Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford says the police consistently manipulate public opinion with character assassinations and lies to justify the killing of black men; from TRNN
KIM BROWN: Welcome to The Real News Network in Baltimore. I’m Kim Brown.
At least four protesters were arrested in Ferguson, Missouri, over the weekend. After previously unreleased video surfaced, of slain teenager Mike Brown, apparently not strong-arm robbing a convenience store shortly before he was killed by former police officer, Darren Wilson, back in the August of 2014.
The newly seen video was featured in a documentary about Brown’s death, told from the perspective of his family. It’s titled, “Stranger Fruit”, and it claims to show Brown, and the clerk at the convenience store, having a cordial exchange the night before Brown was killed.
Let’s have a look.
LESLEY McSPADDEN: I was surprised to hear that two years later there was a video. What you’re going to see on this video is what they didn’t show us happened that clarifies that there was an understanding. And that’s what you are going to see in the video.
JASON POLLOCK: In the early hours of August 9th, just 11 hours before Mike took his last steps, he went to his local convenience store to make an exchange. Look carefully at the counter, and you can see a trade is made. Mike gives the store a little bag of weed. You can see the employee smelling it and passing it around.
LESLEY McSPADDEN: There was some type of exchange for one thing for another. That these people know each other well enough that this is the relationship that they have.
JASON POLLOCK: Then you can clearly see Mike being given two big boxes of cigarillos. The store clerk puts the cigarillos into a bag for Mike, with his other stuff, and hands it over the counter. Mike is about to leave the store, but decides to have the clerk hold his things behind the counter for him. The next day, with his hands politely behind his back, Mike goes back into the store to get his stuff.
LESLEY McSPADDEN: It was a misunderstanding.
JASON POLLOCK: St. Louis County has written documentation that we’ve found, which shows they saw the 1:13 a.m. videotape, but they leave out what really happened that night in their report. Mike traded the store a little bag of weed and got two boxes of cigarillos in return. He left his items at the store, and he went back the next day.
KIM BROWN: That was part of the trailer for, “Stranger Fruit.” It debuts this week at the South By Southwest Festival, in Austin, Texas. Produced by filmmaker Jason Pollock, and the woman’s voice you heard there was Leslie McSpadden, Mike Brown’s mother, who has filed a federal lawsuit against Darren Wilson, the Ferguson Police Department, and the City of Ferguson.
Joining us today to discuss this, we are joined by Glen Ford. He is the co-founder and executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, and the author of the book titled, “The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion.”
He joins us today from Plainfield, New Jersey. Glen thanks for coming back to us.
GLEN FORD: Thanks for inviting me.
KIM BROWN: Glen, the lawyers for the Ferguson convenience store, dispute Jason Pollock’s accounting of this transaction caught on video the night before Mike Brown was killed. But as many of us can recall, the Ferguson police released a portion of video that they claim showing Mike Brown intimidating a clerk, and so-called stealing a box of cigarillo cigars. What are your thoughts about this new video that claims to show the contrary?
GLEN FORD: Well, two things. First, we see that the police have no problem. They specialize in spinning selected pieces of evidence, or even non-evidence, to back up the righteousness of their subsequent actions. And we see how what could have been, just a rather innocent episode in an informal economy in the poor neighborhood, gets turned into something quite insidious, and deadly. That’s one aspect.
But the other points, and I think it’s even more important, is that even if the police spin on the events in that store were true, even if they were true, they provide no justification whatsoever for the actual crime that took place. And that crime was the murder of Michael Brown by the police — the murder of an unarmed Michael Brown by that cop.
That is separate from, and cannot be used; the events in the store cannot be used as a predicate to justify that killing. But we see that, in fact, is in sync with police procedures. With the whole mentality, the whole story line that’s created by not just the police, but their allies in the media and in political office who paint a picture of these deadly young black folks who are plundering communities, and are always in a state of lawlessness, and need to be encountered with deadly force by police all of the time.
It’s a character assassination, not of Michael Brown, specifically, because his actual identity is not important to these cops, but a character assassination of black young men, period. To show that they are at any moment, deserving of death.
KIM BROWN: And, you know, there are some very interesting points about this video being released, at this particular point in time. As I said, Mike Brown’s family does have a federal lawsuit pending against the City of Ferguson and the police department there, as well. But to harp on something that you just said there, Glen, I mean, the media, the cable news networks, the mainstream media repeatedly played that segment of video that allegedly showed Mike Brown strong-arm robbing this particular convenience store clerk for a box of cigarillos.
