Tag Archives: Media Coverage

My Private Aftermath of the O.J. Simpson Verdict 20 Years Ago

01 Thursday Oct 2015

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O.J. Simpson with his attorneys F. Lee Bailey (left) and the late Johnnie Cochran (right) after being found not guilty, October 3 1995. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Daily News/AP, via http://theguardian.com)

O.J. Simpson with his attorneys F. Lee Bailey (left) and the late Johnnie Cochran (right) after being found not guilty, October 3 1995. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Daily News/AP, via http://theguardian.com)

To think that it’s only been two decades since the overhyped “Trial of the Century” came to a close with a clerk’s initial mispronunciation of Orenthal James Simpson’s first name. And of course, with O.J. Simpson’s acquittal. It’s amazing to think that so many would become so emotionally caught up in a double-homicide case involving what at one time was one of the world’s most recognizable faces. But it did happen, all of it in a sixteen-month span, and the reaction was as predictable as the sunrise, racial profiling, and police harassment.

During the Ford Bronco chase on I-5 on Friday, June 17 (during my Knicks’ Game 5 of the NBA Finals against the Houston Rockets), I hoped that the police wouldn’t shoot Simpson before he had a chance to go to trial. The L.A. riots were just two years before. I feared that the issue of race would be front and center, with Simpson’s issues with his now dead White ex-wife.

O.J. Simpson on the covers of Newsweek and Time Magazine, (the picture on right altered to make Simpson appear darker and caused an outcry), June 27, 1994. (Theo's Little Bot via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution of image and relevance to subject matter.

O.J. Simpson on the covers of Newsweek and Time Magazine, (the picture on right altered to make Simpson appear darker and caused an outcry), June 27, 1994. (Theo’s Little Bot via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to low resolution of image and relevance to subject matter.

I was naive, thinking that our world of ’94 would simply attempt to determine if Simpson was guilty or innocent. Instead what I saw within ten days of the Bronco chase was an artificially darkened Simpson on the cover of Time. I saw Blacks who became angrier about the coverage, even as Whites grew more confident about Simpson being convicted, losing his fortune and fame, and possibly getting the death penalty (or at least, life imprisonment). My Mom proclaimed that O.J. was innocent long before the prosecution botched the trial. Some of my grad school colleagues — all White, mind you — made all kinds of assumptions about where I stood on O.J. They didn’t like the fact that I was willing to wait until the trial to make up my mind.

When the verdict came down on Tuesday, October 3, 1995, it was stunning to watch ecstatic Blacks and angry, dejected Whites react to the “Not Guilty” verdict. And not just on TV, although it was obvious newsrooms were actively looking for a racial divide. My friend James (who’s Black, by the way) from my Pitt grad school days spent his lunch break in my apartment gritting his teeth in anger as the verdict was read. I was more shocked than anything else. I smiled, but it was one of bewilderment observing the reactions, as if we all had some deeply personal stake in the trial and verdict.

That smile disappeared as I went through my day editing and printing out chapter drafts of my dissertation. That was my real focus, not the soap opera enveloping the rest of the country. Late that afternoon, I went to Carnegie Mellon to drop off a draft of a couple of those chapters for my thesis advisor Joe Trotter. Carl, a colleague of mine, one who I had called a friend up to this point, immediately started in on me about the verdict when I reached the grad student cubicles in the History Department. He kept literally spewing the media’s line about an all-Black jury, about jury nullification, about Johnnie Cochran. Carl was in a rage, belligerent, possibly drunk, and seemingly ready to throw down. Seriously, aside from showing up to drop off dissertation chapters, what did I do?

I politely pointed out that the jury was mostly, but not all Black (at least three members were White or Latino), and that the prosecution led by Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden left the door wide open for an acquittal. Carl assumed wrongly that I wanted O.J. free regardless of his “obvious guilt.” I asked my colleague what else could the jury do, given the compelling defense put together by the late Johnnie Cochran, the mistakes with forensics, with the glove, with putting Mark Fuhrman on the stand? I said that “I don’t represent all thirty million African Americans in this country,” and that “our conversation is over.”

