Mary Sisney's Blog - Posts Tagged "oj-simpson"
Daddy's Girls: Why I Appreciate My "Deadbeat," Alcoholic Father
An article in the June issue of EBONY defends black fathers against the charge that they are deadbeat dads. But the author Shirley Henderson's arguments are not too convincing: "Even though the U.S. Census Bureau revealed high birth rates for Black unmarried women, it doesn't report the level of involvement dads have with their children. For instance, a Pew Research Center study reports that though Black fathers are more likely not to reside in the same home as their children, 67 percent of them see their children at least once a month, while just 59 percent of White nonresident dads and 32 percent of Hispanic nonresident dads see their kids at least once a month." Well, that's nice, Shirley, but how many black dads are nonresidents? And should we really brag about black dads seeing their children "at least once a month"? And how long are those once a month visits?
I understand why blacks are defensive about the deadbeat black dad charge. Many of the problems with our youth have been blamed on their missing fathers, and perhaps young black males do suffer from not having a strong father figure to emulate. My brother certainly blames most of his problems as an adult on our alcoholic, often absentee father. But I have a different view. In my memoir I said that my alcoholic father and my financially insecure stepfather gave me a great gift. They taught me that I could not depend on a man to support, protect, and rescue me. By the time I was eighteen, I knew that even if I married I would have to take care of myself.
Throughout my life as an independent woman, I've noticed how difficult life can be for women who depend on men. This week as I watched several shows marking the 20th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, I remembered my thoughts about the female victim when I was watching the original coverage of the crime in 1994 and 1995. When I either read or heard about how much OJ was paying to support Nicole, I thought, "Yep. That's exactly why a woman needs her own money. It's better to be a poor, but living waitress than a rich, but dead ex-wife." Despite his surface charm, OJ was clearly a brutish cave man. And that kind of man believes that he owns the woman he is supporting. If he's picking up the tab, he thinks she should do whatever he says or he will beat the crap out of her (to paraphrase her comments to the 911 operator).
I sympathized with Nicole because she was only nineteen when she was captivated by the handsome, superficially charming, superstar athlete. She was probably too young to realize that sometimes Prince Charming can turn into something worse than a frog. But I recently lost patience with another blonde Daddy's girl, Tori Spelling. When the forty-year-old mother of four cute very young children told her weak husband Dean that he wasn't nurturing enough, I wished her milquetoast husband would turn into a black man--not the too violent OJ or Jim Brown, but maybe the gentler, kinder retired football star and "Dancing with the Stars" champion, Emmitt Smith, who could give her a game-face stare-down and then pase doble out of the room. Or maybe she needed Kanye West or Ice Tea to assault her with a vicious rap. Somebody needed to set her straight. When she later said that she deserved a great life, I knew she needed me to set her straight. No one deserves a great life, Ms. Tori, even if she is Aaron Spelling's daughter. We earn great lives by working hard and making smart choices, like not choosing to have an affair with a married man who has a child when we are also married. And when you are forty years old and have four children, you are officially the nurturer, not the nurtured, darling.
Tori had a wealthy, powerful daddy who could build a huge mansion with a bowling alley and (according to rumor) two gift-wrapping rooms as well as cast her in his television shows. But even little black girls growing up in Kentucky during the Depression can become spoiled and dependent when their fathers make enough money working for the railroad to buy them and their older sisters fur coats. I know because I live with a spoiled daddy's girl who was born in Kentucky in 1928. She's my Southern Belle mother. I call her Ebony DuBois.
Although my mother worked hard most of her life and never minded hard work even when she was in her seventies, she has always been dependent on the kindness of men. Recently, I was contrasting my life choice with my mother's and pointed out that she married my alcoholic father when she was eighteen just to get away from her strict mother while I have never married. And when she had to leave Kentucky to find work after my father deserted her, she chose between New York City and Chicago, not because she thought there were better jobs in those cities than in Los Angeles, Detroit, or St. Louis, but because she had older male first cousins living in those two cities. I, on the other hand, moved to Los Angeles because I wanted to live in a warm climate. I had a male first cousin living in the area, but I didn't know him, and we didn't meet until after my mother had moved here. And I knew no one in Boston when I moved there after I earned my PhD in 1979.
I pointed out in my memoir that it doesn't take Freud to figure out the significance of my mother's second husband being a Pullman porter, another railroad man, who was seventeen years older than she was. After striking out with my father, who turned twenty-two on the day she married him, she was clearly looking for a father figure, suggesting that daddy's girls are at least as likely to look for father figures as those of us who didn't have strong fathers.
After my stepfather died in 1988, my mother had trouble living in her San Fernando home alone because she had never lived as a single woman. I had lived alone not only in suburbs like Claremont, Pomona, and Cambridge, Mass., but also in Central Los Angeles. I was never frightened. In THE BRONZE RULE, I called out another daddy's girl, one of my nieces, because my brother had to stay with her and her children when her husband was out of town, and her security alarm was malfunctioning. I pointed out that I use my baritone voice to scare away anyone who comes knocking at my door at the wrong time.
One point that I made in my memoir applies here: Childhood doesn't last very long. If we are lucky, we are adults much longer than we are children. So I don't envy the little girls, like my mother and Tori, who were spoiled by their fathers. Having strong, doting fathers when they were little girls made them dependent women. I prefer being an independent woman.
