Monroe Anderson

Black teen unemployment is the real crime

 

America's treatment of its urban Black youth has been anything but benign. Far too many of them have no jobs, no future and little to lose. Here's my take in the Chicago Defender.

 

Black teen unemployment comes with a price

By Monroe Anderson

 

This summer threatens to be long and hot. Not climate change hot but heated and angry, Baltimore Spring hot.

             Three days ago, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that 96 percent of us believe that there will be more racial disturbances as seen on TV.

             After we see more episodes of police routinely showing up on the nightly news after they’ve killed yet another Black male, there will be more repeats of Black teens with little more than time on their hands and outrage on their minds acting out their frustration. We’ll see more squad cars stomped to death. More buildings going up in smoke. More stores ransacked and looted.

“A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems,” the Journal reported.

            That’s the Fourth Estate’s way of saying poor Black people are about to behave poorly and that while everybody knows it, not everybody knows why. So the opinions are about as racially divided as the nation. Sixty percent of Blacks saw the urban uprising as “long-standing frustrations about police mistreatment of African Americans,” while 58 percent of whites said the riots were "an excuse to engage in looting and violence.”

            There are all sorts of evidence and reasons that underscore the Black interpretation while undermining the white one. There are also studies and events to inform us that the frustrations go far beyond the wanton and routine police killing of unarmed Black males to these core problems: No jobs, no hope.

There’s this year’s annual report released jointly by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network in January titled, “A Frayed Connection: Joblessness among Teens in Chicago,” revealed that In 2012-13, just one in ten of Chicago’s Black teens had a job--nine out of 10 did not.  

“One half of 20-to 24-year old black male residents of the city are not working and not enrolled in school,” the report warned, adding that “Black teen employment rates in Chicago have reached historically low levels.”

A Kids Count policy report that was a dead ringer to the one in Chicago told the same sad story about young Black males in Baltimore in 2012, “unemployment among those ages 16 to 24 is the highest in the country since World War II.”

            The Supreme Commander of the Allies during WWII, Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address as POTUS warned Americans about the future dangers of massive military spending, especially deficit spending and government contracts to private military manufacturers. The unemployed Black males are getting short-changed by the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about.

Less than two years after President Lyndon Johnson launched his ambitious War on Poverty in 1964, those resources were shifted to the war in Vietnam. A generation later, President Bill Clinton managed to downsize the military but Republicans later took their pound of flesh, forcing him to end the Summer Youth Employment and Training Program as a stand-alone initiative which resulted in 600,000 kids being laid off.

The bulk of today’s economic challenges in our urban areas can be traced directly back to President George W. Bush. The 43rd president’s surplus-busting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were never in his administration’s budget, sucked up much of the tax dollars that had been returning to the cities and states.

Depending on who’s calculating those two wars have cost America between four and six trillion dollars. American commanders handed out $3.5 billion with next-to-nothing oversight to purportedly to rebuild the country we illegally invaded.

Meanwhile, back at home, our pavements feel like something out of a war zone. Our outdated bridges are in danger of collapsing. Our transportation system is last millennium. And, of course, our urban areas are teeming with Black men who want and need jobs that they can’t get.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is making jobs available for 24,000 Chicago teens through his One Summer Chicago initiative. In the scheme of things, that’s not a big number.

Maybe all those other unemployed teens, will understand it’s the thought that counts. We’ll see soon enough. Summer is just around the corner.

Black-on-Black crime is KKK

    

    Director Spike Lee will shoot a movie about black-on-black crime this summer in Chicago. The working title is Chiraq. That's Chicago and Iraq truncated into one word. Get it? Here's my Chicago Defender column on what Spike's movie should use as its metaphor.

 

Spike Lee’s Chiraq could be KKK

By Monroe Anderson

Mayor Rahm Emanuel may not care for the title of Spike Lee’s movie slated to start shooting this summer in Englewood, but as an artist, an out-of-towner and a show business man, “Chiraq” makes perfectly good sense for America’s most iconic Black director.