Mary J. Blige, No More Drama (with extra tracks) album cover, 2002. (http://amazon.com).

Mary J. Blige, No More Drama (with extra tracks) album cover, 2002. (http://amazon.com).

That reminded me of how irrational supposedly rational, forward-thinking Whites often are on race matters. They either ignore, deny, or when compelled by some betrayal or injustice, badger, threaten and retaliate in response. Carl that day was no exception. I found that incident unsettling because this supposed friend was one of the few folks at Carnegie Mellon who had earned my trust. It reminded me if I were to ever date or marry someone White (not exactly my plan), there would be hell to pay. I had a grand total of three conversations with Carl after that between October 3, 1995 and August 6, 1999, the latter the week before I left Pittsburgh to live in suburban DC/Maryland.

I’m sure that I wasn’t the only Black person who had to confront Whiteness in all of its angry, hurt and juvenile forms in those first two weeks of October ’95. I’m equally sure that if the O.J. Simpson trial’s verdict occurred in 2015, Carl and his like-minded ilk would’ve set off race riots the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since Detroit in 1943, Tulsa in 1921, and Chicago in 1919. You know, the kind where Whites go into segregated Black communities and rape, kill, steal and destroy as much as they can. To me, Carl just represented the White privilege and resentment of millions, smoldering yet ready to erupt at a moment’s notice. Not that many haven’t benefited from the O.J. Simpson effect in the years since.

Carl has a professorship somewhere in New York these days, and we are professional colleagues who maybe exchange an email one or twice a decade now. I’m sure, though, that he avoids the topic of race in US history like most would want to avoid catching Ebola. Especially given his reaction to one jury verdict twenty years ago.

Baltimore, A “Riot”? Really?

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Screen shot of map of violent incidents in Baltimore near site of Freddie Gray protests on Monday, April 28, 2015. (http://nytimes.com via Twitter).

Screen shot of map of violent incidents in Baltimore near site of Freddie Gray protests on Monday, April 28, 2015. (http://nytimes.com via Twitter).

What happened in Baltimore on Monday wasn’t a riot. Let me repeat that. The violence that broke on in Baltimore a day and a half ago was NOT a riot. Nor was it a referendum on Black violence. Nor was it a microcosm of Black youth as “thugs.” Nor was it “violent clashes between police and protestors,” at least not in any formal sense. It was random violence and vandalism, spread out far enough to be, sadly, a typical week in an impoverished Baltimore neighborhood, as part of larger impoverished and divided city. Period.

Exhibit A of media coverage, Erin Burnett, CNN, April 28, 2015. (http://Gawker.com).

Exhibit A of media coverage, Erin Burnett, CNN, April 28, 2015. (http://Gawker.com).

The Baltimore coverage has been a caustic cocktail so far. One of a media with bipolar disorder, bouncing from ignoring Freddie Gray’s death and the first protests during the White House Correspondence Dinner to wall-to-wall coverage for the past two days. Combine that with the inaction on moving forward with disciplining or arresting the Baltimore PD officers involved in making Freddie Gray paralyzed and dead. Combine that with the Black Respectability Police yammering on as if vandalism is simply an issue of undisciplined youth. Mix that with White columnists and commentators spewing racial stereotypes like a sewer hole. And you get the same numbskull presentation of a situation in which the questions are about how a handful in a community responded in snapshot to years of oppression, neglect, ignoring and ignorance.

Overhead shot of L.A. riots, contrast between South Central LA fires and downtown LA smog, April 30, 1992. (http://latimes.com).

Overhead shot of L.A. riots, contrast between South Central LA fires and downtown LA smog, April 30, 1992. (http://latimes.com).

Twenty-three years ago today, half-a-lifetime ago for me, the L.A. riots began, within a couple of hours of the first verdict in the Rodney King case. You know, the one where that all-White Simi Valley jury made up of retired cops acquitted the police officers involved of all charges. That was a riot, in every sense of the word. It was organized, it was disorganized, it went on for days, it took out whole city blocks, it left 53 dead, more than 2,000 injured, and the police and the National Guard arrested more than 11,000 people.

