alias Bruce.

Racial torture, libraries, and poems.

This is National Poetry Month, a time when – like Black History Month and Earth Day – corporate culture blinks for a moment at realities it generally ignores. Still, a glimpse can reveal plenty. This month, in one of the main windows of the downtown public library in my town of Baltimore, the poem on display is "If Mamie Till Was the Mother of God" by Joseph Ross, which won the local Pratt Library system's 2012 poetry prize. The poem has to do with the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. If you're sketchy on the details, here is Ross's explanation of how Emmett's mother, Mamie, electrified the world by displaying her son in an open casket:

Mamie Till’s decision to bury her son in a casket with a glass top was a momentous one. In her words, she wanted the world “to see what they did to my boy.” In 1955, Mamie Till sent her son Emmett to live with relatives in Mississippi for the summer. One night, he was dragged from his uncle’s house, beaten to death and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was found downriver some days later. The image of her son’s beaten and distorted body were broadcast around the world. In the view of some, this murder was seen as the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, as I've mentioned, was not only brutally beaten but tortured, including having one of his eyes gouged out. As it happens, a few years ago I met and interviewed Emmett Till's cousin, who was in the same bedroom with Till the night that white men burst into the house and took him away to murder him. I will never, ever forget it.

Here is a photo of how you'd see Joseph Ross's poem if you walked past the Baltimore downtown library this month:

Photo: Robert Waxman

At a time when today's American brown shirts want for government's sole job to be the killing of infidels and the punishing of scapegoats, it's good to see a public library acting like a public library. My thanks to my friend Rachel for pointing this out.

Watch this video "mockumentary" in which child actors portray adult roles in the rampant violence, corruption, and suffering that is sweeping Mexico.

The video was produced by an assemblage of groups who want to shake things up in Mexico's public discourse. From the stormy response to the vid, they appear to be succeeding.

In its final scene, a young girl faces the camera and, speaking to candidates in Mexico's upcoming presidential election, says: "If this is the future that awaits me, I don't want it. Enough of working for your political parties instead of for us. Enough of cosmetic changes."

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist.

Update on the Trayvon Martin killing:

CNN reports that George Zimmerman's attorney has now declared that the Florida stand your ground law doesn't figure in the case, and that his client will argue straight-up self-defense. The stand your ground law, the lawyer says, applies primarily to people being threatened in their homes, while Zimmerman, he claims, has a broader case for self-defense.

This seems a curious stance, since all the readings of the law I have seen, such as this one, clearly describe it as applying anywhere a person has a right to be, whether a public or private place. As such, stand your ground appears to offer Zimmerman's best chance at avoiding or beating prosecution. If a burly adult who actively chases a slender unarmed 17-year-old and then shoots him can't claim self-defense under the Swiss-cheese stand your ground law, how in the world is he going to make that claim under the traditionally more stringent standards of conventional self-defense?

It may be that Zimmerman's lawyer is retreating from the sheer public odiousness of a stand-your-ground defense, now that even the two Republican sponsors of the infamous Florida law are saying that the law doesn't protect Zimmerman and are calling for his arrest.

So, just as the law's authors are distancing themselves from him, perhaps Zimmerman's attorney is trying to distance his client from this now globally-detested law. Especially since Zimmerman is already a widely reviled figure, with public outrage spreading and unfavorable media coverage everywhere.

You could think of it as a lawyer in a rickety house hustling his client into the next room as the ceiling collapses.

At any rate, it looks like a desperate move by the attorney, and it may not be his last.

Not that there isn't a feasible chance that Zimmerman will get off, with or without a trial. But if he does, it may make the Rodney King riots look like a Sunday parade.

BTW, here is an interesting piece detailing a variety of cases in which Florida's stand your ground law has been used to fend off criminal charges for homicides in which the killers would otherwise likely have been indicted.

And here is a fact you personally need to know: although Florida was the first to enact a stand your ground law, similar laws have since been adopted by at least 25 states – that's half of America – including Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Think about that the next time some stranger pushes a confrontation with you.

Dissecting the killing of Trayvon Martin.

