So, Sony’s emails were “racially insensitive”?

Get’em Shonda.  ‘Nuff said.

Calling Sony comments”racially insensitive remarks” instead of “racist”? U can put a cherry on a pile of sh*t but it don’t make it a sundae.

— shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) December 11, 2014

There were 161,000 grand juries convened in this country in 2013.

Of them, there were only ELEVEN (that’s 11, NOT 1100) no indictments returned. That is effectively a 100% indictment rate.

That is why it was famously said that you can indict a ham sandwich.  

Do you know why there is a 100% indictment rate? Because prosecutors go in to get an indictment and they present a completely ONE SIDED case to the grand jurors.

It is not a trial to determine the defendant’s guilt or innocence. The prosecutor does not present exculpatory evidence. The prosecutor does not present witnesses that contradict their version of the case. And defendants RARELY testify. There is no upside for defendants to testify. Prosecutors present a completely one-sided case to motivate the grand jurors to find probable cause to bring a charge.

Grand jury presentations are focused and all have one objective: GET AN INDICTMENT.

That is what happens.

UNLESS…

You aren’t trying to get an indictment.

Wow, Black men are dropping like flies.  In other words, unarmed Black men are still being killed by the police all over the country at a rapid rate.

Well, you know they say the criminal justice system is backlogged all over the country.  So, I suppose getting rid of suspects before their cases further clog up the system is one way to handle the over-burdened courts.

A reduction-in-force if you will.

RIF’em.  A new twist on an old concept.

Had a conversation recently with a good friend of mine about how beautiful the”Black Lives Matter” protests all over this country have been.  But, as I told her, I feel tremendous guilt.

The protests make me think about how much my generation has absolutely failed to keep the movement going. My predecessors were deeply entrenched in the Civil Rights movement, and then I came along and comfortably rode the coat tails of those victories to false sense of security, and got comfortable with my highly educated, six figure making, middle class “Buppie” lifestyle.

You know.  My Exceptional Nigger role.

I feel complicit in the mess we’re in now and guilty that my kids’ generation is stepping up to clean up.

Man, what a difference the lack of melanin makes.

Have you ever wondered what would happen to a White suspect, wanted for burglary, fleeing the police, who, when cornered by the police, assaults not one, but TWO police officers (even breaking one’s hand)?

Well, wonder no more.  I offer the story of one Kevin Miner, whose antics occurred a mere four days after the murder of Michael Brown.  Where did this happen?  A few miles away from Ferguson in St. Louis, Mo.

Here’s a little info from this article for you:

“Kevin Miner was hiding from police in a basement. He had been arrested two other times in the past month alone. He engaged police officers physically, breaking the hand of one. Now he is sitting in jail, facing new charges of assault for what he did to the police officers, along with the original robbery charges. But unlike Michael Brown, Kevin Miner will get his day in court. He will probably do some time, but in the end he will eventually be a free man again, able to go on with his life of thuggery.”

The policing of White bodies.  There must be a totally different procedures manual for that.

Some White people go to great lengths to perpetuate the lies of America’s history with Black people.  This is one of the biggies.   According to the article:

“A member of Colorado’s state Board of Education argued that the fact that the United States voluntarily ended slavery proved “American execptionalism” and this perspective should be taught to students in a recent Facebook post about the AP U.S. History curriculum.”

The only “exceptionalism” America can claim with respect to slavery is how exceptionally barbaric its treatment of Black folks was for almost 300 years.  Then there was Jim Crow, Black codes, convict leasing and now…Jim Crow, Jr.

Exceptionalism indeed.  In a delusional kind of way.

Photo Credit: Thanks to www.buddhajones.blogspot.com

So, remember this article that I blogged about the other day?  Well, one black mom rose up and responded brilliantly.  I love Kirsten West Savali’s response to Shannon Ralph’s article.  Kirsten nailed it in “Understand That These Are 11 Things About White Boys”.  It’s worth the read right here.

People, we have to call BS on the BS.  Way to go Kirsten West Savali.

Sometimes it is fascinating to get a close up, in depth look into white people’s minds when they let their guards down and they have no idea that you’re looking.  Such was the case when I read “11 Things Only Parents of Boys Understand”.

Consider her thoughts on the #2 thing only parents of boys will understand:

“2. Simultaneously hating and being grateful for the privilege your son will have as an adult male. This is a tough one. We all want our children to succeed and let’s be honest, males — particularly white males — have an advantage in the skewed world we live in. It’s easier for them. We don’t like it. We fight hard to change it. We rail against it with every fiber of our feminist being. But in the back of our minds, we breathe an uneasy sigh of relief that our boys will not struggle as hard as others. We hate ourselves for it, but we do it nonetheless.”