Watching that unfold was a traumatic experience. It was the kind of experience that should make people — especially in the news business — remember that not every act of violence that occurs during a protest is part of that protest or constitutes a riot. By labeling what happened on Monday in Baltimore a “riot” is insulting to anyone with a long memory. Seven fires, a few clashes, a handful of burned out and bashed in vehicles. Heck, where I grew up, in “Money Earnin'” Mount Vernon, New York, that’s a bad weekend in December ’99. But it’s not a riot.

I’ll tell you what is a riot, though. East St. Louis, Illinois in 1917. The 1863 Draft Riots in New York. Chicago and Washington, DC during the Red Summer of 1919. Detroit in 1943. The 100-plus riots after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Vancouver, in 2011, after the Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup Finals (again). Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization conference. But when White folks destroy property or take lives during widespread and seemingly random violence, it’s either a “protest” or “civil unrest.”

Vancouver Canucks fans riot after team's Stanley Cup Finals Game 7 defeat, June 16, 2011. (Reuters via http://theguardian.com).

Vancouver Canucks fans riot after team’s Stanley Cup Finals Game 7 defeat, June 16, 2011. (Reuters via http://theguardian.com).

I’ll tell you something else. The media, the respectability police, and Whites in denial want nothing more than to make the Freddie Gray killing and the protests a besides-the-point news story. For them, making Blacks look less than human is the story. For them, any imperfection, any violence, any sense of the full range of humanity on display when under systemic oppression, is reason to celebrate. Because it means they can spend another day living in their matrix, where all their racism and race-based privilege is confirmed.

Cold Snap 1994

09 Thursday Jan 2014

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East Cold Wave Compared To 1994, January 13, 2009. (http://www.accuweather.com).

East Cold Wave Compared To 1994, January 13, 2009. (http://www.accuweather.com).

This week’s so-called polar vortex is hardly the coldest weather I’ve ever experienced, whether living in New York, Pittsburgh or DC, or visiting places like Chicago and New Hampshire in the dead of winter. But like all things driven by traditional and social media coverage, anything that happened five minutes ago becomes the penultimate event of all time.

But imagine a day that was so cold that when the temperature rose to -20°C (that’s -4°F) three days later, it felt like a heat wave. A day that produced multiple states of emergency for much of the country. A day where your windows had thick sheets of ice on their panes, and your breath turned into icicles before you started to take in air.

I’m remembering a day twenty years ago exactly like that, one very different from the current cold snap across much of the Northern US right now.  And yes, the term is and will always be cold snap, as a vortex conjures end-of-times climate change similar to the movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Torrents of snow fell in the ‘Burgh, in New York, in Chicago and DC. So much snow fell in Pittsburgh that both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon shut down — something that only happens on near apocalyptic days. By the end of that month, Pittsburgh had already set a seasonal record for snowfall at 96 inches. Of course, that was nothing compared to Chicago, Cleveland or Buffalo that winter.

Frozen Pittsburgh, panoramic three rivers shot, January 7, 2014. (Steve Mellon, http://www.post-gazette.com).

Frozen Pittsburgh, panoramic three rivers shot, January 7, 2014. (Steve Mellon, http://www.post-gazette.com).

What made it worse was the record cold weather. Over the course of nine days, between January 10 and 19, the temperature fell from a bearable 15° to 10, 8° , 5°, -2°, -10°, -15°, and to -22° on Wednesday, January 19, ’94. The wind chill that day made it feel like -50°. New York was -15° that day, and DC a balmy -11°. Only Chicago had it worse in terms of major cities, a -26° degree day with Lake Michigan wind chills of -70°. It snowed on most of those days, making conditions about as bad as living in Fairbanks, Alaska in the dead of winter.