On the night of February 26, Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old walking back to the home of his father's fiancé in a gated community in Sanford, Florida after having bought Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea at a nearby convenience store, was shot to death by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who is a white Hispanic, claims self-defense, despite a 911 recording in which Zimmerman apparently chases Martin on foot against the instructions of the 911 dispatcher, and another 911 recording in which a voice later identified as that of the unarmed Martin repeatedly screams for help before being silenced by a gunshot. The Sanford Police Department has filed no charges against Zimmerman.

All hell has since broken loose. The Sanford City Commissioners passed a no-confidence vote on the local chief of police, and he has subsequently taken a temporary leave after a (white) constituent reportedly sent an email telling him he "deserve[d] to be shot down like a dog" for neglecting the killing of Martin. Activists from Al Sharpton to the NAACP's Ben Jealous have descended upon Sanford. The U.S. Justice Department has opened an investigation into the shooting. Protest demonstrations are roaring, and growing, nationwide. More than 1.6 million people, as of this writing, have signed a Change.org petition calling for the arrest of Zimmerman. President Obama and every major Republican presidential contender have spoken about the case. Corporate media – in their single-sensational-event-driven way – are on a feeding frenzy. Outrage is approaching what a friend of mine calls a potential "Emmett Till moment" -- a possible tipping point in awareness and rage over blacks being killed with impunity.

Let's take a quick look at the two ingredients of the Trayvon Martin case: race and guns.

RACE
A central defense offered by George Zimmerman's family and his lawyer is that he is not a racist because 1.) he is a Hispanic who knows the meaning of discrimination, 2.) he has mentored black youths, and 3.) he welcomed and befriended a black female newcomer to his neighborhood. All of this, if true, tells us exactly nothing about how Zimmerman would regard an unknown young black male on the street. We do have some other clues, though: A Miami Herald reporter who reviewed Zimmerman's history of neighborhood watch 911 calls said, "What you see there is a pattern where every time George Zimmerman sees an African American who he doesn't recognize, he calls the police." Racism has a funny way of exempting some from its fears – non-threatening women and clearly needy students, for example – while leaping to fight-or-flight mode in the presence of an unknown young black male in a hoodie. Racial prejudice is also an equal-opportunity illness: today's police and vigilante cultures have plenty of participants of color – blacks, Hispanics, Asians – who are ready and eager to profile by race. Ask me, or any of millions of other law-abiding black American males, about our experiences with police of all colors.

Whether or not George Zimmerman is a conscious racist in his heart means nothing. What matters is what he did. Which leads to the second issue in the Trayvon Martin case.

GUNS
Florida's so-called "stand your ground" gun laws – recently-passed legislation that allows ordinary folks to carry concealed firearms and to use them, without retreating, whenever they feel threatened -– are what made it possible for Zimmerman to feel empowered as a civilian to kill the unarmed Martin with a semi-automatic handgun. The Sanford Police Department's explanation for its lack of action on the case, in fact, has been that without a witness they have no evidence to contradict Zimmerman's claim that his killing Martin complies with the stand your ground law. Without this law, a neighborhood volunteer of questionable judgment, like Zimmerman, would not be legally carrying a handgun with which to lethally judge when he felt "threatened." Without this law, the Martin case would have been, at worst, a fistfight culminating in a lawsuit -- instead of a killing.

Even proponents of Florida's stand your ground law, though, are distancing themselves from Zimmerman. That is because, against the instructions of a telephone dispatcher, Zimmerman reportedly got out of his car and pursued and confronted Martin. His breathless chase, in fact, can be heard on one of the 911 recordings. One of the stand your ground bill's co-sponsors told CNN after the Martin shooting, "Quite frankly, anyone who steps out in a pursuit in a confrontational mode with a firearm? That's not a self-protection act. You've initiated something."