Rest in peace, Richard A. Sisney. You too, Dexter D. Weathersby. Thanks for the great gift!
I understand why blacks are defensive about the deadbeat black dad charge. Many of the problems with our youth have been blamed on their missing fathers, and perhaps young black males do suffer from not having a strong father figure to emulate. My brother certainly blames most of his problems as an adult on our alcoholic, often absentee father. But I have a different view. In my memoir I said that my alcoholic father and my financially insecure stepfather gave me a great gift. They taught me that I could not depend on a man to support, protect, and rescue me. By the time I was eighteen, I knew that even if I married I would have to take care of myself.
Throughout my life as an independent woman, I've noticed how difficult life can be for women who depend on men. This week as I watched several shows marking the 20th anniversary of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, I remembered my thoughts about the female victim when I was watching the original coverage of the crime in 1994 and 1995. When I either read or heard about how much OJ was paying to support Nicole, I thought, "Yep. That's exactly why a woman needs her own money. It's better to be a poor, but living waitress than a rich, but dead ex-wife." Despite his surface charm, OJ was clearly a brutish cave man. And that kind of man believes that he owns the woman he is supporting. If he's picking up the tab, he thinks she should do whatever he says or he will beat the crap out of her (to paraphrase her comments to the 911 operator).
I sympathized with Nicole because she was only nineteen when she was captivated by the handsome, superficially charming, superstar athlete. She was probably too young to realize that sometimes Prince Charming can turn into something worse than a frog. But I recently lost patience with another blonde Daddy's girl, Tori Spelling. When the forty-year-old mother of four cute very young children told her weak husband Dean that he wasn't nurturing enough, I wished her milquetoast husband would turn into a black man--not the too violent OJ or Jim Brown, but maybe the gentler, kinder retired football star and "Dancing with the Stars" champion, Emmitt Smith, who could give her a game-face stare-down and then pase doble out of the room. Or maybe she needed Kanye West or Ice Tea to assault her with a vicious rap. Somebody needed to set her straight. When she later said that she deserved a great life, I knew she needed me to set her straight. No one deserves a great life, Ms. Tori, even if she is Aaron Spelling's daughter. We earn great lives by working hard and making smart choices, like not choosing to have an affair with a married man who has a child when we are also married. And when you are forty years old and have four children, you are officially the nurturer, not the nurtured, darling.
Tori had a wealthy, powerful daddy who could build a huge mansion with a bowling alley and (according to rumor) two gift-wrapping rooms as well as cast her in his television shows. But even little black girls growing up in Kentucky during the Depression can become spoiled and dependent when their fathers make enough money working for the railroad to buy them and their older sisters fur coats. I know because I live with a spoiled daddy's girl who was born in Kentucky in 1928. She's my Southern Belle mother. I call her Ebony DuBois.
Although my mother worked hard most of her life and never minded hard work even when she was in her seventies, she has always been dependent on the kindness of men. Recently, I was contrasting my life choice with my mother's and pointed out that she married my alcoholic father when she was eighteen just to get away from her strict mother while I have never married. And when she had to leave Kentucky to find work after my father deserted her, she chose between New York City and Chicago, not because she thought there were better jobs in those cities than in Los Angeles, Detroit, or St. Louis, but because she had older male first cousins living in those two cities. I, on the other hand, moved to Los Angeles because I wanted to live in a warm climate. I had a male first cousin living in the area, but I didn't know him, and we didn't meet until after my mother had moved here. And I knew no one in Boston when I moved there after I earned my PhD in 1979.
I pointed out in my memoir that it doesn't take Freud to figure out the significance of my mother's second husband being a Pullman porter, another railroad man, who was seventeen years older than she was. After striking out with my father, who turned twenty-two on the day she married him, she was clearly looking for a father figure, suggesting that daddy's girls are at least as likely to look for father figures as those of us who didn't have strong fathers.
After my stepfather died in 1988, my mother had trouble living in her San Fernando home alone because she had never lived as a single woman. I had lived alone not only in suburbs like Claremont, Pomona, and Cambridge, Mass., but also in Central Los Angeles. I was never frightened. In THE BRONZE RULE, I called out another daddy's girl, one of my nieces, because my brother had to stay with her and her children when her husband was out of town, and her security alarm was malfunctioning. I pointed out that I use my baritone voice to scare away anyone who comes knocking at my door at the wrong time.
One point that I made in my memoir applies here: Childhood doesn't last very long. If we are lucky, we are adults much longer than we are children. So I don't envy the little girls, like my mother and Tori, who were spoiled by their fathers. Having strong, doting fathers when they were little girls made them dependent women. I prefer being an independent woman.
Rest in peace, Richard A. Sisney. You too, Dexter D. Weathersby. Thanks for the great gift!