I awoke to a cold studio apartment on January 19, even though the heat was at full blast and I’d sealed my windows with plastic. I turned on the TV, and found that the Pennsylvania governor had declared a state of emergency because of the cold and because the state’s electrical grid was on the verge of collapse. All businesses, schools, and colleges, as well as all non-essential state work, was to stop that day to preserve energy so that we wouldn’t freeze to death. To a business, everyone complied with the governor’s order.

Everyone except Carnegie Mellon, that is. They cited that they were a private and not a state institution as the reason for them not shutting down that day. Never mind that students who lived off campus would have to brave the killer temperatures to come to class. Or the fact that Pitt, a private institution with far more students than Carnegie Mellon, only two blocks away, was completely shut down. Or the fact that Carnegie Mellon, like the rest of the state, relied on the same overloaded power grid and was stretching limited resources.

So I prepared to go to my 2 pm course. Normally I would’ve walked the 2.75 miles from East Liberty to campus. Even I recognized that -22 was too cold for me to be out in for more than a half-hour, and this a forty minute walk for me in the ice and snow. I wore long-johns and sweats, two layers of socks insulted in plastic Giant Eagle bags that I’d put in my high-tops. I wore six layers of upper body clothing, snapped my hood on my winter jacket, pulled down my black wool cap to my eye lids, and wrapped my blue scarf around my mouth and neck.

I tried to time the bus so that I wouldn’t outside more than a few minutes. With the twenty-mile-per-hour wind gusts, it was like someone was trying to suck the life out of me. It hurt to breathe. Yet I found it funny to feel the icicles forming on my nose hairs and mustache. I took the first bus that came, the old 71C, which didn’t stop close to Carnegie Mellon, did stop right across the street from the Cathedral of Learning, about a half-mile from Baker Hall and my class.

Pitt, of course, was a ghost town. On the bridge that connected Pitt to Schenley Park and the southern entrance to Carnegie Mellon, two idiot joggers passed me, proving once again the dominance of brave alpha males in their attempts to control the world.

Michigan lighthouse entombed by ice, St. Joseph, Michigan, January 6, 2014. (Thomas Zakowski, HotSpot Media, via http://dailymail.co.uk).

Michigan lighthouse entombed by ice, St. Joseph, Michigan, January 6, 2014. (Thomas Zakowski, HotSpot Media, via http://dailymail.co.uk).

Upon entering Baker Hall, I was told by security that Carnegie Mellon was closing after all. I learned from the departmental office that the governor had personally called the president of Carnegie Mellon and ordered the closing under the threat of a $1 million-per-day fine, or something pretty close to that. So the elitist university was shutting down after all, at 2 pm. We could all go home. Or so we thought. John Modell decided that our classes were too precious to cancel over a little thing like a state of emergency. Now I knew that the man had taught for years at U Minnesota, so -22 for him was just a normal winter day, I guessed.

An hour later, with the heat off, we could all see our breath as Modell yammered on and on about cultural anthropology and the meaning of objectivity in that discipline. All I know was that it was way too cold to sit in a classroom wondering what would kill us first, Modell’s disjointed diatribes or the bitter cold classroom. If we’d been ten years younger, Modell would’ve gone to jail.

Finally, Modell released us from his professorial grip, around 3:20 pm. He even acknowledged that is was just too cold to continue class. “We’ll make this up next week,” he said. Yeah, as if he couldn’t have said that an hour before.

Rachel Jeantel, A Real, True Beautiful Friend

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Politics, race, Youth

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Witness Rachel Jeantel continued her testimony, George Zimmerman trial, Sanford, FL, June 27, 2013. (Jacob Langston, AP/Orlando Sentinel; http://time.com).

Witness Rachel Jeantel continued her testimony, George Zimmerman trial, Sanford, FL, June 27, 2013. (Jacob Langston, AP/Orlando Sentinel; http://time.com).

There will be months’ worth of stuff written and said about Rachel Jeantel and her performance on the witness stand during the George Zimmerman trial. Everything from her dark skin and being overweight to her lazy tongue syndrome and reluctance to take the witness stand. Between Black Twitter on Wednesday critiquing her language, shyness, and style and blond-haired, bubble-headed Whites picking apart her testimony on Thursday, it’s a wonder that anyone sees Ms. Jeantel as a human being. She’s far more than the hero, villain or ghetto girl that folks in social media have and will portray her to be.