    Popularized by Chief Keef, and other neo-gangster rappers in Chicago’s drill music set, the term Chiraq chronicles the violence in some of the city’s worst poverty pockets. Creating the phrase was a low-brainer, considering that when it comes to body count in Chitown’s most dangerous hoods- Fuller Park, Garfield Park and Englewood--more Blacks have been shot and killed on a year-to-year basis there than in war-torn Iraq.

Beyond that, Spike could certainly use a drive-by box office hit. In nearly a decade, the “Black Woody Allen” hasn’t able to do enough of the right thing to produce a feature film as relevant as director Ava Duvernay’s Selma or as entertaining as director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. A convincing argument could be made that in the past 20 years, the New York--based director has made only one smack down feature film, the 2006 The Inside Man, that can hold its own against his earlier efforts like She’s Got to Have It and Malcolm X.

While he made some memorable documentaries over the years, including 4 Little Girls, and the TV mini-series, When the Levees Broke, Lee’s feature-film efforts, such as Miracle of Saint Anna, Red Hook Summer and Oldboy, had more fizzle than sizzle.    

A modern day Menace II Society might do the trick in reviving Lee’s career but I seriously doubt if Chiraq will do the trick partly because it’s based on a misleading premise.

Contrary to what gets reported on the nightly news or in screaming newspaper headlines, Chicago’s murder rate is on the decline. It’s the lowest it has been in more than four decades. According to rankings made by NeighborhoodScout.com, a website that markets itself as providing “Enterprise-grade data for every neighborhood and city in the U.S.” the Windy City isn’t even on its list of America’s Top 30 murder capitals. Downstate East St. Louis is number one. Two suburbs across state lines, Gary is number three and East Chicago is ranks number 15.

In making another stab at recapturing  the ‘90s when his films’ shocked and awed viewers, Spike may be bringing too little, too late to the reality of Chicago’s Bronzeville, which is already showing signs of turning into D.C. or Harlem. No longer the Chocolate City, gentrification and incoming white flight, the Black population in the District of Columbia has slipped below 50 percent. Nor are Blacks the majority in Harlem anymore.

You can see it unfolding before your very eyes in Bronzeville. The hipsters are salting the South Side. They can be spotted walking their dogs, jogging or pushing their baby strollers on streets their parents and grandparents had either avoided or had forgotten.

You can trace it back to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his not so grand plan to transform Chicago into Paris. It was obvious with the flowers and the fences and the fancy hand operated sidewalk vacuums. It was clandestine with the razing of Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes, which diluted the power of the city’s Black voting bloc and exiled the poor to, among other places, Gary, East Chicago and Harvey.

You can see why Chiraq is not the best title for what’s really happening here. So, I’ve got a better suggestion. I think Spike should look at the artwork of visual artist James Pate and either beg, borrow or buy his cutting edge artistic vision. A couple of years ago, Pate had a three-month exhibition at the DuSable Museum. Its title was KKK--Kin Killin Kin.

The detailed black and white drawings, beautiful yet powerful, were of boys from the hood, wearing Ku Klux Klan-like headgear with their black faces exposed or basketball jerseys with the initials KKK on them while pointing guns at each other’s heads. The bullets they fired were artistically frozen just before they entered each other’s heads.

That unnerving reality would make a much more powerful movie than a sequel to the Hughes brothers 1993 hit.

If Spike doesn’t want pursue the KKK metaphor, he can always change his filming location. Killadelphia won’t do because, like Chicago, the City of Brother Love’s murder rate is down.  But Baltimore might work. It has killer cops and urban uprisings right now and, unfortunately, a high enough murder rate: Charm City ranks #13 on the Top Murder Capitols list.

Baltimore, courtesy of The Wire, has a controversial colloquialism just as good as Chiraq. That would be Bodymore, Murdaland.