OJ 20 Years Later: Demonizing the Black Man
HE'S BACK! As I pointed out in my memoir, I first became aware of media bias during the interminable 1995 OJ trial. During that summer, I watched the trial live and then watched the media's summary and analysis of what happened that day. I was stunned by how biased their presentations were. The prosecutors' lawyering was called "strategies" while the defense's was called "tricks." The half hour news summaries would often present only information that made OJ look guilty, ignoring any exculpatory evidence. I suggested that some of the people who were so angered by the jury's perfectly reasonable verdict, given the number of questions the "dream team" of defense lawyers raised about the prosecutor's hill (hardly a mountain) of circumstantial evidence, were influenced by the biased media coverage. In fact, I suspect that some people who did not follow the trial as carefully as I did still believe that OJ had bloody clothes in his washer (he didn't), that there was a credible eye witness who saw him and his Bronco near the scene of the crime (that witness was a pathological liar), and that there were buckets of blood (instead of drops) found on OJ's property and in his car. I also suspect that some of the jurors were underwhelmed by the evidence the prosecutors presented because they had heard about the "mountain" of evidence before the trial began.
Although he's been in jail for years for having recovered or "stolen" his own memorabilia from a shady acquaintance, OJ is once again in the news. ABC and A&E are showing tapes from his 1997 civil trial deposition. Even before I learned that these supposedly exclusive, never-before-seen tapes had been shown on NBC in 1999, 2004, and 2014, I knew what these biased media folks were trying to do. They were offering a counter-narrative to the BlackLivesMatter narrative of unarmed black men (and boys) being killed by police. They were reminding us that twenty years ago on an early fall day in L.A., a black man who killed two beautiful young white people with a knife was set free by a cop-hating, mostly black jury. The "20-20" producers and correspondents didn't even try to hide their agenda. They made a direct connection between the jury who set OJ free and the blacks who are suspicious of cops today. They even showed a brief scene of people rioting, probably in Baltimore or Ferguson.
What they didn't show, as I pointed out in tweets to lawyer/correspondent Dan Abrams and "20-20" anchor Elizabeth Vargas (I finally figured out what to do with my previously useless Twitter account), is why the L.A., mostly black jurors might have been suspicious of cops and more willing to believe the dream team's arguments that evidence was mishandled and even planted. They didn't show the video of L.A. cops beating the crap out of Rodney King a few years before OJ took his Bronco ride. And they didn't discuss the L.A. police corruption scandal (the Rampart scandal) that broke a few years after OJ was set free. Maybe some of those black jurors had family members or friends who had been framed by corrupt L.A. cops.
Dan Abrams shamelessly repeated that mountain of evidence lie (although he didn't use that phrase) on "20-20" without giving credit to the dream team, especially MVP Barry Scheck, who now directs the Innocence Project, which has used DNA to free wrongly convicted people of all races. Mr. Scheck tore apart the prosecutors' blood evidence. He was brilliant and ruthless. In fact, other than Johnny Corcoran's closing rhyme, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," the most memorable line from the trial was Scheck's, "Where is it, Mr. Fung?" I felt sorry for the hapless Mr. Fung.
Worse than demonizing the OJ jury and failing to give his lawyers' credit, Vargas and Abrams failed to distinguish between OJ and the unarmed black men who have been killed by police. Even now when he is in jail, like so many other black men, and serving a lengthy sentence for a "crime" that would have led to (at most) a sentence of probation or community service for a white man, OJ is not like other black men. He still has more money and fame than they do. In fact, OJ has more in common with Italian, former child and television actor Robert Blake, another celebrity found not guilty of killing his wife, than with most black men. Can you imagine a middle-class black man being allowed to turn himself in when he was suspected of killing two white people with a knife? Can you imagine what would have happened to that black man if he had not turned himself in and was found driving the freeway in a white Bronco with his best friend at the wheel and a gun to his head? Would the police have slowly escorted that black man and his friend to his home, allowing him to use the bathroom and see his mama before politely taking him to jail? Of course not. Almost any other black man would have been lucky if the police only shot out the tires of that Bronco. More likely, he and his friend would have been on their way to a different home, their last resting place.
Here's my counter to ABC's counter-narrative. More black people have been falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned for killing or raping whites than have been set free when they were guilty. More guilty whites have been set free or not even tried for killing or raping blacks than vice versa. If a civilian of any race kills a cop and there are witnesses to that murder, the civilian will go to jail if he or she is not killed by other cops. Cops who kill unarmed civilians are often not even indicted. While some have been quick to blame those who protested police violence against unarmed civilians for the murders of three cops in two separate incidents, there seems to be no interest in connecting Donald Trump's comments about Mexican rapists or the portrayal of television's favorite father and doctor (Bill Cosby) as a rapist to the murder of nine black people in South Carolina by a white domestic terrorist who claimed that blacks raped their (whites) women. And I didn't hear anyone connecting the murder of three young Muslims by a white atheist in North Carolina to the angry outcry that accompanied Obama's rather mild statement that Christians had also behaved badly. Just before those three innocent Muslims were killed, even some so-called liberals were suggesting that Muslims were more savage (I guess they forgot about the KKK) than Christians.
Racism is America's original sin; the country began with slavery and the massacre of Native Americans. And the racism continues today with the unprecedented disrespect and hatred shown toward our half-black President and the ugly attacks on Mexican Americans and Muslims by some of the Republican candidates. Sometimes the media is helpful in pointing out the racism and demonizing the racists, but too often media outlets like ABC add to the racism.
The resurrection of OJ on "20-20" was a racist attack on blacks. And they should be demonized for engaging in such blatant racism.