And as you said, they used to that to impeach this young man’s character as if to say, you know, well, if he was capable of this misdemeanor crime, then it’s not such a stretch to think that he would be capable of trying to illegally disarm a police officer and shoot at them. Which, you know, if you’re looking at the continuum of crime, that’s sort of like a ridiculous leap to make.
So, why do we continue to see this played out over and over again? When it comes to police-involved shootings of black folks? Because this is something that we saw with Tamir Rice, with Eric Garner, with Ramarley Graham, I mean, the list is very long, and we could name a bunch of folks here.
But this is a pattern. This is standard operating procedure, regardless of where in the country it actually takes place.
GLEN FORD: Yeah. And the pattern is that you put charges on young black men in the community at any opportunity. You manufacture them. You make them up or you exaggerate charges, so that by the time a young black man does wind up getting shot by the cops, he already has a record of encounters with police. That record is made available to the press, so that if they bother to report on that killing it looks like this is a bad guy based upon his rap sheet.
So, the police are in the constant quest for hanging longer and longer rap sheets on young black men in the ghetto, which inevitably justify whatever harm comes to them.
KIM BROWN: Mmm. You know, after the incidents happened in Ferguson with Mike Brown and then the subsequent uprisings there, it made the Department of Justice really push to, a.) Come up with a report for what’s happening in Ferguson, along with how the police deal with the community there. But it certainly raised the issue of statistic keeping, and whether or not local police departments are dutifully reporting their crime stats and their shooting of suspects, and even killing of suspects, to the FBI.
If we take a look at this tweet, because in Arkansas, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette is undertaking a new project where they now are keeping track of police-involved shootings and killings. And as this tweet says, “FBI stats show two killings by police in Arkansas between the years 2011 and 2016. The Arkansas Democrat Gazette found at least 67.” So, Glen, there is a huge discrepancy there between the number 2 and the number 67.
But this is sort of like the larger pattern of newspaper, and independent media, sort of taking on what the federal government doesn’t seem to be able to do. And that’s keep stats of police-involved shootings. What are your thoughts about this?
GLEN FORD: Well, let’s tie that in directly with the Michael Brown killing. If there had not been an explosion of protest, and resistance, and rage in Ferguson, we would not know the name Michael Brown. We know the name Michael Brown because the community made that name known. Made their anger and their rage known. And that compelled the police to put together an elaborate justification and spin to why that man who had a name now – Michael Brown – was lying dead.
But the police, if given their druthers, would rather just kill and go on to the next killing without a whole bunch of ado. And that’s what this Arkansas Democrat Gazette story is all about: a state, which, according to the FBI, their cops have killed only two people in six years. The Democrat Gazette in its own survey shows that they killed twice as many – four people – in December of 2016 alone.
We need to point out that Congressman Bobby Scott, the black congressman from Richmond, Virginia, introduced, and got passed, in the early 2000s a bill that would require that local police report truthfully and dutifully put together a system to report the actual number of killings of civilians, or deaths in police custody, to the FBI. That was passed during the Bush administration. But the legislation, well, nobody paid it any attention, and it was allowed to expire after a few years.
And then after all of this, well, movement activity, after 2014, Congressman Bobby Scott introduced the bill again. It was met by ambivalence from the Obama administration, which wanted to give people the impression that the Justice Department had these things well in hand. I want to mention that the Justice Department itself estimates that the FBI only keeps a tally of about half of the police killings every year. A bill had not made much progress this time around. And it’s almost certain that the Trump administration, and the Republicans in Congress, will not look kindly upon it.
This whole project now joined by the Democrat Gazette, joined before by The Guardian and the Washington Post, which took it upon themselves to keep a running tally of police killings in the country, we need to give the credit where credit is due. And that is to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which in 2012 put together its own tally based mostly upon media reports, its own tally of the killings of black people by police, and security guards, and vigilantes in this country.
It was called Operation Ghetto Storm, and it found that a black person is killed by those forces once every 28 hours, that report was available to people. It came out in 2012, when Trayvon Martin was killed. But it was available in 2014 when the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in the wake of Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson.
So, there were some stats there for people to get a handle on. Put together by no more than three very hard-working activists from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. What I think we should go back even further in time for the historical roots of this kind of activity. Back to Ida B. Wells, the great civil rights leader of the early 20th century.
