“In Concert With U.S. History”: America’s ‘Ferguson’ Confusion; Why The Problem Has Been Completely Misunderstood
Before I had a chance to peruse the Department of Justice’s long-awaited report on the killing of Michael Brown by former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson, I had three predictions. The first was that the DOJ would find the city of Ferguson’s finances to be a house of cards built upon a foundation of anti-tax absolutism and white supremacy. That’s what the Washington Post’s Radley Balko found last September, and while I may not share Balko’s libertarian politics, he’s a good journalist, and that report — which described the criminal justice system in St. Louis County as one “guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment” — is an excellent piece of investigative work.
My second prediction about the DOJ report was that it would find the Ferguson Police Department to be rife with bigotry, which would manifest itself most conspicuously through emails filled with the kind of racist “jokes” that many Americans prefer to call “politically incorrect.” I guessed this not because I had any special insight into the office culture of the Ferguson PD, but because the embarrassing disclosure of racist jokes disseminated among employees by email has become a recurring media story throughout the Obama years. And if the problem is widespread enough to infect the self-styled Hollywood progressives at Sony, it’s hardly a stretch to figure it’s prevalent within a police force with as much historical baggage as Ferguson’s, too.
My third and final prediction, meanwhile, was that the media’s coverage of the DOJ report would devote much more attention to the second prediction (the racist emails) than the first (the systemic dysfunction); and that the response on the part of Ferguson’s civilian leadership would similarly concern itself more with “politically incorrect” jokes than with institutional corruption. I imagined that it would play out this way primarily because that’s how it always does. For a recent example, look no further than former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who saw a decade-spanning empire, which was always fundamentally built on an edifice of bigotry, crumble because he was caught saying what any right-minded person already assumed him to think.
Well, now that the DOJ report has finally been released, and now that I can look back with the benefit of hindsight, the verdict is in. And wouldn’t you know it, I went three-for-three. The report says the Ferguson PD is structurally driven to extort its African-American subjects to fill budget gaps. It also says the Ferguson PD’s email server was a like an online Comedy Cellar for the kind of racist jokes that middle schoolers tell one another when trying to be edgy. And the media has since devoted far more time and digital ink to cataloging jokes unworthy of even Carlos Mencia than it has explaining how a municipality could allow itself to so obviously rely on a system of race-based plunder.
What’s more, the early indications from authorities in Ferguson suggest that I was right to expect their response to focus primarily on the nasty jokes. Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, last seen informing the folks at MSNBC that his city suffered from “no racial divide,” was quick to respond to the DOJ’s damning report — by firing or placing on administrative leave three officers involved with the racist emails. While he refused to answer any questions, Knowles also informed the media that the police department had recently hired three African-American women, was launching programs intended to build a stronger relationship with Ferguson’s African-American communities, and would institute mandatory diversity training for staff. Knowles also mentioned a few administrative tweaks intended to make the city’s criminal justice system less rapacious, but he also said “there is probably another side to all of [the DOJ report’s] stories.” Gotta hear both sides.
Before you start trying to make “Isquith” and “Nostradamus” rhyme, however, you should be aware of a few realities (besides that being impossible, I mean). For one thing, I’d strongly suspect my predictions were widely shared by those in the American media who focus on politics and race because, again, this story is fundamentally nothing new. For another, not everyone in the media chased the shiny red ball of racist emails, which aren’t even bad in themselves, anyway, but are simply too numerous. Lastly, while it’s very tempting to throw all of our culture’s shortcomings on these issues at the feet of the media — which, to be clear, is far from blameless — the press’s failures here are the result of larger, society-wide problems that are more deep-seated than our fondness for listicles or our penchant for calling others out.
Because, as Ta-Nehisi Coates implies in his response to the DOJ report, one of the major stumbling blocks separating the Fergusons of today from what a city in the United States is supposed to be is a level of historical ignorance and denial that makes confronting white supremacy head-on all but impossible. So long as the mainstream refuses to own up to the way race-based plunder is not contrary to but rather in concert with U.S. history, we will continue to understand racism as what happens when a bunch of mean cops sit around forwarding each other racist jokes. And until we’re willing to recognize that Ferguson is New York City is Los Angeles is Chicago and so on, fewer “politically incorrect” emails is all the change we’re going to get.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, March 7, 2015
“Photographer Helped Expose Brutality Of Selma’s Bloody Sunday”: The ‘Segregation Beat’ That Helped Shape American History
This month Selma, Ala., will mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” That’s the day police beat demonstrators attempting to march to Montgomery in support of voting rights. Some of the most iconic images of that day were captured by a white photographer — the late Spider Martin.