Although he's been in jail for years for having recovered or "stolen" his own memorabilia from a shady acquaintance, OJ is once again in the news. ABC and A&E are showing tapes from his 1997 civil trial deposition. Even before I learned that these supposedly exclusive, never-before-seen tapes had been shown on NBC in 1999, 2004, and 2014, I knew what these biased media folks were trying to do. They were offering a counter-narrative to the BlackLivesMatter narrative of unarmed black men (and boys) being killed by police. They were reminding us that twenty years ago on an early fall day in L.A., a black man who killed two beautiful young white people with a knife was set free by a cop-hating, mostly black jury. The "20-20" producers and correspondents didn't even try to hide their agenda. They made a direct connection between the jury who set OJ free and the blacks who are suspicious of cops today. They even showed a brief scene of people rioting, probably in Baltimore or Ferguson.
What they didn't show, as I pointed out in tweets to lawyer/correspondent Dan Abrams and "20-20" anchor Elizabeth Vargas (I finally figured out what to do with my previously useless Twitter account), is why the L.A., mostly black jurors might have been suspicious of cops and more willing to believe the dream team's arguments that evidence was mishandled and even planted. They didn't show the video of L.A. cops beating the crap out of Rodney King a few years before OJ took his Bronco ride. And they didn't discuss the L.A. police corruption scandal (the Rampart scandal) that broke a few years after OJ was set free. Maybe some of those black jurors had family members or friends who had been framed by corrupt L.A. cops.
Dan Abrams shamelessly repeated that mountain of evidence lie (although he didn't use that phrase) on "20-20" without giving credit to the dream team, especially MVP Barry Scheck, who now directs the Innocence Project, which has used DNA to free wrongly convicted people of all races. Mr. Scheck tore apart the prosecutors' blood evidence. He was brilliant and ruthless. In fact, other than Johnny Corcoran's closing rhyme, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," the most memorable line from the trial was Scheck's, "Where is it, Mr. Fung?" I felt sorry for the hapless Mr. Fung.
Worse than demonizing the OJ jury and failing to give his lawyers' credit, Vargas and Abrams failed to distinguish between OJ and the unarmed black men who have been killed by police. Even now when he is in jail, like so many other black men, and serving a lengthy sentence for a "crime" that would have led to (at most) a sentence of probation or community service for a white man, OJ is not like other black men. He still has more money and fame than they do. In fact, OJ has more in common with Italian, former child and television actor Robert Blake, another celebrity found not guilty of killing his wife, than with most black men. Can you imagine a middle-class black man being allowed to turn himself in when he was suspected of killing two white people with a knife? Can you imagine what would have happened to that black man if he had not turned himself in and was found driving the freeway in a white Bronco with his best friend at the wheel and a gun to his head? Would the police have slowly escorted that black man and his friend to his home, allowing him to use the bathroom and see his mama before politely taking him to jail? Of course not. Almost any other black man would have been lucky if the police only shot out the tires of that Bronco. More likely, he and his friend would have been on their way to a different home, their last resting place.
Here's my counter to ABC's counter-narrative. More black people have been falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned for killing or raping whites than have been set free when they were guilty. More guilty whites have been set free or not even tried for killing or raping blacks than vice versa. If a civilian of any race kills a cop and there are witnesses to that murder, the civilian will go to jail if he or she is not killed by other cops. Cops who kill unarmed civilians are often not even indicted. While some have been quick to blame those who protested police violence against unarmed civilians for the murders of three cops in two separate incidents, there seems to be no interest in connecting Donald Trump's comments about Mexican rapists or the portrayal of television's favorite father and doctor (Bill Cosby) as a rapist to the murder of nine black people in South Carolina by a white domestic terrorist who claimed that blacks raped their (whites) women. And I didn't hear anyone connecting the murder of three young Muslims by a white atheist in North Carolina to the angry outcry that accompanied Obama's rather mild statement that Christians had also behaved badly. Just before those three innocent Muslims were killed, even some so-called liberals were suggesting that Muslims were more savage (I guess they forgot about the KKK) than Christians.
Racism is America's original sin; the country began with slavery and the massacre of Native Americans. And the racism continues today with the unprecedented disrespect and hatred shown toward our half-black President and the ugly attacks on Mexican Americans and Muslims by some of the Republican candidates. Sometimes the media is helpful in pointing out the racism and demonizing the racists, but too often media outlets like ABC add to the racism.
The resurrection of OJ on "20-20" was a racist attack on blacks. And they should be demonized for engaging in such blatant racism.
White Women, Please: Victims and Villains V
The Weinstein whiners (white women are as good at whining as black women are at rolling our eyes and giving facial attitude) remind me of an incident that I described in my memoir. My second officemate at Cal Poly, a southern white woman fourteen years my senior, a woman who had evolved from a devoted Catholic mother of four to a crusading Marxist-feminist before we met, was whining about her bad job evaluation. Like too many converts, this former Catholic was a missionary, trying to convert everyone else, including her students, to her way of thinking, so the men in the department couldn't stand her. They punished her with an inappropriately negative (considering her teaching ability and hard work on department committees) evaluation. When she first started complaining to me, I was sympathetic because I hate unfair treatment, but then she went on too long in her whiny voice, declaring that she had never been treated so badly in her life. At that point, I shut her down. Glaring at her as if she were wearing a sheet and carrying a burning cross, I barked (my husky voice is incapable of whining), "I have! I've been treated a lot worse than anything that's happened to me in this department." This smart southern woman knew exactly what I meant and immediately calmed down. She understood Toni Morrison's message: Black people have the high moral ground when it comes to suffering and oppression. We did not enslave or lynch white people.