To that time, the United States was in the throes of a frenzy of lynching. But the official American line was that lynchings of black people, especially in the South, were just isolated incidents, and that when they did occur it was because of a propensity of black men to rape, or try to rape, white women. Ida B. Wells did her landmark study which showed that there had been thousands of lynchings, and only a very few involved even allegations of rape by black men of white women. Most of them had to do with jealousies by whites of blacks having a little bit of land.
Or, just black folks not buckling under to the movement to establish absolute ironclad white supremacy. And it should be pointed out that Ida B. Wells, although she’s known as a civil rights leader, was a journalist. She had been driven out of Memphis where she’d run a newspaper by these same white mobs.
KIM BROWN: Absolutely. And we know Ida B. Wells was no stenographer for the police so it’s certainly encouraging to see newspapers like the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Post, and The Guardian, and others to step up and not just accept the police line and the government’s line of how many people are actually killed…
GLEN FORD: …
KIM BROWN: …and injured by police every year. Absolutely. Glen, we’ve run out of time. We’ve been speaking with Glen Ford. He’s the co-founder and executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, also author of the book titled “The Big Lie: An Analysis of U.S. Media Coverage of the Grenada Invasion.”
Glen, as always, we appreciate your perspective on all these issues, so thank you so much for joining us.
GLEN FORD: Thanks for putting up with me.
KIM BROWN: (laughs) No problem at all, and thank you all for watching The Real News Network.
When I’d poked around for the story after seeing a similar headline at The Times (i hadn’t wanted to use up my other three free hits), I saw similar ‘statements’ like these at FoxNews.com:
“An attorney for the store and its employees says no such transaction took place.
Store co-owner Andy Patel tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Brown “grabbed the cigarillos and stoe (sic) them” when confronted inside the store about 10 hours later, shortly before the shooting. Surveillance video shows Brown strong-arming Patel while leaving the store.”
Is that just what the store would be obliged to say? “Ain’t no drug dealin’ goin’ on here, no sir!”?
And two from Keegan Stephan:
While we’re BAR-ing, from Ajamu Baraka: ‘Malcolm X and Human Rights in the Time of Trumpism’, Black Agenda Report
“By shifting the center of human rights struggle away from advocacy to struggle, Malcolm laid the foundation for a more relevant form of human rights struggle for people still caught in the tentacles of Euro-American colonial dominance. The PCHR approach that creates human rights from the bottom-up views human rights as an arena of struggle. Human rights does not emanate from legalistic texts negotiated by states—it comes from the aspirations of the people. Unlike the liberal conception of human rights that elevates some mystical notions of natural law (which is really bourgeois law) as the foundation of rights, the “people” in formation are the ethical foundation and source of PCHRs.
Trumpism is the logical outcome of the decades long assault of racialized neoliberal capitalism. Malcolm showed us how to deal with Trumpism, and the PCHR movement that we must build will move us to that place where collective humanity must arrive if we are to survive and build a new world. And we will – “by any means necessary.”
davidly
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café babylon 
marijuana laws…hmmm…and other laws…preemptive defamation by the gov’t (not just the police; cops didn’t pass these laws).
yep, character assassination always comes first from the police, police unions, and ‘non-prosecutors’.
this is how wsgw.com covered the new footage story. as in: ‘pffft; dudn’t change a thang’
shaun king parsed the police lies waaay back, and some peeps, like reality checker, were infuriated that the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ became a predominant theme against police killers back in the day. shaun now writes for the daily news, iirc.
The intention was defamation ever since the days of Reefer Madness (the Coolidge “Roaring 20s” I believe). Also the heyday of the post Birth of a Nation resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. A distraction from speakeasies in affluent white communities? White coke-heads? And included enough progressive reformers to ensure that it was class-based.
Kate Randall at wsws.org lays out the numbers in ‘US government agency projects 24 million to lose health coverage under Republican plan’. the numbers make my head spin, but i trust she’s got it right the text makes it sound…evil, worse even than obamaCare.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/03/14/cbor-m14.html
i hadn’t ever seen this first video reenactment, but the second is quite familiar.
then they left his body in the street for…four hours.
on edit: of course there’s a hashtag, and oy, is it being trolled w/ abandon.
never forget: they wouldn’t even give him the tiniest dignity of covering his body. not an accident. they knew precisely what they were doing.
no, i won’t forget. we saw the same thing all over the nation just in the last decade, didn’t we? ‘ambulance is busy elsewhere’, tra la la. i can’t remember whose body was covered in ants by the time it was ‘picked up’.
and THD’s only too right about ‘birth of a nation’ and the like making it too easy to decide ahead of time that ‘the other’ was a thug, a criminal, a ne’er-do-well, etc., and deserved to die. the expendables, and yes, it’s the intersection of class ad ‘otherness’ a lot of the time, though not al of the time.