Spider Martin’s real introduction to the civil rights movement came on a late night at home in February 1965. He was 25, a photographer for The Birmingham News. He explains in a video from 1987 that he got the call because he was the youngest staff member and no one else wanted to go. That assignment would lead to his most famous work.
“About midnight I get this phone call from the chief photographer and he says ‘Spider, we need to get you to go down to Marion, Ala.’ Says there’s been a church burned and there’d been a black man who was protesting killed. He was shot with a shotgun. His name was Jimmie Lee Jackson.”
James “Spider” Martin grew up near Birmingham. Small in stature, he earned the nickname “Spider” for his quick moves on the high school football field. He said while he grew up with a few black friends, he was largely ignorant of the injustice blacks faced. That changed once he started covering the Jimmie Lee Jackson case, according to his daughter Tracy.
“He realized that it was history and that it was important,” she says. “He got wrapped up in it.”
Jackson’s killing helped spur the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches a few weeks later. Martin was in Selma for Bloody Sunday when state troopers attacked protesters. Holding a camera made him just as much a target. He recounted in an interview with Alabama Public Television, what happened when a police officer saw him.
“He walks over to me and, blow! Hits me right here in the back of the head,” he said. “I still got a dent in my head and I still have nerve damage there. I go down on my knees and I’m like seeing stars and there’s tear gas everywhere. And then he grabs me by the shirt and he looks straight in my eyes and he just dropped me and said, ‘scuse me. Thought you was a nigger.'”
Martin kept covering the marchers until they reached Montgomery two-and-a-half weeks later.
Martin’s collection contains thousands of photographs, clippings and other notes — much of it previously unpublished before it was purchased by the University of Texas. Even producers of the movie Selma used his pictures to recreate scenes for the film. Exhibitions of his work are going up around in Selma for the anniversary, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, and in New York.
The exhibit at ArtsRevive includes his most noted pictures from the marches. Executive director Martha Lockett says some of her favorites are less recognized including a close-up of an officer’s leg with his billy club.
“It’s very still, but very energetic,” she says. “You know what’s getting ready to happen and to me that’s one of the most dynamic pictures that’s in the show.”
That artistry was calculated, according to Morehouse College history professor Larry Spruill. He says Martin was one of a handful of photographers on what’s dubbed the “segregation beat.” They were mostly college-educated, white men in their 20’s who reflected the liberal optimism of a post-World War II generation.
“They took complex issues layered in race and made them very simple,” he says.
Spruill says the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., understood the power of visuals and tipped off photojournalists. And while the optics of Bloody Sunday were credited with shocking middle America — leading to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — back then the pictures were considered disposable. That was partly because in the mid-’60s, photojournalism was beginning to take a backseat to the flash and immediacy of television. Spruill says he found pictures newspapers didn’t run with holes punched through them.
“It’s like finding original copies of important American history documents trashed,” he says.
A similar thing happened to the photographers. Martin’s daughter says it was decades before he became known for his civil rights pictures. He died in 2003 and she says he’d be excited about exhibiting his work around this 50th anniversary. But in his interview it’s clear he was uncomfortable with the attention.
“I mean it’s kind of fun sometimes being a celebrity, you might say, or a little bit famous. But then again, I’d rather not be famous,” he said.
Still the attention he offered through his camera, helped shape American history.
By: Andrew Yeager, Code Switch; Cross Posted at NPR, March 6, 2015
“New Voting Laws Show That The Struggle Continues”: Pointing To A Growing Lack Of Respect For Individual Voting Rights
Growing up in Mississippi more than 50 years ago, Sammie Louise Bates had to help her grandmother count the money needed to pay poll taxes. Living under Jim Crow laws angered Bates — and inspired her to become a lifelong voter.
Bates was 25 when the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, abolishing poll taxes and other discriminatory voting practices. For most of her life she did not face hurdles to the ballot box like her grandmother did.
But in 2013, that changed. Bates was no longer able to vote because her home state of Texas passed a new restrictive voter ID law. To get an acceptable photo ID, she first needed to pay $42 for a birth certificate. The cost was too much: “We couldn’t eat the birth certificate,” she testified in a lawsuit, “and we couldn’t pay rent with the birth certificate.”
Bates is an example of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Americans who now face difficulties voting because of new state laws restricting the right to vote. On the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march, which galvanized support for the VRA, these Americans remind us that the struggle is not over.