While white women had annoyed me by voting for a pussy-grabbing, racist maniac instead of a competent, sane woman, I appreciated that they immediately went to work to resist him. I knew from working with white women in my department, including my second officemate, that they are effective organizers, and as Mitch McConnell pointed out, they can be persistent. A white woman does not mind manipulating and badgering men, women, and probably children to recruit them to their causes. They are also obviously more experienced at dealing with crazy white men than we nonwhite women are. Helping me forgive the stupid white women who voted for a crazy, racist pig were the heroic Republican Senators from Alaska and Maine who stood with Vietnam hero McCain against draft dodger Trump and his enablers in the Senate to protect the ACA. Then Heather Heyer joined Viola Liuzzo as a martyr for civil rights, and I decided that nonwhite women willing to serve (word choice deliberate) Trump were much worse than KellyAnne Conway and the most obnoxious Sarah since Palin--Ms. Huckabee Sanders. I turned my ire on reality star Omarosa, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and probably the worst nonwhite woman in the world, Elaine Chao. Any nonwhite woman who can marry Mitch McConnell and serve under (word choice deliberate) Donald Trump is really an old white man in nonwhite women's clothing.
Then the Weinstein whiners started whining, and I went to war with white women. I was triggered by two white women talking on MSNBC. The co-creator of "The Daily Show," Lizz Winstead, and the anchor of the 11:00 a.m. (2:00 Eastern) MSNBC show, Trump abuse victim Katy Tur, were discussing Weinstein's dirty deeds when they decided to call out Obama and Hillary Clinton. I almost lost my lunch. Being able to sound off on Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook, and Google+ had stopped me from screaming at the television until Trump's nomination and then election. Now I occasionally have to scream. I screamed at the two smug white women who were claiming that Obama and Clinton had to say something or they would lose credibility: "Well, maybe if you white bitches had voted for them (I knew they probably had, but their sisters hadn't), they'd say something." "What did y'all say about birtherism?" I bellowed. Later, I mean-tweeted both women, telling Lizz that I couldn't find her comments on birtherism, Trayvon Martin, Charleston, and Charlottesville. I looked for such comments before I tweeted, so I knew that if she said anything on those issues, her comments didn't make much noise. I tweeted Katy to say that she should have asked Lizz about her comments on racism and to make the point about voting. I said that maybe if a black woman complained about Weinstein, Obama and Clinton would speak out since we voted for them. I also suggested that she should have asked Lizz about Emmett Till and the Scottsboro Boys. Maybe because she's a humorist, Lizz engages with her mean-tweeters, so she told me to look harder. Oh, no, she didn't tweet back to me! I let her have it, pointing out that Hillary lost not only because white women voted for Trump but also because all of their whining made Hillary look either weak or unnatural since she wasn't as weak as other white women. I said that the first female President would probably be nonwhite because white women are seen as too weak to be Commander in Chief. I may have told her (or maybe it was Katy) about black women cleaning the homes and taking care of the children of white women and about white men using white women as weapons against black men, lynching and castrating them, while the white men raped black women. And I might have mentioned Strom Thurmond's half-black daughter and Arnold S.'s half-Latino son. Ms. Lizz, as I called her in my mean-tweets, is as smart as my second officemate was. She meekly tweeted "Okay" in response to my tirade. Maybe she didn't realize I am a black woman until I unleashed that twitter storm. Katy didn't respond to my tweets, but the next day discussed Weinstein with two non-white women. However, they were just analysts, not so-called victims.
Besides the fact that the Weinstein scandal was taking attention away from more serious issues--natural disasters in Puerto Rico, California, Texas, and Florida, and unnatural disasters in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.--this trendy sexual assault discussion set me off because it reminded me of my second least favorite person on earth after Trump--Gloria Allred. About two weeks before Weinsteingate, I read a profile of the bigot-in- liberals' clothing. The writer made a point of telling us that Gloria taught in mostly black high schools and wrote her English Honors thesis on black writers, including Ralph Ellison. But there was no mention of the race of most of Cosby's accusers or of Tiger Woods' mistresses. I wrote a letter to the editor (it was not published in this week's issue), pointing out that Allred's crusade against black men who have sex with white women, not just Woods and Cosby but also OJ Simpson and Herman Cain, may have been triggered by a character in INVISIBLE MAN named Sybil, a white woman who wanted invisible man to rape her because she had dreamed of being raped by a black man since she was a child. When I taught that novel, some white women were offended and defensive when they encountered Sybil. I didn't include this point in my letter, but I also wonder if her experiences with disrespectful, rowdy black students, especially males, caused her to be subconsciously hostile toward them. I taught at Evanston Township High School for one year; it's a highly ranked, mostly white suburban high school, but I encountered a few unruly black boys and girls there who helped me decide that I preferred teaching college. Maybe Gloria decided she'd prefer putting black men in jail, extorting them for money (Tiger didn't commit a crime), or ruining their careers to trying to teach them how to read and write while they hazed her.