did anyone refuse to believe emmet till’s accuser in 1955? no, they knew, and been taught, that’s how darkies acted w/ white women, didn’t they? she was soooo frightened, just like darren wilson, and all the other po-po who killed unarmed people, including those ‘in custody’. i went back to discover whether your term of ‘predictive programming’ were relevant here, but in the end, not really.
the expert witness for accused killer kops have gotten it down to a science by now, esp. given the wide scotus rulings on ‘reasonable fear’ and so on.
on edit: i’m taking out my wonderings at the end.
ah, predictive programming (p.p.) let’s think about that for a second. it’s a big, vague concept, but a friend of mine is a native of Hong Kong. how readily coming to the US she took to the discourse of blacks as lazy, etc., etc. not all blacks of course, not the uppers she hangs out with or the black guy she was married to. as she has said to me at least twice: (s)he is not “really black,” referring to “successful” imitators & internalizers of the dominant culture. problems w/her HOA are cuz the black tenants don’t want to pay their share, etc., etc. maybe p.p. is too loose a notion, but the cultural programming does exist, partly, to ensure certain predictable responses on the part of the dominating majority, as we see in our readiness to believe the cop crap about mike brown. she comes to this country having already partly internalized the racial codes & stereotypes of our society thru exposure to US mainstream culture. in China. it’s just awful. she knows almost nothing about US history and sees here successful minorities and unsuccessful ones. and, btw, all the “successful” people swim in anti-racist rhetorical BS. and keep their jeans on the way God intended them to be worn when he made a fashion breakthrough w/ Wranglers blue jeans. (oh yeah. and why is the “Asian” community “more successful”? see! that proves it.)
and what does that say about us who have been marinated in this garbage our entire lives and for the entirety of our national & cultural history?
i appreciate your thinking it through, and could kiss your sections on god-intended fashions and class connoting ‘not really black’ . i almost said that class of blacks, esp., is noted by the wearing of hoodies, and droopy jeans. which is why agents provocateurs sport them in protests, but ah…sometimes footwear outs them in the end. ;-)
yes, asians are smarter and far more industrious proving that anyone can succeed, give the will.
while i was eating my toast just now, it occurred to me that what both colbert did w/ hayden, and my riff about rachel maddow and trumps 2 pages of 2015 1040 forms (i must have stuck it on the other thread) have in common with this thread and the films might be better called ‘proscriptive programming‘, two meanings of the verb form: to denounce or condemn (a thing) as dangerous or harmful; prohibit; to put outside the protection of the law; outlaw,
maddow seems to be the largest an most beloved celebrity brand name of the librul class on the teevee, and is the most rabid about ‘putin and the roosians stole the election from clinton’, prosecutions, and all that jazz. i’ll bet her performance with david kay johnston was fairly spittle-flecked, no? what colbert’s obviously scripted interview of the criminal overseer of black sites…’hey, ask me specifically about samsung teevee spying’, etc., what colbert helped do was to deliver the lie that the cia doesn’t spy on amerkans, but bad guys have samsungs, warrants are required, normalizing the reification of ‘the cia exists to keep YOU (and the world, of course) safe’, as god’s USian manifest destiny intended.
do you remember her takedown on assange on letterman back in the day? a bunch of jingoist nationalism, pffft. but in this year of chaos, roosians and putin are evil, the cia deep state is mah friend, war is kinda necessary to kill those muslin jihadists, never mind this unbearable fact and photo:
and herr trump just returned the power of the cia to assassinate by drone at their own whim/s.
maddow’s sincerity is just so revolting.
new rule on ngo’s: if it takes more than 2 seconds to spot an adamant anti-war statement on the ngo’s web page, they can fuck off.
I remember somebody photo-shopping that photo you post from club de corderliers w/ the kid who’s hand is in the center holding a bright shiny Apple computer “apple”. really said it all about these bullshit do-gooders.
yes, proscriptive, prescriptive. none of it is descriptive b/c there’s no analytical merit to any of it. all manipulation.
well, more good newz: the nyt reports the great barrier reef is dead. no doubt it’ll be even deader sooner. numerous commenters on the article point out the reefs are all already dead in the Caribbean.
and now let us all bemoan the lost revenue from eco-tourism. how long after the great barrier reef completely collapses will Australia get back to its current GDP?????
