mayor had sympathy for those who were looked upon as having anti-police views, then the NYPD doesn't have the support of the mayor.


When 2 officers were killed over this past weekend in what is being labeled as a 'revenge killing' for Eric Garner, the discontent between the police department and the mayor culminated in several uniformed officers turning their backs on de Blasio and police commissioner Bill Bratton when they entered a press conference related to the shooting. Police across the nation are on high alert now that someone has successfully murdered two police officers (and subsequently themselves) and this will only bring about more tension between local law and the communities like Ferguson and New York City when both citizens and police officers now have a legitimate reason to be fearful for their lives.


Even though racism plays a HUGE part in these situations (and admitting that, really, is as important as acknowledging that police have a very difficult job and are not all bad), we also have to realize the culture that both police and minorities have bred in their respective communities regarding each other. In the inner cities, crime is very high. That has less to do with the race of people there than it has to do with how those people are treated as a whole because of their race. In Black and Hispanic communities in cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, most of these inner city citizens live in housing projects where hundreds and thousands of people occupy a very small space. Most of these communities are set up where the children never leave that radius. They go to school in the same general area, their parents shop and may even work in that area. These projects were set up so that the people who lived their never had to leave (ironically, in many cases, they weren't originally built for Blacks but for immigrant families like the Italians, Polish and other European immigrants. History shows that crime in these areas were always high, even when white immigrants occupied the slums in New York and Chicago because of the living conditions and the apparent lack of concern by local government and police for those areas. Organized crime has their roots in the early immigrant slums, i.e, the reference book and related movie 'Gangs of New York'. When these families were able to make a way for themselves and move out to neighboring areas, working class Black families moved into these areas and subsequently, the cities built the housing projects to contain the large number of occupants in a such a small radius). Generations of families live in these areas, so while some from more affluent areas travel across town or across the country to visit relatives, the families living in these projects may never even have to go outside of their building to go see their grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, etc. I've grown up with people who said they never left their general project neighborhoods until they went to high school. Some have never left until they got their first job. Others, due to their economic situation, never leave at all, if not for an extenuating circumstance. So when you hear people like former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani respond to questions about the extreme police presence in Black communities by saying "white officers wouldn't be there if weren't killing each other", you begin to understand what I mean by the "culture" that is bred amongst police officers in cities and environments such as the housing projects or low income neighborhoods in New York City. That breeds a counter culture in the Black communities where the threat of police brutality or over policing (stop and frisk) fosters distrust from innocents citizens. When you have those with guns in positions of authority over those who have real life examples to look at that show them they are literally under attack in some cases, a violent reaction is all but inevitable. In fact, it will definitely happen. At this point, no one on either side of the issue trusts the other. But this is not a justification for any violence against police.


Side Note: History shows that crime in these areas were always high, even when white immigrants occupied the slums in New York and Chicago because of the living conditions and the apparent lack of concern by local government for those areas. Organized crime has their roots in the early immigrant slums, i.e, the reference book and related movie 'Gangs of New York'.


What is also at the root of the issue is the media. Yes, they have to report what's going on. With the 24 hour news cycle, seeing violent images or hearing of these incidents and reading minute by minute updates online, one can easily and quickly become discontented. When you have reports that lean heavily to one side of the issue, you have pundits and commentators showing extreme bias and passion to appeal to their viewers. When you have people who only watch FoxNews or only watch msnbc, only watch Politics Nation with Al Sharpton and/ or Melissa Harris-Perry's Show, only watch Joe Scarborough's Show Morning Joe, and don't care to see or hear any other views on certain subject, they're inundated with personal views that they agree with. So if you hear Al Sharpton railing against the NYPD but you don't hear someone who says "well, while their has been wrongdoing and corruption in the department for decades, we have to continue to realize that the department as a whole does want to protect and serve", then an opinion against the police is self fostered and that could permeate to others in the community. On the flip side, if you are constantly emboldened by opinions that all Black people are on welfare and all they do is kill each other and now they're attacking police and never see and hear of examples of the many minority families who are working class and doing very well and have never been subject to any type of violence, then your opinion of Black people and minorities would be similar to what you allow yourself to be exposed to on the news or wherever. So while the news media does have a responsibility to report the news fair and balanced, we have a responsibility to be reasonable and hold ourselves accountable to knowing that every racial group, political organization, law enforcement agency, etc., has good and bad apples, good and bad policies and truths and untruths. Reality, in some of those cases, may often match perception and we have to admit to that, too.


