Be Prepared For a Long, Hot Summer

As a teenager in the 1960s, I can remember clearly the televised images of the riots that erupted in a number of American cities. It was as if there were embers floating through the air that landed on gas soaked rags in city after city. In Newark, Detroit, Watts and even my hometown of Oakland, our television screens were filled with images of blocks and blocks of buildings billowing gray smoke from fires, looters running from store to store grabbing anything they could carry, vehicles engulfed in flames and dead bodies lying in the streets.

I now watch the news on a computer monitor instead of a giant TV console, but the images of the Baltimore riots could have been from an incident fifty years earlier, and for me, that’s very discouraging. It doesn’t feel as if race relations in this country have progressed much at all over the intervening half century. Read the comments section of any Baltimore related news story or tune into FOX News, and you’ll be enveloped by the stench of persistent racism, some of it couched in code words and subtle inferences while much of it is blatant and straightforward bigotry hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet.

The one dramatic difference between today and the 1960s is the number of people with video cell phones. Citizen videographers are now able to capture confrontations between police and the policed, and what we are seeing as a result is not a pretty sight. Many have claimed over the years that there are two systems of justice in America, one white and one black. The videos that we’ve seen over the past year or so only seem to confirm this assertion, as unarmed blacks are shot to death for infractions you know most white people would escape unharmed.

This has been a winter of highly visible, racially charged incidents. From Ferguson to Staten Island to Los Angeles to Baltimore, unarmed black men have been killed by police officers. They’ve all been under different circumstances, and not all of them can be labeled a police murder, but the videos do show how quick the police are to use lethal violence in confrontations with black men.

You don’t need a crystal ball to see that this will be a long, hot and violent summer across the U.S. as tensions over police conduct in black communities boils over to the streets. Rioting is not the answer, especially when it destroys the very communities in which black people live and work, but the frustration level of those who are the victims of justice by skin color is on the rise, and with a judicial system that lets them down time after time after time, where do they turn for help?

Media authority bias on display in protest coverage

The mainstream media’s biases are on full display in an article about this weekend’s national protests against the grand jury decision in the Eric Garner case. This morning’s front page of CNN reports on the protests in Oakland and Berkeley California that became violent. Here’s the headline:

“Protesters flood California highway, throw explosives at officers, police say”

Right off the bat the players in this drama are typecast, protesters bad, police just doing their jobs. Then we get into the article, and for the first ten paragraphs, we are treated to reports from the police on what happened – explosives where thrown, officers suffered minor injuries, vandalizing police cars, and on and on. If you make it as far as the eleventh paragraph, you’ll find this:

“The acts of violence were apparent anomalies in a sea of protests nationwide…”

So CNN spent two-thirds of the first section of a front-page article describing a rare situation among the hundreds of protests around the country. How come? Oh, and then there is the fact that not one demonstrator was interviewed to counter the allegations made by the police. I read somewhere else (can’t remember where) that Berkeley protestors are claiming the police instigated the violence.

Aside from simply being sensationalist, the article is clearly from the perspective of the police or state, with little credence or regard for the people. To me it’s journalistic malfeasance bordering on propaganda to publish a story like this without presenting both sides of the issue.

The indefensible persistence of racism in America

If you hear anyone trying to argue that we live in post-racial America, please tell that person to sit down and shut the fuck up. The failures of two grand juries to indict cops for murdering Michael Brown and Eric Garner should lay the post-racial myth in its grave. Racism is alive and well in the United States. Just turn on your TV and listen to conservatives like ex-New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani or FOX News’ Gretchen Carlson or Congressman Peter King spew ridiculous justifications for the actions of the police. King thinks Garner died because he was too fat.

Modern racism is comfortably couched in code words and phrases that allow the speaker a back door to escape being labeled an outright bigot. The welfare state, the takers, the lazy poor, the criminal class; prejudice and racial hatred are covered with layers of euphemisms that have allowed them to be slyly interjected into our national political discourse.

Yes, we elected an African American president, and at the same time opened a Pandora’s Box of racial hatred that has seen conservatives accuse Obama of everything from hating America to being the Anti-Christ. When they couldn’t come up with an actual impeachable offense, they tried to manufacture one with Benghazi. This colossal effort, this extensive expenditure of time and energy to try and bring down the President isn’t coming from any patriotic quest to wrest America from an evil leader, but from the poisoned stream of racism that runs just beneath the surface of far too many of our politicians.

The year is 2014, but we are still haunted as a country by divisive attitudes and racial prejudices that have plagued us since our founding. Think about the message that’s being sent to black communities in America through the results of the Brown and Garner grand jury decisions. Justice has two faces in the U.S. One is white and one is black, and they are not equal.