what a great screen name, mr. gB reefer, a bon mot to love. agreed on the ngo’s, but i’d say ‘say it ain’t so’ on the photoshop, except i’ve seen bill gates touting ’empower women’ showing photos with african women in their crop fields holding…smart phones. yes, they can dial up weather forecasts, market prices for their crops, find out which enemy sectarians might be coming to rape and pillage, all of it will reap enormous personal benefits.
i actually like ‘proscriptive programming to say the truth. kinda related, on an agatha chrisitie story i just watched, a shrink in a complicated story about murder and dual personalities said to one of his interlocutors: “rubbish she was born to the gutter…and the gutter always sticks”. the protagonist was trying to show him, another lord, and a vicar that they simply couldn’t see past their own belief systems.
hard news about the great barrier reef, but it’s been dying for years, as have many reefs and ocean ecosystems. much ocean floor space has been the victim of the degradation of the insane amount of plastic in the sea as it degrades in the sunlight, and the hydrocarbons float down and smother…well you know.
and that’s not just below the traveling three (iirc) Great Garbage Patches, either. you’ve likely read what the explorers have found in them?
oh no, the person who did the photoshop I mentioned was being totally sarcastic.
and wait. you are telling me that the NYT does not report the *worst* in these eco-terror-porn stories? no effin’ way. w/all their concern for Australia’s GDP? no mention of the likelihood that Fukushima has something to do w/the accelerating collapse?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/16/asteroids-climate-chaos-and-fracking/
does this guy have a point, or is it too late? who knows???
back to something slightly less demotivating, here’s a query re predictive programming: the Fox show (never seen) “The Americans”. is this p.p.?
or coincidence? we’ve been marinating in anti-Russian hysteria for now over 100 years. some TV writing program lodged somewhere in Murdoch’s colon, knowing that nostalgia is big (sunshine, Reagan, etc.), noting “rising tensions” w/Russia over Ukraine, etc., etc. and from its own programmed surveillance of the daily news, spits this idea out, and voila, we have a wiener! and wow, look how snuggly it fits into all our terrorism memes.
hard to say. wouldn’t put it past ’em to put an additional layer of conditioning, beyond the “news”, into public consciousness solely from considerations of the likelihood of war w/the Bear. cyber warfare is cause to invoke NATO! hurray!
sorry to have mistaken that it was satire, but given bill gates and friends, well.
what’s ‘the americans’? a new film? or were we supposed to know already?
ooof, that CP carolina dude’s thing sounds kinda fringe: shoot asteroids that increase co2 or something? sequester methane? green capitalism BS at its finest? ah, maybe i didn’t read well enough, and don’t know the dangers of asteroids!© really, but how about the best fix: stop the fuck fracking?
ay yi, of course fukushima radiation, head smack. and warm water bleaching, acid rain, tra la la.
“The world has lost roughly half its coral reefs in the last 30 years. Scientists are now scrambling to ensure that at least a fraction of these unique ecosystems survives beyond the next three decades. The health of the planet depends on it: Coral reefs support a quarter of all marine species, as well as half a billion people around the world.
“This isn’t something that’s going to happen 100 years from now. We’re losing them right now,” said marine biologist Julia Baum of Canada’s University of Victoria. “We’re losing them really quickly, much more quickly than I think any of us ever could have imagined.”
Even if the world could halt global warming now, scientists still expect that more than 90 percent of corals will die by 2050. Without drastic intervention, we risk losing them all.
“To lose coral reefs is to fundamentally undermine the health of a very large proportion of the human race,” said Ruth Gates, director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.”
(not that *that* should be a deal-breaker, lol.) well, the ‘interventions‘ sound pretty quixotic, to say the least, but who knows?
I think the CP/asteroid article was posing the “extinction event asteroid” as a hypothetical, and that runaway climate is a similar thing, BUT methane release from fracking makes it all so much worse, and stopping fracking is super important in the *short term* (while we solar panel up the shopping malls & etc?). I was probably grasping, raking actually, at the straws of hope on offer there.