But the real problem is us, as a whole, as humans. Not enough of us care. When George Zimmerman was not held responsible for the death of Trayvon Martin, I personally believe it re-ignited a precedent in the minds of those citizens that don't hold human life in high regard. George Zimmerman was guilty on many accounts and the law protected him instead of the young life he extinguished. And while this was not the first time it happened in recent years, it opened up a new discussion on race in this country, while we have Black president in office. When Obama identified with Trayvon Martin and his family, it set events into motion that changed how people expressed their negative views on race. When Michael Dunn shot and killed Jordan Davis over loud music, although he was convicted and sentenced to 90+ years in jail, you have to wonder if he ever thought he'd be held accountable for shooting some Black kid. The same goes for Darren Wilson and Dan Pantaleo. The officers who shot Tamir Rice and John Crawford reacted to the descriptions of the individuals that posed a supposed threat. With the cases that were in the news, I'm sure those officers thought, "shoot first, ask questions last". Rice was shot two seconds after police arrived on the scene, apparently without word from the dispatcher that the 12 year old was holding what was "probably a fake" gun. Crawford was shot when someone called 911 and told the dispatcher that a man was waving a gun in the store. Video surveillance shows that Crawford never interacted with anyone as he walked through the aisles with the toy rifle. When it was found out that the gun was just a toy, officers interrogated his girlfriend aggressively, trying to get her to tell them if she saw Crawford walk into the store with the gun, even threatening her with arrest. All of this in an effort to somehow justify the shooting.


What gets me in all of this is how those who support Brown, Garner, Martin and all those countless other who've been killed unjustly are looked at as if all of a sudden, they are anti-police. Like Black people have just started experiencing these things. Three St. Louis Rams players who made the "Hands Up! Don't Shoot!" gesture in what they said was support of the families in Ferguson were vilified by local police and called irresponsible. When Derrick Rose wore his "I Can't Breathe" shirt during warm ups that sparked others around the league, including LeBron James, to do the same, a lot of people thought that was inappropriate. They felt like the protests were inappropriate. But when has standing up for what you believe in, especially when it comes to injustice, ever really been appropriate? People who protest are doing so because the views that they believe in are not popular views. To protest for a cause is a right that everyone has. Police brutality is obviously a real issue, otherwise politicians and lawmakers wouldn't be pushing for reform (like they have been my entire life). Whenever an unarmed man is killed by another person, white or Black, police officer or everyday citizen, there is going to be outrage as long as it is an unjustified killing. No one is siding with the young man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who killed officers Wenjian Liu and Rafeal Ramos as they sat in their patrol car. It was an unjustified killing, plain and simple. Anyone that thinks differently is an extremist and really needs to re-examine their views. The problem lies when things aren't as cut and dry as this particular incident is and when there is a justifiable difference of opinion, those who hold that opinion are vilified and viewed as extremist as Brinsley.