Since I can't tweet (or tweet about) every white woman who annoys me with her whining or her attacks on black men, let me address them the way I addressed the white Trump supporters in an earlier post (12/4/16): White women, you are not the primary victims in America. You have to get behind black men, black women, all Latinos, all Native Americans, all Asians, all turban- and hijab-wearing people with pigmentation, all other people of color or people who appear to be of color, as well as poor white people in the most oppressed Americans line. Also, white women, being a victim is not empowering, and joining a lynch mob is not brave. And, oh, white women, if you take hush money, you should stay hushed or give the money back. If you had been a nonwhite woman, you might have done what the nonwhite foreign model did, go straight to the police and then wear a wire to try to build a criminal case against the powerful pervert. Finally, white women, learn what working-class black women already know. There is no free ride; everything has a price. You can't hang around powerful white men, hoping to take a shortcut to the top, without something bad happening. Sucking up to power to move to the front of the line might be dangerous; you can be sucked into a "traumatic" experience. If you want to make it in any town, do what those of us who are not white women have to do--work hard.
Before Trump was elected, I tried to tell women that all the whining about sexual assault (the Emily Doe nonsense and the overreaction to the "Access Hollywood" tapes) would make it harder for Hillary to win, and as Trump likes to say, "I was right." I'm also right in being disgusted that there wasn't as much outrage expressed over Trump's birther lies as over his bragging about sexual assault. All Americans, but especially the media, should be ashamed that he wasn't demonized off television as soon as he started claiming that our first (half)-black President wasn't really born in Hawaii. So, Americans, let's all say together, "America's original sin was not sexism; it was and still is racism." Let's also say, "The worst people in the world are racists."
While white women had annoyed me by voting for a pussy-grabbing, racist maniac instead of a competent, sane woman, I appreciated that they immediately went to work to resist him. I knew from working with white women in my department, including my second officemate, that they are effective organizers, and as Mitch McConnell pointed out, they can be persistent. A white woman does not mind manipulating and badgering men, women, and probably children to recruit them to their causes. They are also obviously more experienced at dealing with crazy white men than we nonwhite women are. Helping me forgive the stupid white women who voted for a crazy, racist pig were the heroic Republican Senators from Alaska and Maine who stood with Vietnam hero McCain against draft dodger Trump and his enablers in the Senate to protect the ACA. Then Heather Heyer joined Viola Liuzzo as a martyr for civil rights, and I decided that nonwhite women willing to serve (word choice deliberate) Trump were much worse than KellyAnne Conway and the most obnoxious Sarah since Palin--Ms. Huckabee Sanders. I turned my ire on reality star Omarosa, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, and probably the worst nonwhite woman in the world, Elaine Chao. Any nonwhite woman who can marry Mitch McConnell and serve under (word choice deliberate) Donald Trump is really an old white man in nonwhite women's clothing.
Then the Weinstein whiners started whining, and I went to war with white women. I was triggered by two white women talking on MSNBC. The co-creator of "The Daily Show," Lizz Winstead, and the anchor of the 11:00 a.m. (2:00 Eastern) MSNBC show, Trump abuse victim Katy Tur, were discussing Weinstein's dirty deeds when they decided to call out Obama and Hillary Clinton. I almost lost my lunch. Being able to sound off on Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook, and Google+ had stopped me from screaming at the television until Trump's nomination and then election. Now I occasionally have to scream. I screamed at the two smug white women who were claiming that Obama and Clinton had to say something or they would lose credibility: "Well, maybe if you white bitches had voted for them (I knew they probably had, but their sisters hadn't), they'd say something." "What did y'all say about birtherism?" I bellowed. Later, I mean-tweeted both women, telling Lizz that I couldn't find her comments on birtherism, Trayvon Martin, Charleston, and Charlottesville. I looked for such comments before I tweeted, so I knew that if she said anything on those issues, her comments didn't make much noise. I tweeted Katy to say that she should have asked Lizz about her comments on racism and to make the point about voting. I said that maybe if a black woman complained about Weinstein, Obama and Clinton would speak out since we voted for them. I also suggested that she should have asked Lizz about Emmett Till and the Scottsboro Boys. Maybe because she's a humorist, Lizz engages with her mean-tweeters, so she told me to look harder. Oh, no, she didn't tweet back to me! I let her have it, pointing out that Hillary lost not only because white women voted for Trump but also because all of their whining made Hillary look either weak or unnatural since she wasn't as weak as other white women. I said that the first female President would probably be nonwhite because white women are seen as too weak to be Commander in Chief. I may have told her (or maybe it was Katy) about black women cleaning the homes and taking care of the children of white women and about white men using white women as weapons against black men, lynching and castrating them, while the white men raped black women. And I might have mentioned Strom Thurmond's half-black daughter and Arnold S.'s half-Latino son. Ms. Lizz, as I called her in my mean-tweets, is as smart as my second officemate was. She meekly tweeted "Okay" in response to my tirade. Maybe she didn't realize I am a black woman until I unleashed that twitter storm. Katy didn't respond to my tweets, but the next day discussed Weinstein with two non-white women. However, they were just analysts, not so-called victims.