Ms. Jeantel is beautiful to me, skin-deep and otherwise. Yes, she’s not perfect, which is one of the things that makes her a beautiful person. The most important thing to remember about Jeantel, though, is that she’s a real person and a real friend. The truest friend any human being could ever hope to have. I should know. I’ve never had more than eight people in my life at any time that I could truly call friend, and none during my preteen and teenage years before college. Of those, about half have proven themselves to be fair-weather friends, unreachable when I’ve needed them the most.

Jeantel is the ultimate friend, for she has acted in Trayvon Martin’s best interests even after his death. A friendship that gave her the strength to tell the truth, to endure ridicule and scorn and hours of cross-examination from Don West. Jeantel gave voice to Martin from beyond the grave, knowing that she was in the right.

Jeantel makes me think of a scene from Tombstone (1993), the one with Val Kilmer playing Doc Holliday. Dying from the long-term effects of tuberculosis and living the life of an alcoholic gambler, Holliday continued to ride with Wyatt Earp to hunt down his youngest brother’s killers. When asked, “Why you doin’ this, Doc?,” Holliday said

“Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.”

In response, the other character said, “Friend? Hell, I got lots of friends.” To which Holliday replied, “…I don’t.”

Jeantel may well have lots of friends, but her friendship with Trayvon Martin is as real, true and beautiful as it gets. I hope that my close friends are even one-tenth as true to me after I’m dead as she was to Martin this week.

Why Obama Is Only A Failed Centrist President

07 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Photo portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson [our last transformational President] in the Oval Office, leaning on a chair, March 10, 1964. (Arnold Newman, White House Press Office via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Photo portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson [our last transformational President] in the Oval Office, leaning on a chair, March 10, 1964. (Arnold Newman, White House Press Office via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I don’t say what I have to say about President Barack Obama lightly. But in light of the recent “fiscal cliff deal”  and the negotiations process that preceded it, I’ve now become convinced that Obama will be seen as a pretty good president. Period. Obama hasn’t been a unique president, despite his race or relatively humble beginnings. Obama is hardly a great president, either. Nor will Obama be a transformational president. If anything, Obama falls right in line with every American president since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.

Photo of living presidents with then President-Elect Barack Obama in the Oval Office, January 7, 2009. (http://npr.org).

Photo of living presidents with then President-Elect Barack Obama in the Oval Office, January 7, 2009. (http://npr.org).

The fact is, Obama is a centrist president, beholden to the military-industrial complex, prison-industrial complex, Wall Street and corporate interests, just like Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 before him. That Obama is Black and intellectual in his approach matters little in terms of actual policies or in the path that he and his administration have taken toward incremental policies and half-baked compromises. Based on some of Obama’s policies, I could even make the argument that the President is a borderline neo-conservative, although I don’t think you can generalize this argument to every policy.

This has been an argument I’ve made in my US History courses over the past couple of years. When I’ve raised the idea that Nixon was a liberal Republican, that President Bill Clinton was a neo-con (see the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and TANF welfare reform in 1996 as but two examples), and that Obama is hardly a liberal at all, my students have collectively gasped. How dare I say that Nixon was more liberal than Clinton, that Obama is somewhere between a centrist and a neo-con!

But then I’ve worked with them through discussion to talk about the major domestic and foreign policy agendas of the past seven presidents in comparison to our current president. On so many issues, from the US relationship with Israel to the War on Drugs, from welfare reform to financial deregulation, from a re-escalation of the Vietnam War to the surge in Afghanistan, there hasn’t been a nanometer of space of difference in executive branch decision-making. Whether the people in these positions of power have been Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, or Obama and Hillary Clinton.