When Black people in this country had to fight for the right to live as average citizens, enough people, white and Black cared enough to make a difference. When Black kids had to endure dogs and fire hoses being turned on them just because they wanted to go to school and get as good of an education as their white counterparts, enough people, Black and white, cared enough to make a difference. Today, though, that care from enough of us, Black and white, is gone. Too many of us as Black people won't support hot button issues, won't speak out against those issues, won't participate in protests because of what we feel like might happen to us if we did. I get that, to a certain degree. But look at the things some of us are willing to support. One might look at me and say that I have nothing to lose because I just write a blog that maybe only a handful of people read. Some may feel I don't have interests that might be affected by my opinion on certain things. To that I say regardless of my ambitions, I will gladly risk all of them standing up for what I think is right. And while there are others who have public careers to think about or public endeavours that they don't want to compromise, I say think about your influence in your community and in your circle. If you believe that injustices are occurring, speak up on your feelings. People are listening and they will move with you. Nothing one can attain is worth sitting back while the world crumbles around us.


On the other hand, too many white people are tired of what they call Black people playing the race card. A lot of the negative expressions we hear on race by some white people are based on their feelings that our President is destroying America. They see him as emboldening minorities, supporting undocumented immigrants and changing a culture that they have lived by through the generations of their family. They feel exactly how Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Don Imus and countless others feel about Blacks and all other non-whites in this country. To see Black people protesting unjustified police shootings of Black children doesn't represent tragedy to them. They see it as people finding an excuse to riot and to loot and steal. They're not even looking at the situation because it's irrelevant to them. They just see ignorant Black people acting up.


All of this contributes to what we see happening around us today. All of us need to see the need to make changes in how we perceive things and one another. Until we can do that, things will get worse.

After Ferguson: The Denial of Racism

This blog post was supposed to be about the grand jury decision to not indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown. It was supposed to speak on the sad excuses that the district attorney used in supporting the decision. It was supposed to talk about how now Dorian Johnson, the young man who was with Brown during the shooting, is hearing calls for him to be brought up on perjury charges. But as I typed up what was to be that blog, I just felt like it was all empty words. Apparently, the powers that be could care less how Michael Brown's family feels, how an entire community in Ferguson feels. What is also apparent is the fact that society doesn't give a damn about the value of Black lives in this country.

I know, I know, I know. Some people might read that line "society doesn't give a damn about Black lives in this country" and say "Whatever, here we go again with  the 'America hates Black people' thing". But to hate, you'd have to actually care. When people observe other groups of people protesting over the unnecessary deaths of young Black Americans and respond with rhetoric like "Black people kill other Black people everyday, so why are they protesting this?", that's basically asking, "Why should we care?" When an entire investigation is based on criminalizing or demonizing the victim so that the person who is suspected in a probable crime isn't held in a negative light, that's showing more care or concern for the perpetrator than the victim. When a witnesses testimony is said to be the most consistent of all the witnesses testimonies, and that witness not only changed his retelling of the events in question, but was first said to be 100 yards away, then 50 to 75 yards away, there is a message being sent. And it is "we don't care".

Here is another "we don't care" quote from the illustrious former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani in an interview he had on Fox News Sunday:

"I don't see how this case normally would even have been brought to a grand jury," said Giuliani, a former prosecutor, on Fox News Sunday. "This is the kind of case—had it not had the racial overtones and the national publicity—where a prosecutor would have come to the conclusion that there is not enough evidence to present to the grand jury."

A week earlier on Meet the Press, Giuliani blamed Black on Black crime for the need of a heavy police presence in the Black community. When Michael Eric Dyson challenged him, he said this:

 "...the white police officers won't be there if you weren't killing each other."