 

 

Post post-racial America

 

Half a century after the Selma March, race still matters in America as events in Selma, Alabama, Madison, Wisconsin and Norman, Oklahoma demonstrated. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column

 

From Selma to Madison to Norman

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

The march, a shooting and a song summed up this past weekend just how far this nation has gone and just how far it has yet to go.

 

The nation’s first African American president stood near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most important feats of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of the epic confrontation between forces of peace and progress and the agents of brute force, Blacks won the right to vote in the South.

 

“We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still cast it’s long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama told the integrated crowd of thousands who had gathered to commemorate, along with him, the Selma to Montgomery March. “We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won.”

 

As if to underscore the president’s point, some 898 miles north from Selma, in Madison, Wisconsin, another white cop shot and killed another unarmed black teenager and some 783 miles northwest of Selma, in Norman, Oklahoma, a YouTube video went viral exposing tuxedo-clad white frat boys chanting a bus-trip song about racial exclusion and lynching.

 

The lyrics to the song were not exactly surprising, considering that Sigma Alpha Epsilon is 159 years old and is the only national fraternity founded in the Antebellum South. The fraternity boasts on its website that during the Civil War 92 percent of SAE members fought for the Confederate states.

 

In case you missed the video or didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are in all of their good ol’ boy, old-fashioned, garden-variety racist glory:

"There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me

There will never be a ni**** in SAE."

 

I find this alarming because this isn’t a bunch of curmudgeonly, bitter old white men hating on hope and change but young guys who are white America’s future. After these frat boys graduate from college, they’ll move on into the corporate pipeline where some day some of them will have the power to hire and fire with “there will never be a ni**** “ playing like the soundtrack to their lives in their heads.

 

The SAE chanters may represent a throwback to mid-century American racism, but times have changed. Rather than stonewall the Unheard, a group of Black student activists at OU who had learned of the video and posted it online, or buy time with a three-month investigation, David Boren, the university president, immediately shut the fraternity down.

 

The national headquarters of SAE, which prides itself in having a membership of “gentlemen and leaders.” followed Boren’s lead and immediately suspended the OU chapter.

 

With no blood thirsty state troopers or Selma police waiting to do battle, what was supposed to be a march was so well attended by so many movers and shakers that it turned into an extravaganza. Not only was America’s current president there but also former President George W. Bush, along with Capitol Hill lawmakers galore.

 

It was plainly easier to take photo-ops  than it has been to pass a new voter’s rights law that would repair the damage the five right wing activists on the Supreme Court did two years ago to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states that had historically suppressed the Black vote no longer had to prove they were no longer suppressing the Black vote. Since then, southern states like Texas has come up with all sorts of creative, new-fangled ways to diminish the number of Blacks and Browns casting their votes at the ballot box.

 

We can vote now but we can’t stop the unjustifiable killings of black men and boys by frightened or ferocious cops.

 

Even with the “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests becoming this generation’s civil rights movement, policemen across the nation continue to create more martyrs.

 

Friday night a Madison policeman shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed biracial teen, five times in the chest. The 19-year-old Robinson had a file on his with a conviction last year for armed robbery and a diagnosis that he suffered from attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression.

 

Officer Matt Kenny, a 12-year veteran, has been put on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the Robinson’s death. Kenny was involved in another fatal shooting in 2007, that was found justified; a so-called suicide by cop case.

 

So while Selma was throwing a grand party, 2,000 protesters, mainly Wisconsin students, have been peacefully marching in Madison while chanting, “Black lives matter.”

 

Some students’ chants are far better than others.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

Here's my Root commentary on the Sikh tragedy. No more commentary here. It speaks for itself.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: August 10, 2012 at 12:26 AM

 

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

Another conservative website, Alex Jones' Prison Planet, is headlined, "Homeland Security Report Lists 'Liberty Lovers' as Terrorists."

And then-top Republican of the House Intelligence committee, former Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, charged "unsubstantiated conclusions and political bias," worthy of a House investigation.