So I’ve had my students work through parts of Obama’s agenda. The surge and gradual drawing down of US military forces in Afghanistan, in which part of their role is nation-building. “How is that any different from Bush 43?,” I’ve asked. The historic Affordable Care Act, a so-called universal health care bill that fails to cover 20 million Americans and works through complex networks of government subsidies and private insurers, a neo-con plan that failed as an alternative to single-payer under Clinton in 1994. “How is this really a liberal or progressive idea?,” I’ve asked. The continuing War on Drugs, the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the highest rates of deportation of undocumented immigrants ever. “But yeah, Obama’s a liberal!,” I’ve said sarcastically in concluding this discussion with my students.

Some folks, like the reformed neo-con Bruce Bartlett, have compared the Democratic Party of recent years to the liberal Republicans of yesteryear. Bartlett, though, has stopped short of calling Democrats centrist neo-cons, which is in fact a much more apt description. Bartlett also stopped short in time, as he argued that the tipping point for the Democratic Party’s movement from left-of-center to right-of-center began with President Clinton in the 1990s. But that’s incorrect. The tipping point began when the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition of labor unions and blue-collar Whites, Southern whites, Catholics and Blacks fell apart as part of a backlash against President Lyndon Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the late-1960s.

Photo of Presidents George H.W. Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library dedication, Simi Valley, CA, November 4, 1991. (Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times).

Photo of Presidents George H.W. Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library dedication, Simi Valley, CA, November 4, 1991. (Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times).

Most Americans, though, don’t have the knowledge or luxury of taking a long view of history and their lives in attempting to put Obama in context. The media’s constant coverage of every trumped-up, imagined or real crisis hardly helps matters, either. They assume on behalf of the public the idea that there are two equal and opposite sides to every issue and every argument, which means most journalists failed geometry in high school. As a result, most Americans believe that Obama’s a liberal because the media consistently makes the false claim that all Democrats are liberals and that a Black guy with a Harvard law degree who used to be a community organizer must be a liberal.

How is a budget cutting agenda that puts Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare on the table as entitlements (and not a paid-for weak social safety net) a liberal idea or policy agenda? How is coming out reluctantly in favor of gay marriage some great progressive stance, comparable to President Kennedy’s speech in favor of civil rights in 1963? How is consistently giving into oligarchic conservatives by pushing hard for a meager tax increase on the most privileged members of our nation — the people who benefited the most from 40 years of policies that have greatly increased the gap between rich and poor — part of a liberal strategy? It isn’t and they aren’t.

Obama being three steps to Congress’ left on gay marriage and a tax increase is an incredibly weak counterargument to the fact that he’s a centrist. And a failed one at that, as his centrism has been based on garnering bipartisan support of weak legislation in terms of socioeconomic appropriations and strong legislation in terms of defense and Big Brother-esque laws. Obama has pushed climate change, long-term unemployment and underemployment, social mobility and real education reform either off his presidential agenda or into the hands of the private sector.

Thank you, but no, Obama’s a centrist, not a liberal. If you want to see a liberal policymaker in action, the nearest place to go these days is Ottawa, not Washington.

Newtown Calling

19 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Youth

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President Barack Obama tears up during White House press conference on Newtown, CT mass shooting, December 14, 2012. (UPI)

President Barack Obama tears up during White House press conference on Newtown, CT mass shooting, December 14, 2012. (UPI)

One thing that I can say about myself with confidence is that I’ve had some experience with violence and tragedy. A witness to domestic violence, a victim of child abuse, an observer of violent assaults involving knives and baseball bats. Knowing a couple of folks who committed suicide — one who jumped on my side of the office building in which I worked a decade ago — and watching a former boss flip out from a manic-depressive episode right in front of me.

Still, even with all of that experience, I don’t know anything about being the parent of a child killed in the midst of a mass shooting like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I can only begin to imagine that kind of grief, pain and anger.

So, it’s with that in mind that I write about the things that have been said by journalists, parents, politicians and others about this latest tragedy that have really bothered me. Despite the core-shaking event in Newtown last week, apparently there are people in this country who believe in guns more than people, who believe that some lives are worth more than others, that people with mental health issues are the perpetrators of most violent crimes. These people are wrong, wrong-headed, and the kind of people who seemingly want to steal my hope that we’ll do something serious about guns and gun violence in the US.