All too often, we hear this type of justification when the issue of unjustified police shootings or other shootings and brutalities involving black people and police officers or non-Blacks come up. We heard the same type of justification when the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, just to name those two, were being protested. While these statistics may be true, by numbers only, the whole point gets missed by those who spew this nonsensical line of thought. Black people, especially young Black men, are often subject to police brutality, shootings and other forms of violence from non-Blacks with out clear justification. When these cases are reviewed, they are often handled typically; a short investigation, if any, and a swift decision usually in favor of the non-Black aggressor. It seems, also way too often, that any confrontation between Blacks and non-Blacks comes down to a shooting of the unarmed Black person. Just over the past few weeks while we awaited the grand jury decision in Ferguson, an unarmed young Black man, 28 year old Akai Gurley, was shot to death by a police officer while patrolling the stairwells of a project building. The young man and his girlfriend were taking the stairs due to the elevator being out of service. That shooting, which is said to have been an accident, has since been ruled a homicide but is still under investigation. Also, on Saturday, November 22nd, a 12 year old boy, Tamir Rice, was shot within seconds of police arriving on the scene to respond to a call that the boy was waving a gun and pointing it at people. The person who called made it a point to tell the 911 dispatcher that the individual was just a kid and that the gun could possibly be fake. That point was repeated to the dispatcher but apparently was not relayed to the officers responding to the call. It has been said that the officer told Tamir to show his hands but surveillance video shows that the young man was shot within 2 seconds of the officers arriving. This case is a bit difficult in that the officer was responding to a call that was said to involve a person with a gun. But the breakdown in communication between dispatch and the officer and the fact that it was a fake gun leave many questions unanswered.

But if we are going to quote statistics and mince words and all of that, lets look at this perspective. How often do you hear of white unarmed men being gunned down by police? When you hear of police standoffs or manhunts regarding armed white males (most recently Eric Frein), how often are these men shot and killed? The truth is, you don't hear this occurring too often under these circumstances. Why? Well I can only speculate but it has to be related to the image that is often portrayed, relayed and accepted regarding Black men in these United States. Before Trayvon martin was shot, I never saw signs in stores that said "No Hoodies, No Hats, No Sunglasses." There are hashtag movements that were sparked after Michael Brown was shot and the subsequent violent clashes with police like #pantsupdon'tloot. Young black kids have been told that if they sag their jeans then they would not be able to walk through shopping malls and other public places. The word "thug" has been primarily used to discredit those like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Jordan Davis based soley on how they dressed, how they looked, the type of music they listen to and where they either come from or were perceived to come from. When looking up information on Akai Gurley, the first image that popped up was a mugshot along with another picture that prominently showed a tattoo on his neck. His back story was that he shied away from the street life and was about to start a job with the city. He had also been pursuing a modeling career.

 

When the grand jury decision came with no indictment for Darren Wilson, the District Attorney's press conference seemed to be motivated to discredited the slain Michael Brown and all those who offered accounts supporting him. The same thing happened when a group of NYPD officers in Staten Island, NY killed Eric Garner via an illegal choke hold. The officers claimed that he was resisting arrest in relation to selling illegal cigarettes. Fortunately their was someone videotaping the entire encounter, and if you have seen it, you can see and hear that the police regularly harassed Garner. Once they tried to subdue him, for whatever reason, the choke hold was applied and they turned a deaf ear to his pleas of not being able to breathe. Once the media got involved, the smear campaign was on. So here we have a pattern that we do not see when white males commit violent crimes but we see it when unarmed Black males are shot committing no crime at all (for those who want to say Michael Brown was committing a crime when he stole the cigarillos from the convenience store, Darren Wilson had no knowledge of that until after Brown was already dead. But even stealing cigarellos doesn't warrant being shot to death when you are unarmed.).

 I hear people say things like "We're never going to get past race in this country until people stop making everything about race." But everything in this country is about race. Our president is Black and anything said about him, positive and negative, is said and/or perceived through context of race. The fact that our country is over 238 years old and we had our first Black president 219 years after George Washington first took office shows how deeply rooted in race our country is. Race will always be an issue because it was what separated the haves from the have nots for so long. Even now, immigration reform has the face of Hispanic Americans when there are illegal immigrants from all corners of this earth here inside of our borders. Getting past race may be too much for a country so diverse, until the economic distinctions blur racial lines to the point where it is just the uber wealthy and the rest of us. But even that may not ease racial tensions, due to the fact that race is often used to push certain political and social agendas. We can't "wish" it away either, hoping that one day it won't be an issue. People who 'hope for change' have to understand, as sensitive a topic as race relations is in this country, it has to be talked about honestly. Listening to Darren Wilson describe Michael Brown during their altercation sounded like he was told to give as menacing a description as possible so that it would be proliferated throughout the media and that the public opinion would be that Wilson was battling this enraged thug hell bent on killing him. But the details don't add up and it is very obvious that the grand jury was never going to indict Wilson. The indictment would be of Michael Brown, the citizens of Ferguson who protested violently and peacefully and all those who sympathize with Brown, his family and those who feel like police practices and interactions with people of color need to be re-evaluated.