After decades of progress, the past five years has seen the most extensive attack on voting rights since the VRA was signed into law. Since 2011, every state but one has considered legislation that would make it harder for many eligible citizens to vote, and half the states passed new voting restrictions. By the 2014 election, after lawsuits and repeal efforts, voters in 21 states faced tougher voting rules than they did in 2010.
These new voting restrictions — which go beyond Texas-style photo ID laws and include things like early voting cutbacks and voter registration restrictions — apply to everyone. But they are not neutral in their impact. While most people do have a driver’s license or a similar state-issued photo ID, for example, the 11 percent of Americans who do not are disproportionately African-American and Latino.
And while most people still vote on Election Day, minorities make up a disproportionate number of those who voted on the weekend and other early voting days cut in states like North Carolina and Ohio. The net effect of these changes is a voting system that is less accessible to minorities, especially those with modest incomes.
A federal court found last year that Texas’s photo ID law was passed for the purpose of discriminating against the state’s minority voters.
In at least some states, this effect is not an accident. A federal court found last year that Texas’s photo ID law was passed for the purpose of discriminating against the state’s minority voters. (That case is now on appeal.)
Race has played a significant role elsewhere as well. The push to restrict voting came after a surge in participation among African-Americans and certain other groups in 2008. Recent studies found that the more a state experienced increases in minority and low-income voter turnout, the more likely it was to push and pass laws cutting back on voting rights. The Brennan Center similarly found that of the 11 states with the highest black turnout in 2008, seven passed laws making it harder to vote. Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth in the 2010 Census, nine states did so. And of the 15 states that used to face special monitoring under the VRA because of a history of racial discrimination in elections, nine states passed laws that make it more difficult to vote.
Unfortunately, efforts to restrict voting show no signs of abating. In the first few weeks of this year, legislation was introduced in 17 states and already progressed in two.
All this points to an urgent and continuing need for strong legal protections for voting rights — protections sought and won by the brave marchers 50 years ago in Selma. But here’s the rub: in the midst of a controversial and racially-charged battle over voting rights, the US Supreme Court gutted a core provision of the VRA. The net result has been not only a loss of voter protections in the courts but also a marked increase in discriminatory voting changes in states that used to be covered by the law. This contributes to a growing lack of respect for voting rights — arguably the defining feature of American democracy.
So what can we do? For starters, urge Congress to update and restore the Voting Rights Act. Urge your state not to pass retrograde voting restrictions, and instead to modernize the voter registration system and adopt other sensible improvements like those recommended by a recent bipartisan presidential commission. And join the tens of thousands of Americans flocking to Selma this week in honoring one of our nation’s greatest accomplishments — the recognition of the equal right to vote for every eligible American.
We have come a long way, but we still have farther to go.
By: Wendy Weiser, Director, The Democracy Program at The Brennan Center for Justice: Bill Moyers Blog, Moyers and Copany, March 6, 2015
“Pretty Much How Things Go”: Every Clinton Scandal Is Exactly The Same
We don’t yet know whether there will actually turn out to be something nefarious in the emails that Hillary Clinton somewhat belatedly passed on to the State Department, but I feel confident in predicting that this Clinton scandal will likely play out just like every other Clinton scandal. For those of you who don’t remember the 1990s, here’s how it works:
- Bill and/or Hillary Clinton does something that on first glance looks a little sketchy.
- The news media explode with the story, usually including insinuations that something illegal or corrupt took place.
- Republicans quiver with joy, believing that this scandal will finally be the one to reveal the true depths of the Clintons’ villainy.
- Clintonworld adopts a bunker mentality, insisting that they did nothing wrong yet trying to limit the amount of information that gets out, thereby antagonizing reporters.
- As the eight zillion journalists assigned to the story learn more information, the story grows increasingly complex, yet no actual illegality or corruption is found.
- The story drags on for months or even years, with Republicans never wavering in their certainty that the only reason we haven’t learned the awful truth is the Clintons’ stonewalling.
- The more committed conservatives begin to lose their minds, eventually coming to believe spectacularly outlandish theories about what actually happened.
- The whole thing peters out, and reasonable people conclude that while Bill and/or Hillary might have shown better judgment, they didn’t actually break the law, violate their oaths, betray their country, or anything else their opponents imagined.
There are variations, of course, but that’s pretty much how things go. And even though it’s possible there’s an email somewhere in which Clinton instructs her paramour Ayman al-Zawahiri to launch the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, it’s probably how things are going to go with this one, too.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 6, 2015
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