Ruh-Ro.  CLEARLY this chick was not speaking for any black parent of black boys I know.  All I could think was that THIS is how white privilege gets indoctrinated and perpetuated.

I’m struggling to make sense of Ralph’s thought process. Either she has been living under a rock and is completely ignorant to how offensive her admitted protection of, and indeed, perpetuation of, white male privilege is to mothers of sons of color or she is just that arrogant, insensitive and racist. Either one is unacceptable.

As the mother of two black, adult sons I can no longer protect my sons by holding their hand as they navigate this world which seems hell-bent on taking them out…one way or the other. That’s not Ms. Ralph’s problem. But her secret celebration of her sons’ privilege, which, truth be told, comes at the expense of my sons, is more than I can swallow.

Recently I attended a community event.  While trying to hold a conversation with an acquaintance, I was distracted by the conversation going on next to us between two white women.  I wasn’t eavesdropping.  Until.  Until I heard “that boy in Ferguson Missouri”.

THEN I was eavesdropping.  Which was incredibly rude to the person to whom I was already talking.  But I just knew the other conversation was going to be much more enlightening and interesting.

And it did not disappoint.

White Woman #1:  Did you hear that black people are still rioting over that boy in Ferguson, MO?

White Woman #2:  No, I stopped paying attention to that stuff.  Until all the facts come out, I think they’re just playing the race card to deflect from the fact that that boy was up to no good.  We all saw the video of him robbing that store.

White Woman #1:  I know.  It’s so crazy.  I. just. don’t. get. it.

No, you don’t get it.  And you know why a lot of white people don’t get it?  Because Michael Brown, and others like him, are so incredibly devalued by them that losing him MAY be acknowledged as unfortunate, but not as an injustice to humanity.  For some white people to “get it” in any meaningful way, they have to feel that an innocent person (who is not despised by them or at the very least seen as extraordinarily expendable) was wrongfully murdered. They have to relate to the person as someone who truly did not deserve to die on any level.  And it helps if they feel that it could have been them or someone they love.

Right now, I think many white people have stronger sympathetic emotions towards the adorable, innocent dogs killed on Michael Vick’s property than they do towards the “ignorant, ugly, poor, ghetto, dangerous black criminal” human being that Officer Darren Wilson had the misfortune of encountering on August 9th.

Some black person “worthy” of feeling a loss over will have to be killed by the police before droves of white people will speak out against racism corporately and in their personal lives.

Somebody like, you know, an Exceptional Nigger.

That’s basically what NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said the other day when he defended the inequalities in arrest rates of blacks and Latinos for minor crimes versus white people.  According to Commissioner Bratton, minorities are arrested more because they are the ones committing more crimes.  You can read the article here.

I could point out that his argument is a preposterous circular one.  The reason more minorities are arrested is because the NYPD (and the colleagues across this country) keep arresting more minorities.  It’s not that they’re committing more crime than white people.  It’s that they are arrested more often than white people.

But it is in fact true that there is a lot of crime in poor neighborhoods, and at least with respect to black neighborhoods, the high crime rate has created a frenzy about “black on black crime”.   Once again, victims of systemic oppression become the scapegoats for systemic discrimination and oppression.  I’ve written about this before.

Lately, I’ve been reading some of Dr. King’s lesser known speeches and have been amazed at how relevant his speeches are even still today (which, considering it’s 50 plus years later, is beyond troubling).  His speech at Western Michigan University in 1963 is particularly rich as it relates to black criminality.

“I read just the other day where someone in Mississippi said that God was a charter member of the White Citizens Council. These ideas still linger.  But on the whole, the Biblical justifications have passed away. The arguments are now on more subtle sociological cultural grounds. The Negro is not culturally ready for integration, the argument goes, and if you integrate the schools and other facilities, you will pull the white race back a generation. And the Negro is a criminal, you see. These arguments go on ad infinatum. The people who set forth these arguments never go on to say that if there are lagging standards in the Negro community, and there certainly are, they lag because of segregation and discrimination. Criminal responses and other things like this are environmental and not racial. Economic deprivation, social isolation, ignorance, poverty
breed crime, whatever the racial group may be, and it is a tortuous logic to use the tragic results of segregation as an argument for the continuation of it. There is a need to go for the causal root, to grapple with the problem at that point and to get rid of the notion once and for all that there are superior and inferior races. There are too many things alive in our nation and in our world to disprove this notion that has existed all too long. Then we’re challenged after working in the realm of ideas, to move out into the arena of social action and to work passionately and unrelentingly to make racial justice a reality. In other words, there is great need to develop an action program in order to remove all of the vestiges of the old order.”

We need an action program.   I’ve laid out necessary actions here and here.  More to come.