Many say before Black communities can expect change when it comes to the way we are perceived in society, we have to do a lot of changing ourselves. I can agree that there are a lot of issues in the Black community. Charles Barkley said some racial profiling isn't wrong due to the amount of crime that exists in Black communities. There are some young men and women who do fit the profiles that many others place on them. But as a whole, the profiles or stereotypes don't describe an entire community. There shouldn't be a set of "characteristics" that justify injustice, racism or extreme tactics. Michael Brown's personality or character traits didn't justify him being shot down in the street like a dog and left there for over four hours. Eric Garner's personality didn't warrant the deadly force used to subdue him, essentially because he wasn't buying the officer's reasoning on why they were questioning him. So, while change needs to be made within Black communities, it shouldn't dictate how we are treated by authorities, politicians and our neighbors of different races. The simple fact that an argument can be made in this regard shows that a real problem persists amongst those who feel like there are certain rules for certain groups of people. Those rules are usually one set of rules for whites and a series of separate rules for every other ethnic group around the world. In the case of Akai Gurley, different rules of law enforcement for certain areas, like the housing projects of Brooklyn, NY where there is a very high crime rate, leave way too much room for error. I believe that his death may have been the result of an accident. The police officer was relatively new to the force and he was patrolling dark stairwells in the building. Could it have been avoided? I think so, maybe by having seasoned, more experienced officers handle high risk situations such as project building patrols. Individuals close to the case said that Peter Liang, the officer who shot Gurley, was scared during the moments before the shooting. His fear, the instructions and training he had for his patrol (flashlight in one hand and gun drawn in the other) and the reputation those projects have, may all have led to the accidental shooting.


But what can we do? Honestly, I think the only thing we can do is to be honest about the separation that exists in this country. Ben Carson, a possible Republican candidate for the 2016 presidential election, said that race relations in our country have gotten worse under Obama. While that statement is true, his insinuation that it is Obama's fault because he plays the race card too much is not only inaccurate, it's misguided. As I mentioned before, Obama being president is a race card in of itself. You see his Blackness every time you see him on television. You hear his Blackness every time his name is mentioned. You can't get around it. Some people, like Carson, want to say he talks about race too much. People like Cornell West say he doesn't talk about it enough. While many, like me, would like to see him address situations like the Brown case a little more passionately, we can't look to him to be the face of change, at least not anymore. In 2008, we wanted him to be that face, we thought he was going to be that face. But one thing I learned was that the deep rooted racism that many had thought had subsided resurfaced more aggressively the day he took office. While some white Americans had been agreeable to the possibility of a Black president, many felt and still feel that a Black person isn't qualified to hold that position. Change takes more than time; it takes acceptance, patience and tolerance. These aren't things that our country has been known for throughout it's history. But whenever there is a conflict and someone brings up race, the conversation often turns to that itself than to a solution for the conflict. It's because we really want to believe that racism is dead and that we as a society are advanced enough to have moved on from that. It's just not true. Once we as a nation can admit that, then we can work on ways to coexist peacefully with one another entirely. But as long as we try to fool ourselves that the problem doesn't start with our perceptions, on both sides of the spectrum, then the issues that we see in places like Ferguson will not only continue to occur, they will get much, much worse.