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Less than a quarter of the world's population is white. By 2060, fears conservative Pat Buchanan, that percentage may dip into the single digits.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Obama's straight walking, double talking Urban League speech

The Root called me last night to ask if I could do a quick turnaround commentary on the president's speech at the National Urban League. The is what I wrote.

Obama's Careful Urban League Speech

The president kept his message all-inclusive at the civil rights group's annual convention.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: July 26, 2012 at 12:06 AM



(The Root) -- President Barack Obama walked a narrow line in his speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans Wednesday night, attempting to fire up his most enthusiastic base while giving his most rabid enemies as little ammo as possible to fire back at him.

It was no easy task. There has been some grumbling in the black community that the first African-American president was taking the last-hired and first-fired community for granted. That sentiment grew stronger this summer after Obama sent Vice President Joe Biden to address the National Association of Black Journalists and the NAACP. So Obama arrived in New Orleans for the annual Urban League meetup possibly fearing that African Americans might not show up in large enough numbers at the polling booths in November.

The president's speech to the venerable civil rights organization hit on the three most critical challenges in the black community -- violence, education and jobs -- while deftly managing to broaden the scope enough so that conservatives wouldn't have an easy shot at labeling his remarks as for blacks only.



 

With the exception of announcing that, by executive order, he was establishing "the first ever White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, so that every child has greater access to a complete and competitive education," the president's speech was pretty much all-American for all Americans.

The POTUS ticked off measures his administration has done to help black students, such as increasing Pell Grants and pushing colleges and universities to cut their costs. But imbedded in those boasts was an unspoken truth: This is good for the rest of our fellow citizens, too.

The same tactic was employed for jobs. "We don't believe government should be in the business of helping people that refuse to help themselves, and we recognize that not every government program works," Obama said. "But we do expect hard work to pay off. We do expect responsibility to be rewarded. We do expect that if you put in enough effort you should be able to find a job that pays off."

Obama also deftly merged the Urban League's mission of equal opportunity into values of the middle class, where prosperity should be broad-based. But in speaking about the tragedies brought on by the senseless deaths from gun violence Obama really integrated his message. "Violence plagues the biggest cities but it also plagues the smallest town," he said. "It claims the lives of Americans of different ages and different races, and it's tied together by the fact that these young people had dreams and had futures that were cut tragically short."

The president spoke of praying for the victims of the massacre in Aurora, Colo.: "We also pray for those who succumb to less publicized acts of violence that plague our communities in so many cities across the country every day. We can't forget about that." Obama's sleight of hand was not just a black-and-white narrative. He delicately drilled deeper into the gun-violence plague without once mentioning gun control.

"I also believe, like other Americans, that AK-47s belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities," he said. Then he went on to say he was going to talk to members of the House and Senate to seek "a consensus around violence reduction." That was another hidden message. I read it as this: "We all know all this gun violence is insane, but I can't afford to rile up the gun nuts right now. I've got an election to win."

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Apathy in America means that we're all potential victims

     

    My younger son, Kyle, still bears an ugly scar on his right eyelid from an attempted mugging on the CTA. 

In 2008, he was on his way home on the Green Line from his part-time job at Kennedy-King College as a City Colleges student when he was jumped by a gang of thugs out to relieve him of his Zune, his cell phone and the lonely and  solitary singles hanging out in his slim wallet.

After failing to beat Kyle down, the pack of muggers jumped off at the next L stop, vanishing into the rush hour crowd waiting to board the train. Their quick and vicious attack was witnessed, but neither interrupted nor protested, by the packed car of transit riders. It was only after the thugs had scurried away that one compassionate passenger provided Kyle with a handkerchief to wipe away the blood flowing from his open wounds.

Unfortunately, that's life in the big city. Citizens don't want to get involved in all-too-common outbreaks of violence for fear that they may themselves become unwitting victims. I think that kind of conduct is cowardice but I also understand it.

