If this doesn’t make you want to jump up and get every black person you know see registered to vote (AND make sure they actually go vote)…including Pookie and ‘nem…then I don’t know what will.  These people vote and then we (black folks) spend the next four years on a rampage about the legislators who not only don’t represent our interests, but in fact, specifically work against our interests.  WE are not these legislators’ tribe.  THESE folks in this video are.  Sure their ignorance makes us LOL.  But who’s laughing last?

Shocking photoshop of NFL CoverGirl model with black eye is sweeping across Twitter: http://t.co/NSrTyrtyqS pic.twitter.com/JBxiT6st5Z

— For The Win (@ForTheWin) September 14, 2014

“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”  ~ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

We started last week with domestic violence in the NFL, hit mid-stride with racism in the NBA and ended the week with child abuse in the NFL.  Contemplating these headlines over the weekend, several random thoughts came to mind in no particular order:

• The NFL has a domestic violence problem that it is not handling well because it is putting profits over people and women and children aren’t important policy issues.
• America has a domestic violence problem that it is not handling because it often puts profits over people and for sure, women and children aren’t important policy issues.
• Ray Rice was dead wrong but shouldn’t be permanently banned from football.  He should be held accountable with required treatment and “probation” covering future incidents.
• Ditto for Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald and any others that surface in the future.
• Society needs to stop “victim shaming” by dragging Janay Rice through the mud for staying and marrying him.
• Society needs to do more “perpetrator shaming” by outing abusive men and holding them accountable for their actions.
• Federal Judge Mark Fuller should be permanently removed from the bench.  Federal judges have the ability to significantly impact people’s lives permanently.  He cannot be trusted with matters of justice – civil or criminal – when he himself is a criminal.  Removing him from the bench will take an act of Congress.  Literally.  He has to be impeached.  So I’m not holding my breath for that one.
• The NFL has been schizophrenic in its handling of domestic violence among its players.
• Society has been schizophrenic in its handling of domestic violence among is residents.
• Adrian Peters deserves criminal prosecution for beating his 4 year old like that.  It was abuse.  Period.  No excuses.  No ifs ands or butts.  He should be held accountable for his actions.  But he shouldn’t be permanently banned from the league either.  Suspended indefinitely pending completion of domestic violence/child abuse counseling, parenting classes and mental health counseling…yes.
• Ben Roethlisberger is notably being vewy, vewy quiet.  And he should.
• I don’t care if your mama beat you when you were a kid and it was good for you because you would be dead or in prison if she hadn’t.  If she left lacerations, welps, scars and blood, then she abused you.  You may forgive her now as an adult, but you should NOT beat your own children.  Children need to be DISCIPLINED (and sometimes that may mean a spanking) but not ABUSED.  There is a difference, and it is not a fine line.
• Danny Ferry’s leave and sensitivity training are the right thing.  I don’t think he should be fired for his comments–this time.   I’m all about accountability.
• Mark Levenson outed himself and as the owner/leader of the team, I think he did right to step down.  Personally, I think it was a ploy to create controversy in order to draw potential buyers to the team because he wants out.  Some of have said that his comments were purely commentary about marketing strategies.  Yeah. Right.  Those marketing strategies sound eerily reminiscent of another marketing strategy: “We’re not racist, but we can’t sell our home to you because white people don’t want to live in neighborhoods with black people so if we sell to you, then our property values will go down.”  Marketing strategy my arse.
• Roger Goodell has to go.  For so many reasons.  It’s easy to manage an organization when things are going well and whatever isn’t going well you just sweep under the carpet and ignore it and your customers (fans) love you.  Just keep making the owners “mo money, mo money, mo money” and keep pocketing your own $44mm annual salary (FORTY FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!).  But it takes real leadership to lead with integrity and proactively acknowledge and address the problems in your organization and come with a plan (a real plan) to address the issues in order not to hurt the brand or your loyal customers/fans AND to support your employees.  LEAD PROACTIVELY WITH INTEGRITY.  Roger has to go.

I was reminded of Dr. King’s passage about the need for legislation when an acquaintance of mine said that we can’t fix police brutality with legislation because the problem is the police officers’ intrinsic bias towards black men.

Maybe we can’t fix their hearts.  But we can make them think twice about killing another unarmed black man.

“Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there’s half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.”  Dr. Martin L. King, 1963 at Western Michigan University

Rallies, marches, protests and civil disobedience are important tools in this new civil rights movement.  Indeed, the mobilization of a people demanding that which ought not even be in question – the basic dignity of recognition that #blacklivesmatter – is powerful and, I believe, effective.

To a point.  It brings awareness in ways that conversation cannot.  It makes the oppressor stand up and take notice.  Even if only out of nervousness.  But at the end of the day, we need legislation addressing police brutality.  We need legislation requiring that police departments wear front facing cameras and have dash cams in every squad car.  We need legislation requiring citizen review of police-involved shooting deaths.  All of them.  And we need legislation mandating uniform reporting of police shootings to state police departments as well as to the U.S. Department of Justice.

It won’t make rogue police officers believe that #blacklivesmatter.  But it just might tame those itchy trigger fingers.

Conservatives say that welfare and other entitlement programs are a disincentive to work.  But you know what I say?

Working 40 hours for minimum wage and still not having enough money for basic needs like rent and food and clothes is the REAL disincentive to work.

Here’s a big shout out to the workers across this country fighting for living wages.

Apparently history only told half the story.  Here is an incredible review of rant against a book on slavery.

Mind-boggling criticism of a book about slavery in the US South. pic.twitter.com/hjkjq2m7u6

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 4, 2014

Where is the fair and balanced story of white people’s struggle during slavery???

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

Last month, I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) about black rage in connection with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.  I didn’t condemn the rage black folks were feeling about Ferguson, MO then; and I’m not going to condemn it now.

In fact, I’m going to celebrate it.  Because we are tired of being patient.  And I think that rage was necessary to bring us to where we are today.  We are at the precipice of an uprising.  The edge of an uprising if you will.

And it’s about time.

While rage is irrational and often unproductive, it has quite possibly moved us beyond thinking of Ferguson, Mo as being solely about Mike Brown.  It appears that we have turned the corner (and if we aren’t quite there yet, I’m absolutely suggesting we get there. Now.) so that Ferguson, MO is now about the dignity of black lives all over this country.  We are at the point where we demand that the world recognize that #blacklivesmatter.  We are sick and tired of it, and we’re not going to take it anymore.  “It” means, for starters, we’re not taking police officers killing black men at a rate of 1 every 28 hours anymore.

It’s time for an uprising: an act of resistance or rebellion; a revolt.

I’m not proposing a physically violent revolt or rebellion.  I’m proposing a psychologically violent revolt.  By that I mean that our patience has ended.  We have to demand the end to the daily police brutality against black men.  We have to demand that racial profiling end.  We have to insist that the police stop beating, maiming and killing us.

Every time we are killed by the police, our souls are traumatized.  Our mental state is thrown out of equilibrium.  Our blood pressure rises, our hearts race, our temples pulse.  That is extremely stressful and distressing and takes a toll on our psyche, not to mention the toll on our physical health.  It’s time to give it right back.  We have to return the same level of distress to the collective psyche of police departments and communities around this country.  They have to know that we will mobilize in a “Mike Brown Minute”.  Everywhere.  Wherever they misbehave, we have to mobilize.  Wherever there is evidence that a “Ferguson” exists anywhere in this country, we have to turn our collective attention there.

We need feet on the ground.  We need to ambush legislators with letters and emails.  We need to be that city government power structure’s worst nightmare.  We need to demand media coverage.  We need to create our own coverage via the strength of our pooled social media.  We need a full court press.  We need an uprising.  I described it in more detail here.

Psychological warfare is not for the faint of heart.  But confining our angst to kitchen table conversations and Twitter isn’t enough.  And losing the momentum we have right now by limiting our rage to the Mike Brown tragedy diminishes us all.

#Blacklivesmatter.  All of them.  So don’t mistake the meaning of Ferguson.  It represents our collective message to this country…indeed the world:

We’re mad and we’re not gonna take anymore.

You did not die in vain Mike.  None of you did.

As a black, self-employed attorney and elected official in my community, I started August 28th with gratitude, believing that the Civil Rights Movement made it possible for me to be possible. I started with a sense of hope that racial progress was still not only possible…it was inevitable.  