Mogadishu (Somalia) suicide bomb victims, January 24, 2009. (Ontdek Islam website).

Mogadishu (Somalia) suicide bomb victims, January 24, 2009. (Ontdek Islam website).

1. The “I can’t believe that this happened here” response. Every time I hear someone say something like this, I think, “So it’s all right if a mass shooting happens in Mogadishu, Harlem or Southeast DC?” It’s one of the most entitled, elitist and bigoted things I’ve heard over the years. Tragedy happens everywhere, especially in a nation as fearful, violent, imperialistic and gun-obsessed as ours. And people’s lives are invariably screwed up by tragic events, regardless of race or location. Whether in a mostly White bedroom suburb like Newtown or on the South Side of Chicago.

2. “If the teachers and principal had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened” response. Really now? Folks whose job it is to teach should walk around with or have handy a handgun on the rare chance someone like Adam Lanza shows up? Gun enthusiasts can say this a billion times a day. But more people with guns doesn’t make anyone any safer. There’s about a generation’s worth of research showing this very fact. End of discussion.

3. “We need to get rid of violent video games” response. This is ludicrous. American history is replete with mass murders and mass shootings, from White “settlers” decimating American Indians to the Rosewood, Florida race riot of 1923 to Charles Whitman shooting and killing fourteen during his University of Texas clock tower rampage in 1966. Last I checked, Mortal Kombat and Halo 4 didn’t exist in 1877, 1923 or 1966. Violent video games aren’t the problem. Our violent obsession with guns and supremacy in life is the problem.

4. “We need a better mental health system in this country” response. This one is actually correct. At least, it mostly is. The assumption here, of course, is that people somehow snap in the process of taking their own and others lives without a coherent rationale. Psychological screenings (see my post “A Call for Psychological Screenings” from September ’12) and backgrounds checks with 100 hours of mandatory gun training would definitely help. But the vast majority of people with mental illness are NOT violent. There are plenty of “normal” folks who are anti-social, have borderline personalities, are psychotic, but function normally in our society. Until the day they get a hold of a gun or some other weapon, that is. Those folks, though, would likely not test as having a mental illness.

Sidewalk memorial with 26 stuffed animals representing 26 shooting victims, Newtown, CT, December 16, 2012. (David Goldman/AP).

Sidewalk memorial with 26 stuffed animals representing 26 shooting victims (cropped), Newtown, CT, December 16, 2012. (David Goldman/AP).

We need much tougher gun control laws, a total assault weapons ban, regulations on bullets sales, maybe even a repeal of the Second Amendment. We certainly need a system that promotes comprehensive mental health services from birth through death. But right now, we also need to stop engaging in clichés, to get the story right before reporting it first (hint, CNN), to step outside of our cloistered and entitled way of viewing the world. Newtown’s calling, but for me, so is Mount Vernon, New York, Littleton, Colorado, New Orleans, Washington, DC, Silver Spring, Maryland, Aurora, Colorado, Norway, Afghanistan, Pakistan and so many other parts of this world that have experienced violent tragedies.

The “Invisible” Poor & The Middle Class Mythology

19 Thursday Jul 2012

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Transparent (or invisible) Woman (cropped), July 19, 2012. (http://cgtrader.com).

This past weekend, I found myself drawn into the discussion of the middle class and middle class aspirations on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes (otherwise known as “Uppers”). It was a good and yet wholly unsatisfying discussion of technical definitions of what middle class is and of the political optics of only discussing the middle class as a socioeconomic category. Chris Hayes and his guests justified this with an all-too-common refrain. “If you’re poor, you’re aspiring to be middle class,” Hayes said on Saturday. With that, Hayes and his guests rendered America’s poor invisible, and failed to see beyond the politics of invisibility in the process.

