Over 3 Billion Blacks Killed

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Black Lives, Dehumanization, Gangsta Rap, George Zimmerman, Hunger Games, Independence Day, Individual Racism, Institutional Racism, Jordan Davis, Michael Dunn, Nikita (2010-13), Popular Culture, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Sardonic, Terminator, The Day After Tomorrow (2004), The Purge (2013), The War of The Worlds (2005), Trayvon Martin, Violence

McDonald’s signage, Austin, MN, May 20, 2006. (Jonathunder via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC and GFDL.

Do you remember those McDonald’s signs back in the ’70 and ’80s, before the corporation went global (from 6,000 to 30,000 franchises since ’92), where they said, “Over 100 Million Served” hamburgers or “10 Billion Served?” If the signage is there at all these days, it usually says “Billions and Billions Served.” That’s about as cheap as Black life is in the US as well, though maybe a bit more expensive in Western countries in general (they do use the Euro, after all!).

I’ve been thinking about the low value of Black lives for years, even in the middle of grad school at Pitt. But I must admit, it’s been on my mind more and more since George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin nearly two years ago. Now, with the hung jury over the murder of Jordan Davis, with so many who find it easy to render Black and Brown lives cheaper than dog meat in the middle of the Roman Coliseum 2,000 years ago, it seems that there’s no such thing as a dead stereotype.

Jordan Davis’ Facebook picture, February 17, 2014. (via Huffington Post).

It’s so infused in popular culture, as life and art intertwine in a macabre dance on Black and Brown bodies. Blacks especially (and for the most part, Latinos) don’t feel pain the same way as Whites. We lack the emotional and psychological control of Whites. We’re irrational and prone to criminal behavior. We’re lazy and don’t mind living in abject poverty. We love illegal drugs, but love malt liquor and hard alcohol even more. We’ll eat anything deep-fried, and don’t mind dying before middle age just so that we can save the Social Security dollars for elderly White folk.

With that as the backdrop, it’s no wonder much of the movies, music, TV and Internet depictions of us ultimately ends in our gratuitous, ubiquitous and anonymous deaths. Yes, even in 2014! I’ve recently binge-watched the now defunct CW series Nikita (2010-14) with Maggie Q as the lead. I counted at least thirty Black actors on the series over its seventy-four episodes. Only two survived the series, and one (character played by Lyndie Greenwood) wasn’t even in the last two episodes because the actress was doing double-duty on FOX’s Sleepy Hollow!

But if anyone were to take some of the largest grossing films and franchises of all time, it would become obvious how cheap folks in the US and elsewhere think Black and Brown lives really are. Between Independence Day (1996) and The Terminator series of films (1984-2009) alone, you would have to assume that almost all of the forty million Blacks living in the US died in these fictional realities, not to mention the 1.2 billion folks of at least partial African descent living in other Western nations, Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil and the rest of Latin America. That this has occurred more than once in these films alone puts us at 2.48 billion Blacks killed.

Then, between lesser known/lesser quality films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Deep Impact (1998), The War of the Worlds (2005) and Hunger Games (2012-present), it would seem that in every global calamity, most Blacks draw the short straw. These movies (and, prior to these movies, books) put us easily over three billion Blacks and Browns killed. And that’s without accounting for standard action films, cops-and-criminals shows, and other cinematographic renderings of the Black and Brown as disposable human beings. Unless you’re Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman (sometimes) or Halle Berry, if you’re Black or Brown, your job in popular culture is to die a violent death.

Of course, those upset with my sardonic take will say, “Well what about gansta rap? What about Ice-T, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and so many other rappers who present Black lives as cheaper than bottled water?” Three things: 1. you really need to update yourself on today’s rap, between Lil Jon, Rick Ross and Lil Wayne, before commenting; 2. the “gansta rappers” of the ’90s were mostly rapping about a lived experience, not some fantasy life; and 3. they figured out that they could and can make money off of Black deaths in lyrical rhymes, just like folks in the movie, TV and real worlds.

Venison meat for braising, February 19, 2014. (http://www.simplyscratch.com).

This will make the likes of George Zimmerman, Michael Dunn, and substantial numbers in the NYPD and LAPD happy. Actually, what would really make them happy would be a version of the movie The Purge (2013). But instead of crime and murder being legal for one day a year, they would have to get a “coon hunting” license to kill themselves a Black or Brown person one day a year. That way, they could keep our numbers low, just like hunters do with deer every fall.

Cold Snap 1994

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Cold Snap, John Modell, Media Coverage, Polar Vortex, The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

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).

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).

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.