But the law is what put the gun in the hands of an amateur like Zimmerman and made him feel free to use it. Such laws are among the latest symptoms of an American firearms fetish whereby panicked citizens can suckle at the nipple of a warm gun. The United States is becoming the laughingstock of the industrialized world for its reckless embrace of access to firearms. What, after all, is some heavy-breathing neighborhood watch schlump doing with a gun in his possession while he roams the streets? Like Alabama's recent draconian anti-illegal-immigrant law, which now has many of that state's businesses in open revolt as their crops rot in the fields and their Hispanic former employees go into hiding, Florida's wild-west gun law is revealing its consequences.

Trayvon Martin paid for this law, and for the public paranoia and police collusion it enables, with his life. Others have as well; the number of Florida homicides ruled "justifiable" has almost tripled since the law took effect. The bodies continue to stack up.

We'll see where this goes. One thing is clear: As has happened so often before in so many places, it will take a concerted and ferocious national shove for Florida lawmakers to awaken to reality.

Good for the Penn State Board of Trustees for firing Joe Paterno

in the wake of the horrible sexual abuse scandal there. The entire situation is tragic, but the board acted promptly and rightly in asserting its authority at a school where, as with many big-time football powers, the coach and the athletic program are virtual deities.

In the case of the legendary Paterno, he is as iconic a coach as there is, with more wins than any other major college football coach and a well-deserved reputation as a football titan. But, like many titans, it appears he overestimated himself. He apparently thought he could still dictate the terms of his future at Penn State -- even after having displayed 10 years of reprehensible cowardice regarding the now-public allegations that former Penn State defensive coach and Paterno friend Jerry Sandusky sexually abused at least 8 boys. Essentially, after being told in 2002 by an eyewitness about Sandusky's allegedly sexually molesting a 10-year-old boy in the locker room shower, Paterno simply told his boss and then, when his superiors did nothing, kept his mouth shut for 10 years -- giving Sandusky a decade in which he allegedly continued to ruin more young lives through his access to young boys via a charity he runs for vulnerable youths. The university was sufficiently convinced of Sandusky's dangerousness to bar him from school locker room facilities -- but, for some odd reason, did not feel moved to protect potential victims outside of the university by going public with the embarrassing news about the allegations against one of their own.

Paterno's implicit message, as revealed in his own defense: Hey, I told my boss about this. I followed the rules. If they choose to hide the problem and not tell the police, why should I stick my neck out and bring down my football program by going to the police myself? Well, maybe now Joe realizes why he should have: because preventing 10 years of rapes of children is more important than protecting the brand name of Penn State football.

Paterno apparently thought he could outmaneuver the Board of Trustees by pre-emptively announcing yesterday that he would retire at the end of this season. But he badly underestimated them. The outraged board replied by swiftly and correctly handing Paterno his head, effective immediately, and by just as appropriately booting Penn State President Graham Spanier. Two of Paterno's bosses, Athletic Director Tim Curley and VP for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, have now been indicted for perjury and failing to report the incident to law enforcement. The grand jury says that Spanier also knew about the allegations against Sandusky and kept quiet, but at this point neither he nor Paterno have been indicted.

There are, of course, politics here. Paterno has been angering the board for years with his imperial behavior. His latest stunt, trying to escape the scandal via his sudden statement of retirement without consulting with the board, no doubt angered them more. And Paterno and President Spanier have reportedly tussled for power for years.

But the politics don't alter the facts. Paterno and Spanier are out on their ears because they failed the most basic test of responsibility for the welfare of young people and for the character of the university. And Curley and Schultz have been indicted because failing to be honest about an alleged sex crime on campus and to report it to authorities is, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general, illegal.

But what this is really about is that college football, at the big football schools, is a business. It pulls in big money from alumni benefactors. It generates media hype. It attracts students. It builds a college's brand. It is a collusion among frenetic high school and college coaches, see-no-evil college administrators, the NCAA, the NFL, and glory- and money-hungry athletes. It is an industry, and its ruthless needs trump quaint concerns like ethics, academics, respecting women, and safeguarding the interests of young people in general.

The most tragic thing about the Penn State debacle is that more young people were, according to the charges, set up to be sexually brutalized and traumatized in the ensuing years in part because a coach and several administrators were afraid to damage their venerated football program.