I don't understand, however, what went down late last month in Seattle, Washington. Four teenagers--a girl and three boys--attacked a 15-year-old girl in a Macy's department store. Seattle police reportedly witnessed the row and then ordered the teens to take it outside. 

The targeted girl retreated to bus tunnel at Westlake Station, purposefully standing by security guards, thinking she would be safe. 

She wasn't. 

The guards stood idly by and watched as she was allegedly (and I use this as an innocent until proven guilty phrase) badly beaten by the teenagers who had followed her out of the nearby department store.

It's one pathetic thing for citizens to watch and do nothing while an innocent victim is being beaten and mugged but it's something else altogether for hired hands to keep theirs in their pockets as they whistle while they work.

In Kyle's case, he fought off his offenders. They ended up hightailing it empty handed. The 15-year-old Seattle girl was not so fortunate. Her attackers stole her phone, her purse and her IPod, leaving her temporarily unconscious from a kick to the head.

I know the right-wingers aren't about to agree with me on this, but I'm hoping the trial lawyers help the teenage girl victim and her parents get as much as a Wall Street CEO's annual bonus in lawsuit judgments against the Seattle police department and the security company that failed to step up when regular citizens were afraid to do so.

Cop killing is a bad political cause

With only one exception, when it comes to police, the "we protect and serve" has meant nothing more than a motto stenciled on the side of a squad car to me. 

Just once, in all my years, did the police come to my rescue. That was nearly 30 years ago when a doped-out burglar was wondering around in my home at the break of dawn. I let the intruder know that I knew he was someplace he had no business and he fled. I dialed 911 and two minutes later, they showed up at my door with the bad guy in hand. 

My other experiences were not so reassuring. I was clubbed by the Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention for doing my job as a Newsweek Magazine intern. I was stopped and frisked by Chicago police as a young teen because I and a couple of my friends were running along the Lakeshore. I am periodically stopped while driving black.

I am not what you'd exactly call a cop lover. But, when I surfed into an post on the Hinterland Gazette blog that left me shaking my head. The headline says it all: 

Dozens March in Protest Organized by Uhuru Movement to Honor Lovelle Mixon who Shot and Killed Four Police

That any organization, black nationalist or whatever else, would try to make a political martyr out of a cold-blooded cop killer is deadly dumb and terminally stupid.

The Hinterland Gazette said as much in its post:

It is unconscionable to me that people could march and rally to honor cop killer Lovelle Mixon, who was shot by Oakland police after he fatally shot four officers last Saturday. What is the message that the organizer, the Uhuru Movement, is sending? That they are condoning the horrific actions of a career criminal. Sorry, but had that been a white man who shot and killed four black cops, they would be throwing the kitchen sink and everything else that they could find. Heck, they might have even ended up in Washington D.C. at the Capitol in protest. How do you honor someone who has deliberately killed four police officers or anyone, for that matter? This sets a terrible precedent in Oakland and around the country. The shootings were by far the deadliest incident for U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001, and the deadliest in California in nearly four decades, according to media reports.

"OPD you can't hide - we charge you with genocide," chanted the demonstrators as they marched along MacArthur Boulevard, near the intersection with 74th Avenue where Mixon, 26, a fugitive parolee, gunned down two motorcycle officers who had pulled him over in a traffic stop. He killed two more officers who tried to capture him where he was hiding in his sister's apartment nearby.

The protest was organized by the Oakland branch of the Uhuru Movement, whose flyers for the march declared, "Stop Police Terror." Many marchers wore T-shirts featuring Mixon's photo, including a woman identified by march organizers as Mixon's mother. The woman declined to comment and gave her name only as Athena. Lolo Darnell, one of Mixon's cousins at the demonstration, said, "He needs sympathy too. If he's a criminal, everybody's a criminal." Asked about police allegations that Mixon was suspected in several rapes, including that of a 12-year-old girl, marcher Mandingo Hayes said, "He wasn't a rapist. I don't believe that."