Besides the fact that the Weinstein scandal was taking attention away from more serious issues--natural disasters in Puerto Rico, California, Texas, and Florida, and unnatural disasters in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.--this trendy sexual assault discussion set me off because it reminded me of my second least favorite person on earth after Trump--Gloria Allred. About two weeks before Weinsteingate, I read a profile of the bigot-in- liberals' clothing. The writer made a point of telling us that Gloria taught in mostly black high schools and wrote her English Honors thesis on black writers, including Ralph Ellison. But there was no mention of the race of most of Cosby's accusers or of Tiger Woods' mistresses. I wrote a letter to the editor (it was not published in this week's issue), pointing out that Allred's crusade against black men who have sex with white women, not just Woods and Cosby but also OJ Simpson and Herman Cain, may have been triggered by a character in INVISIBLE MAN named Sybil, a white woman who wanted invisible man to rape her because she had dreamed of being raped by a black man since she was a child. When I taught that novel, some white women were offended and defensive when they encountered Sybil. I didn't include this point in my letter, but I also wonder if her experiences with disrespectful, rowdy black students, especially males, caused her to be subconsciously hostile toward them. I taught at Evanston Township High School for one year; it's a highly ranked, mostly white suburban high school, but I encountered a few unruly black boys and girls there who helped me decide that I preferred teaching college. Maybe Gloria decided she'd prefer putting black men in jail, extorting them for money (Tiger didn't commit a crime), or ruining their careers to trying to teach them how to read and write while they hazed her.
Since I can't tweet (or tweet about) every white woman who annoys me with her whining or her attacks on black men, let me address them the way I addressed the white Trump supporters in an earlier post (12/4/16): White women, you are not the primary victims in America. You have to get behind black men, black women, all Latinos, all Native Americans, all Asians, all turban- and hijab-wearing people with pigmentation, all other people of color or people who appear to be of color, as well as poor white people in the most oppressed Americans line. Also, white women, being a victim is not empowering, and joining a lynch mob is not brave. And, oh, white women, if you take hush money, you should stay hushed or give the money back. If you had been a nonwhite woman, you might have done what the nonwhite foreign model did, go straight to the police and then wear a wire to try to build a criminal case against the powerful pervert. Finally, white women, learn what working-class black women already know. There is no free ride; everything has a price. You can't hang around powerful white men, hoping to take a shortcut to the top, without something bad happening. Sucking up to power to move to the front of the line might be dangerous; you can be sucked into a "traumatic" experience. If you want to make it in any town, do what those of us who are not white women have to do--work hard.
Before Trump was elected, I tried to tell women that all the whining about sexual assault (the Emily Doe nonsense and the overreaction to the "Access Hollywood" tapes) would make it harder for Hillary to win, and as Trump likes to say, "I was right." I'm also right in being disgusted that there wasn't as much outrage expressed over Trump's birther lies as over his bragging about sexual assault. All Americans, but especially the media, should be ashamed that he wasn't demonized off television as soon as he started claiming that our first (half)-black President wasn't really born in Hawaii. So, Americans, let's all say together, "America's original sin was not sexism; it was and still is racism." Let's also say, "The worst people in the world are racists."
The Media Strike Again: Fake Photos, False Narratives, And Alternative Facts
Two weeks ago, I was so delighted with MSNBC weekend anchor Joy Reid that I tweeted she won the week and should be Time Person of the Year (I would still pick her over the editors' absurd choice). In fact, I was so giddy with delight when I sat down to write my blog that I made a mistake, writing the word "class" in the title when I meant to write "sex." For about a week, the title of my last blog was "Race Versus Class" instead of "Race Versus Sex." I also made a mistake when I posted a tribute to Joy on Facebook, saying she should be "Time Person on the Year." What did Joy do to delight me and earn such praise? She either was thinking like me and realized she needed to debunk the case against Al Franken, or she read my tweet after her Saturday show and quickly created a segment on her Sunday show that followed my instructions. For a week, Joy was the greatest person in the world. Then she returned to her show and the topic of sexual harassment and got on my last nerve. I had to mean-tweet her last week, pointing out that Trump's supporters believe him when he calls the news fake because she and other journalists keep presenting fake news and alternative facts. I was responding to the big lie promoted by her and several of her panelists that only women are sexualized and objectified, that people don't talk about men's looks. I, of course, made the opposite point in a recent blog (10/29/17). While it's true that Sarah Palin, who clearly did not use her superior intelligence to move up in the world, was described as hot and sexy, attractive Democratic Senators and former lawyers Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris have not been treated the way equally smart, "hot" men like Paul Ryan, Barack Obama, and John Edwards have.
The John Edwards case is especially interesting to me right now because I wrote about how the media treated him in both my memoir and my second book, THE BRONZE RULE. I pointed out, for instance, that the photo used by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER to expose him and his "love child" was fake, but the mainstream media never made that point. His disloyal aide, Andrew Young, said the picture was fake, both in his book and in at least one television interview, but years later people were still saying that the NATIONAL ENQUIRER told the truth about Edwards; like most tabloids, they told some truths and some lies. The failure of the mainstream media to debunk that phony tabloid picture is similar to what has happened with Al Franken. Even the 11/26 Joy Reid panelists who pointed out that conservative dirty trickster Roger Stone was behind the attack on Franken didn't address the picture or question the motives of his original accuser, a conservative. If I had not watched how the media operated not only in the Edwards case but also during the OJ trial when I was shocked (as I reported in my memoir) by the difference between what I saw and heard while watching the trial and what the media reported, I would assume that the comments about original Franken accuser Leeann Tweeden and the phony photograph that I've found on social media were fake, but I knew how fake the mainstream media was before the phrases "false narratives" and "alternative facts" became part of our lexicon and before I read Donna Brazile's book, where she admitted that she was acting, playing the role assigned to her by producers of the news shows, when she served as a commentator on ABC and CNN. Although the obnoxious Gillibrand led the witch hunt against Franken for whatever reason, the media is the reason he has resigned.