The second-most-tragic thing is that, in the midst of a Great Recession and the kinds of vast suffering and plutocratic brutality we've not seen since the 1930s, thousands of students at Penn State now feel moved to near-riots involving toppled lampposts and overturned cars not because American society is sinking toward peonage and fascism but because they are losing their football coach.

Penn State is perennially rated as one of the nation's top party schools by Princeton Review. It was ranked the #1 party school in 2009, when this episode of the popular radio program This American Life provided a glimpse into the circus-like aspects of student life there.

One can wonder, too, how administrators could have worked for 10 years to bury this awful Sandusky issue without word leaking out to anyone on the Board of Trustees. I mean, these are heavyweights we are talking about: the board's vice chairman, who made the announcement of Paterno's firing, is CEO of U.S. Steel, for God's sake.

Still, it's good to see that even as crowds rage on campus, the Penn State Board of Trustees appears to be awake, sober, and willing to act.

Hi from El Paso, TX.

El Paso, ranked the safest city for its size (about 700K) in the U.S., is directly across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Mexico's deadliest city, where there were 3,000 murders in 2010. This is the bridge where pedestrians walk across to Juarez. Someone was shot here two nights ago. (I'm here to give a talk, BTW.)

 


People park here to walk across the bridge (in background) to Juarez. Many also work in El Paso and live in Juarez. A woman from Juarez told me that the state of terror there (routine execution of families and children; on a single day, 6 kids between 8 and 16 were shot) continues because the Mexican government is in bed with drug gangs and can't or won't intervene in any real way.

 

The difference between the tourist zone (note slick building in background) and the section proximate to Juarez is striking. A half-mile from this sign, everything is different.

This is a half-mile from that arrow sign on the same street. See what I mean? An interesting thing is that everyone here stands and waits for "walk" signs, even if there's no traffic. I wonder if cops use jaywalking... or maybe it's more innocent than that.

 

Speaks for itself, baby!

Here is a really creative video about self-esteem for girls

made by students at Arts & Ideas Sudbury School in Baltimore. A friend of mine, whose daughter is a student there, told me about it after they posted it on You Tube. Now we need one for boys about how cool it is to be emotionally present.

 

Amy Chua's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" WSJ article has

  photo: Wall Street Journal

readers and opinionizers in an uproar. In case you've not seen it, Chua's January 8 Wall Street Journal piece, an excerpt from her new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, is her first-person account of her use of brutal child-rearing tactics in ensuring that her two daughters would grow into trophy offspring – as in fact they have. In the section of the book excerpted by the WSJ, Chua, a Yale law professor, argues that her methods (including calling her children "garbage" and furiously holding her traumatized 7-year-old daughter captive in a piano practice marathon without water or meal or bathroom breaks until the child perfected a difficult piece for a recital) constitute what Chua calls the Chinese approach to child-rearing, which, she says, is far better for kids in the long run than the squishy, permissive customs of Western parenting.

As you'd imagine, the main response to Chua's manifesto has been horror and rage at such treatment of children and at the be-the-best-or-be-worthless values implicit in this.

My take after reading her piece:

– Chua's claim to cultural authority in representing "Chinese parenting" is as phony as that of anyone who presumes to explain how "their people" behave. Although she may be referring to actual Chinese cultural trends, what Chua is really writing about is herself: a child of Chinese parents who was raised in America, is married to a Jewish Yale law professor, and is inevitably influenced by the mores of the prosperous, high-achieving group of Americans to which she has chosen to belong.

– The truth about raising healthy, happy, successful children is somewhere between – and I mean way between – Chua's extreme of an achievement-obsessed parental reign of terror and the opposite extreme of lax child-rearing devoid of expectation or discipline.