If I try real hard I can almost understand the twisted rationale behind the Uhuru Movement's thinking. Oakland's black community is still outraged from the murder of 22-year-old Oscar Grant who was fatally shot by a transit cop. In one black community after the next, the police represent and act like an occupying army rather than like guardian angels. It's easy to understand the personal and collective resentment that exists from that constant and predictable treatment. 

Being rich and famous is no shield from police arrogance as Houston Texans running back Ryan Moats discovered when he was detained and lectured by Robert Powell, a Dallas cop, while his mother-in-law lay dying just steps away in the hospital. 

It's the Moats-like incidents that give cover to the anger and resentment that can give rise to the Mixon-like protests. It's unsettling that something as simple as a traffic stop was the beginning that led to both bad endings in the Mixon and Moats stories.

      We'd all be better served if the police took care to treat blacks in America not like suspects but like human beings--and if blacks in America took care to remember that murdered cops were human beings too.

(This post was also published on UK/EU Progressive, Newsvine.com and AgoraVox.)

Chris and Rihanna show all's not fair in love that wars

Superstars Chris Brown and Rihanna are the poster children for domestic violence. You know the story. A lover's quarrel in 19-year-old Brown's car led to a beating so brutal that neither were able to make scheduled appearances at the Grammy Awards later that night.

Rihanna ended up with a badly bruised and swollen face, Brown with an arrest record and the two of them back together again. Apparently, Rihanna, 21,  and Brown's teenage fans are willing to forgive him for his behaving badly. 

Their spat gone violent might be worth all the attention it's received if it was not so common. As black nationalist H. Rap Brown observed four decades ago: Violence is as American as apple pie.

That's particularly true when it comes to home and to those who are intimately involved partners. There are nearly two million injuries in this nation each year resulting from domestic violence. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, victims of severe domestic violence--like Rihanna--annually miss 8 million days of paid work; that's the equivalent of 32,000 full-time jobs, and approximately 5.6 million days of household productivity.

And while I abhor the practice of a man beating his woman senseless--or slapping her around for that matter--I believe it's worst when a parent whips a child.

Although, like Rihanna, many abused women fail to dump their abusing lover, abused children rarely have that choice to make. In the name of love and discipline, a parent can beat a child day in and day out without rebuke as long as that child doesn't end up with welts and bruises--or in the ER. But that old school discipline that so many old school parents are so fast and proud to dish out is nothing but an act of violence.

If I pulled off my belt and decided to whip a complete stranger walking down the street, I'd go jail if not to the morgue. That reality and those rules don't apply to the most defenseless Americans--small children.

Citing "spare the rod, spoil the child," far too many Americans believe that when it comes to punishing children, that which doesn't kill them will make them stronger.

But, in reality, it's poor parenting, not spared rod, spoil the child. Our prisons are overcrowded with men who got their butts whipped as children at home AND on the streets. Rather than beating up your child because you're bigger and stronger, wouldn't it be better to teach them how to behave by reasoning with them and punishing through non-violent means? Time-outs work. So do revoked privileges. Teaching by example is tops. For example, when I was a child, my father told me any curse word I heard him use I could use. Since I never heard him use one, he never heard me use one. 

If you teach a child that violence is a means to get what you want, then violence becomes an early and easy option. The jails are filled with men--and boys--who got their asses whipped on regularly. Rather than learning reasoning and self-control, they learned that physical abuse is the way to control or address problems.

And, isn't it strange that parents feel free to beat up--whip--their children while they're little but stop as soon as they get big enough to make it a fair fight?

The same principle holds true for two lovers. Had Rihanna been bigger, stronger or a black belt, Chris Brown would have thought long and hard before he struck out.

btw, here's a YouTube video reenactment from the police reports of the what allegedly took place between the two pop stars. DoSomething.org, a teen organization, made the video as a public service announcement about teen dating. 

(This column is also posted on Huffingtonpost.com,  Newsvine.com and UK/EU Progressive.)