“the americans” is a fox program set in the ’80’s centering on a family of rooskie spies trying to blend in. now in its 2nd or 3rd or whatev season. never seen an episode. they say it’s the best show on tv, but I don’t know. maybe watching the weather channel radar is more realistic & informative? I know I experience Reagan-levels of nostalgia for simpler times just watching the weather radar.
ah yes. let’s design better reefs. rather than…nah, mitigation rather than elimination of the problem is the only way to restore mother nature. she needs to toughen up & adapt. caring people are here to help.
neither I nor anyone else really has any clue how “ideas change things,” but what about the concept of “living in harmony w/nature”? other ages across diverse cultures, religions, time zones, gave considerable thought to that perhaps unanswerable question (what does it mean for a homo idiota, I mean sapiens, to live in harmony with nature?). but jeeeeezus. in that some activity is colossally harmful to the mother earth sustaining all life, maybe we should consider it “contrary to nature”?
ah, the asteroid thing was an analogy. should have read more closely. i can’t blame anyone for grasping at technological solution straws. well, maybe i can, in a way. in another venue on methane/co2, the author mentioned ‘geoengineering’ as a potential solution. i’d mentioned er…isn’t that the thang where the adherents to the concept swear that some behind-the-curtain doctor evils are making those jet chem-trails to actually *cause* climate disruption for fun and profit?
now we were all cheering evo morales for granting the environment ‘personhood’, but it’s not altogether clear to me how that’s playing out in bolivia.
now hold on. doesn’t the bible say that man is to have dominion over the plants and animals on the planet? too bad no one included any chapters that might have used ‘custody of’ instead, eh?
on edit: just in from the bureau of investigative journalism:
“The Bureau’s drone war project has launched a new open-source tool which makes our data much easier to access and analyse, and which allows people to create bespoke, shareable reports. As part of a major website relaunch we have introduced an interactive tool which allows users to explore and visualise whichever part/s of the data they wish over a specified time period. For instance, a user could create a report showing how many strikes hit Pakistan between 2010 and 2014, and how many civilians were killed; or a report showing how many people were killed in strikes in Yemen from January 2016 to now. Where data is available the locations targeted are also shown on a map.
hmmm…can’t speak for anything else this guy has written, but I wouldn’t count ending hydro-fracking (lol. as if that’s gonna happen) in the silly whiz bang technophilia category. geo-engineering? more of what got us here! this time, we, the same people, will do it more better & righter. trust us.
how many states have passed laws prohibiting their 2nd amendment citizen champions from exercising their rights in order to blow snoopy (or armed) drones out of the sky?
i may be misunderstanding you, but what i was laughing about was the techno-fix of methane capturing he was advocating. and perhaps you and i have different notions of what geo-engineering is.
on the other hand, how many states have ruled that municipalities can’t end fracking, and are backed up by the courts? o, for a memory… gotta go for now, got a couple of things to put up and i’m waaaay behind on emails again. note to self: ‘an email a day keeps the doctor away’.
serendipitous; from the BAR newsletter just now:
‘He’s My Death, Too’’ by Shehryar Fazli, from BAR
“For Blacks in the United States, it was arguably the most influential murder of the first decade of the modern civil rights movement. “The lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.”
“The ‘horror of interracial sex,’ as Tyson describes it, turned the black boy into a new arch-villain in a kind of mutated Southern Gothic.”
“The feather in Tyson’s on investigative cap is his interview with Carolyn Bryant.”
Shehryar Fail’s essay is a review of author timothy tyson recent book ‘The Blood of Emmet Till’;
[Carolyn Bryant refers to CB Donham, Till’s accuser who recanted before her death.]
https://blackagendareport.com/emmett_till_death_book
now, back to work, wd, ya feeble crone. ya keep swearin’ you’ll write up ‘the $trillion infrastructure sham. scam. boondoggle. bait-and-switch. what.ev.er. ;-)
I almost hurled when I got an email about this cowpie:
https://www.edow.org/news-events/news/2017/03/16/police-are-public-and-public-are-police (edow=episcopal diocese of Washington, d.c.)
kids need to hug the Geheimat Staat Polizei local Hauptmanner (or however you say chiefs in that language that makes my teeth hurt).
what profession is the most likely to rob, taze, beat up, rape or murder you? kids, give ’em your contact info! make sure to wave & smile as you pass thru the metal detector on the way to class.
the public face of religion, and an ungodly amount of its actual praxis, in this country is fully integrated into the imperialist agenda, at the local & national levels. but does it have to be so obvious? I see that photo & think of a city…in Switzerland or that other syndromy place…hugs for the abuser who gives me what I need.
why lord, oh why did they have to choose that photo? remember? it went viral, i say…viral. there was prolly even a caption contest hashtag. yeah, religious/faith gospel is important (i remember during Occupy days keeping a list of churches that supported the movement, never mind how many of them turned that support into gotv for Dems from the pulpit).
and yeah, they’re more scared now because: herr trump, and some of the speakers are familiar, and will be good. but community policing should be a position of power, not begging, of course, and should not reflect stockholm syndrome.