– This entire thing looks to be more a commercial than culturally revelatory project. The Wall Street Journal is flacking Chua's inflammatory "Tiger Mother" shtick for everything it's worth. The article's title, "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior," is guaranteed to both offend and stereotype. Chua's embedded reply to reader comments in the online WSJ piece is titled, "The Tiger Mother Responds to Readers." WSJ ran the piece four days before Chua's Tiger Mother book's scheduled release. Can you smell the franchise? Chua was reportedly taken aback by WSJ's sensationalist headline and its choice to excerpt the book's most outrageous section, and also displeased with the WSJ excerpt's failure to show how her thinking had shifted somewhat by the end of her book. If so, I feel compassion for her naivete, but I am not convinced that the self-titled "Tiger Mother" will be crying en route to the bank.

At any rate, if you read Chua's piece, I strongly suggest you also read this fierce rebuttal.

Thanks to Herschel and Sandy.

The new version of Huck Finn replacing the word "nigger"

with "slave," and "injun" with "Indian," manages to accomplish one thing: it worsens the problem it claims to want to solve.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben of Auburn University – whose new edition of the book will come out next month as a joint volume containing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a similarly-sterilized Tom Sawyer – has an affable enough explanation for his revisionist escapade. Since Huck Finn is so widely outlawed in schools (it is reportedly the fourth-most-banned book in America), Gribben reasons, why should we let a mere word deny students the chance to read one of the great American novels? As the BBC quotes him, "It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers."

But here is the problem: Huck Finn was not meant to be a "marvelous reading experience." It was meant to be a story in which the reader is forced to feel the grating contradiction between racism and true human interaction. A story in which the white protagonist's voice, uttering "nigger" 219 times, comes up against the experience of his compelling relationship with an actual black person. The hideous and hurtful resonance of racism throughout Huck Finn is not a "barrier" blocking understanding of the book; it is the very point of the book, by which the reader is confronted with an excruciating question: What created this unjust and insane situation for two people rafting down a river?

There are two ways for readers (and teachers) to respond to this. One is to answer the question. The other is to paint over the question, like a picket fence in need of whitewashing, so that students can be spared the ugliness inherent in the story's lesson and instead enjoy their "marvelous reading experience." By choosing the latter, Gribben actually strengthens the unspoken influence of racism by prettifying it and denying it. It is as if a scholar were to write a revised history of the Holocaust that deleted references to Auschwitz and Dachau so that young people could have an unimpeded "marvelous reading experience" about Nazi society. The entire idea is cowardly and absurd.

Yes, teaching Huck Finn raises profound problems for students, teachers, and parents. It demands context, compassionate support, strong guidance of reading and classroom conversation, and a lot of informed preparation for everyone involved. And it requires particular attention to the needs and feelings of students of color who come to the text already having had a lifetime of demeaning, abusive and injurious racial experiences. These are real problems for teachers in a racist society. But is the answer to ban history? Or to help students to deal with it?

Alan Gribben may mean well. But, like whites who have insisted to me that they "don't see color," he isn't part of the solution. He is part of the problem.

If you loved Felix the Cat, don't miss an essay about cartoons and racist archetypes that will

both piss you off and intrigue you. On the one hand, one feels, Is there anything safe from racism? (The answer is no.) On the other hand, it is great to see a piece that dives head-first into what the styles of cartooning to which we become accustomed as kids actually mean.

I'm talking about an essay I stumbled across on the Sans Everything blog, by journalist and cartoon aficionado Jeet Heer, titled Felix the Cat & Blackface. Heer looks, fascinatingly, at the striking visual similarities between early cartoon characters -- such as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse -- and the blackface style of racist stage portrayal of black people that was all the rage for decades. Heer argues convincingly, too, that the personalities of animated characters such as Mickey and Felix were almost the exact cartoon analog of the popular white image of black Americans: randy, fun-loving tricksters who were haplessly reckless but blessed with the good fortune of their ignorance. Heer also quotes, at length, a brilliant John Updike riff on the brazenly race-colored jivey, elastic jazziness imparted to such characters as Mickey and Felix by white cartoon studios. And Heer quotes, as well, a riveting explanation by cartoonist Art Spiegelman about the stark racial message he saw in the cat-and-mouse cartoons and why he ultimately chose that metaphor to portray the Nazis and Jews in Maus, his devastating book-length comic-style story of the Holocaust.

You owe it to Felix to read Heer.