There are two issues here, and many layers within them, about America’s poor, working, on welfare, or otherwise. One issue is that journalists, commentators, political operatives and most politicians treat the poor as if they are an unknowable group of people. It’s as if they all think the same way, as if there are all Black or of color, and a complete drag on the American economy and the federal budget. And that’s on a day in which the media and politics deem America’s poor as discussable. Most of the time, America’s poor are invisible, shoved into the middle class category by commentators and politicians at every turn.

Yes, America’s middle class is struggling too, fighting tooth and nail to not slip into the class of the invisible working poor, treading water to avoid food banks and food stamps. But they have something to struggle with — and for — at least. Their homes, their cars, a retirement account, their families’ net worth, all accoutrements of being middle class in America. America’s poor don’t possess anything to struggle with or for.

Chris Hayes on a train in Switzerland, November 10, 2008. (Matthew Yglesias via Wikimedia Commons/Flickr.com). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Except, maybe, with their vote, if they care to vote at all. Yet no mainstream commentator nor presidential candidate has truly spoken to their needs, their plight, to how their situation is completely interconnected with the struggles of the American middle class, not their aspirations. Not Chris Hayes, nor his weekend compadre, Melissa Harris-Perry, not President Barack Obama, and definitely not the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

It’s a story I’m all too familiar with, as someone who grew up in poverty in Mount Vernon, New York. Not to mention as someone who had to go to college and graduate school and then struggled for two years at part-time work before finding a job with a Ph.D. in ’99 (see my “The Five Senses of Poverty” post from July ’10). I was thirty years old by the time I earned a middle class income. Yet in all of that time, the only mainstream politician who spent time on the issues of the American poor as if these were real people was President Jimmy Carter, and we know what happened with him. Outside of my degrees and my publications, I was invisible until the fall of ’99.

Otherwise, it’s been four decades of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton concerned with “welfare queens,” “pink Cadillacs,” and “mend it, don’t end it” welfare policies, and the media following suit. It’s like being kicked hard by someone as one is laying on the ground with broken ribs and internal hemorrhaging, as if they want to poor to die, painfully.

But it’s not just the ones with microphones and word processing programs that kill America’s poor by rendering them invisible. Despite the general notion that the media and politicians nurture — that everyone not rich aspires to be firmly entrenched in the middle class — most Americans middle class and poor aspire to be rich, wealthy, well-off.

Creflo Dollar, pastor, World Changers Church International, November 1, 2010. (Zwicky Institut via Flickr.com). In public domain.

This is the other neglected issue, whether inadvertent like with Chris Hayes and his guests on Uppers, or deliberate on the part of President Obama and Romney. Why so? Because they don’t acknowledge that it’s hard to be truly middle class in America these days. To be in the middle class, one must borrow, borrow, borrow, beg and sometimes steal while struggling to pay student loans, car notes, a mortgage and child care costs.

This wasn’t the case even thirty years ago, before the severe double-dip recession, high interest rates and inflation and Reagan Revolution took full hold. Then, a high school diploma and raw initiative was all most folks needed to find a job at a GM plant or to get an administrative job in government or with a large corporation (although, typing at 90 words per minute enhanced a woman’s chances, at least). Now, two years of college or postsecondary technical training, some experience in a specialized field, and a personal connection is the floor for a living wage — not exactly middle class. Of course, no one wants to be in the basement with nearly one in five Americans, 50 million in all, working just to be poor.

Stacks of money, April 13, 2008. (Allureme via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 License.

America’s poor and fledgling middle class both aspire to be rich (or die tryin’), and not just middle class. The rise of fundamentalist Christianity, mega-churches and the cult of prosperity as these pastors reimagine the New Testament. The endless lines for Powerball and Mega Millions whenever the pot is more than $100 million. The fascination with reality shows about the well-off or about competing to be well-off. All of this is the manifestation of the warping of the American Dream since the early 1970s, where the pursuit of riches has led to debt slavery for millions.

The old American Dream has become myth, and the old American middle class is but the story of Camelot, Timbuktu and Shangri-La. In our new world, “the poor will be with us always” has been made a plain and unyielding truth by those in power, reinforced by those with a media platform.