But, within 3 hours, in two Chicago-area courthouses in two different counties, I was reminded that although the nation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the history-making “I Have A Dream” speech, the reality is that I, a highly educated black woman, still exist at the margins of society.  While I can now physically enter the courthouse through the front door, I am still mentally relegated to back door entrances and persona non grata status by white court personnel.

In the first instance, the court clerk rudely told me that I could not check in with her for my case. Instead, I was told to take a seat and wait for my case to be called, and then asked if I had an attorney.  Even though I was dressed like other attorneys in the courtroom, had a file in my hand, and attempted to explain that I was checking in as the attorney.  There was no moment of awareness nor acknowledgment of how offensive and racist she had just been.  No apology.  Just business as usual.

I observed that the white male attorney before me and the two white female attorneys after me, were assumed automatically, just by their presence, dress, and demeanor, to be attorneys.  They were treated professionally and with respect.  I, on the other hand, was talked down to and practically ordered to sit down (as she pointed to the public seating area of the courtroom, not the “inner sanctuary” where judges, clerks…and attorneys sit).

In the second courthouse, I stood in line inside the Circuit Court Clerk’s office, under the overhead sign marked “Attorneys”.  In front of me stood a white, male attorney.  After he was waited on, the clerk looked at me and walked away.  She just walked away and left me standing there wondering if she was coming back or what.  I soon had my answer.  As she sat down at a desk across the office, I called out to her and motioned to the open window.  She looked at me, and without saying a word, pointed to the sign above…because, after all, that line was “for attorneys only.”  No chance she hadn’t seen me.  We made eye contact.  She saw me alright, but not as an attorney.

And then I remembered when a court security officer motioned to my white, female client that she could come around the metal detector, while I, walking right behind her, was motioned directly to the metal detector.  When she hesitated, the officer said,“You are an attorney, aren’t you?”  So, not only are white attorneys automatically presumed to be attorneys, white people, in general, receive the presumption and apparently get to avoid the metal detector…at least if walking into court with a black person.  Ahhh, white privilege.

And then I remembered the time when I stepped up to the judge with a white, male client charged with a DUI.  As started to talk, the judge cut me off and told me to let my attorney talk for me. In a nano-second I realized that the judge thought my client, dressed like he was on his way to a rodeo, was the attorney…and that I, dressed like I was going, well, to court, was the DUI defendant.

There are other similar incidents.  I repeatedly get to see how the justice system treats people who look like me when they think I’m not an attorney.  I get to see what’s really happening.  

So, I’m on a mission. If you believe in “the Dream”, please join me in turning a mirror on America’s persistent, racist pathology.  If you see discrimination, call it.  Like roaches, discrimination hates the light.  But injustice doesn’t scream and call attention to itself.  It is usually more subtle, more nuanced.  If you don’t look, you won’t see it.  

Don’t ignore it.  Confront it.  Join the movement.

There’s an old saying that goes “just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after me”.  Or something like that.

So, when it comes to “The Exceptional Nigger”, some might say I’m paranoid.  Whatever.  I say they’re after us.

Watch this clip.  I rest my case.

I was just thinking.

Kill a dog, and you’re going to prison.

Shoot yourself, and you’re going to prison.

Walk Black down any street in America, and you “fit the profile”, so you just might be on your way to prison.

Die an unarmed black man at the hands of white cops and your character goes on trial by a national jury of media and non-peers.

Kill an unarmed black man as a white cop in America, and you’ll be home in time for dinner, with a couple of hundred thousand dollars in crowd-sourced fundraising to show for your trouble.

The difference?  Being a nigger versus a white man in America.

I’ve had an epiphany.

I realize that I have spent an inordinate amount of my life – time I can’t get back – trying to convince white people that white privilege really does exist.  And trying to convince them of how they benefit from it.  And trying to convince them that it is part and parcel of the regime that oppresses black and brown folks in this country and further marginalizes us.

But, after reading this and especially this in the past two days, I’m done.  I’m now focused on dismantling it and operating effectively in spite of it.  This is going to cause some people a lot of confusion and I’m sure I’ll be accused of being insensitive at best, and perhaps militant, at worse.  I’m neither.  I’m simply resolved to call a spade a spade and move forward.

So, this is a virtual passing of the baton to others.  Specifically to white allies.  As these two authors have so powerfully pointed out, you need to come for your own.