The media don't just report on the news; they make the news. They choose what they will cover and what they won't cover. They choose what they will call horrifying and appalling and what they won't. That's why Trump was able to continue to be on television after his appallingly racist birther lies. The media folks, including the black ones, weren't sufficiently horrified to demand that he lose his jobs ("Celebrity Apprentice" and the pageants) on NBC. But Billy Bush and Matt Lauer lost theirs because of sexual misconduct. And let's be clear; the corporate media are political and conservative. I made that point in one of my earliest blogs (12/1/2013) when I was commenting on an ABC news special that focused on the top ten political scandals of this century. The top three scandals, according to ABC, were sex scandals featuring three liberal Democrats--Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and John Edwards. Spitzer and the now jailed Weiner had tried to restart their political careers in New York in 2013, but Edwards, whose sex scandal was listed in first place, was sitting quietly in North Carolina. He hadn't even been on television since his trial more than a year earlier. However, Baby Mama Rielle Hunter had recently apologized for a tell-too-much, mean-spirited book she wrote, and the corporate media probably thought Baby Daddy Edwards was preparing to "rise up" and start fighting for the poor and against insurance companies again. I saw another motive, however. This special, which did not include the WMD lies that led to a costly (we're still paying for it) war in Iraq or the Katrina disaster among the top ten political scandals of the 21st Century, appeared shortly after the government shutdown that turned Americans against Republicans. Disney's ABC had to help them by making Democrats look like the more scandalous politicians.
I thought of that special when I caught the end of Stephanie Ruhle's show on MSNBC one day last week. She was apologizing for not covering John Conyers' sex scandal when she had covered Roy Moore's as if she had to be fair and balanced by finding a Democrat to smear every time a Republican misbehaved. If the news media had been fair and balanced before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House. Her coverage was much more negative than that of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
If the media folks were just incompetent and being manipulated by politicians and other narcissistic celebrities, they would be annoying, but not sinister. However, they are manipulating as much as, if not more than, they are manipulated. The media launched this witch hunt, lynch mob moment that they are now celebrating. The NEW YORK TIMES, the NEW YORKER, the WASHINGTON POST, MSNBC, and CNN started this sexual assault, harassment "wave," as Lawrence O'Donnell called it recently, while the politicians and other celebrities just rode it. And the media are continuing to keep the wave going with TIME choosing alleged sexual harassment victims for their people of the year. I would have chosen the survivors of mass shooters or murderers, including the severely injured on a baseball field Republican Representative who still supports the NRA and the two Washington D.C. officers who saved his life and those of other Republicans. If we could include people who didn't survive, I would have chosen a true hero, civil rights martyr Heather Heyer, or the four soldiers lost in Niger. Maybe they could have pictured Heyer's mother or LaDavid Johnson's widow and a family member for each of the other soldiers. Certainly these whining women who are riding this sex-obsessed, fake media wave don't deserve to be named people of the year. Even Trump would have been a better choice.
Having created the monster Trump, not demonized him off television after his racist birther lies, given him free, usually uncritical publicity during most of his primary campaign, and helped him beat Hillary by focusing on the gossip from the Russian hacked DNC e-mails instead of on the hacking, the corporate media have continued to damage our culture by promoting narcissistic jerks like Kirsten Gillibrand and destroying true political heroes like civil rights warrior John Conyers and arguably the most popular Democratic Senator, annoyingly persistent fundraiser (no more money for the Democrats from me), and women's champion Al Franken.
I would stop watching the news if I didn't believe that I could occasionally make a difference in what is covered by calling news anchors and commentators out on Twitter. As I reported in my memoir, even before Twitter, I changed (however slightly) what was happening on the NBC station in L.A. during the OJ trial when I called the station, ranted in my husky, authoritarian teacher voice (I'm 100% sure they thought I was a tough, powerful man) about the biased coverage, and then asked where black newscaster Furnell Chatman (whatever happened to him?) was. KNBC continued to be biased against OJ, but Furnell started reporting on the trial. I've seen evidence recently that my tweets also are being considered, especially by some of the anchors and commentators on MSNBC. In fact, both Lawrence O'Donnell and Katy Tur (or their staff; I'm no fool) have "liked" one (not the same one) of my tweets.
As part of the resistance, we the people have to not only sign petitions while tweeting and calling politicians, we must also tweet and call the news stations and their commentators. We must write letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers. We must keep the news media honest because they are the key to saving not only our democracy but also our culture. Right now they're destroying both.
The John Edwards case is especially interesting to me right now because I wrote about how the media treated him in both my memoir and my second book, THE BRONZE RULE. I pointed out, for instance, that the photo used by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER to expose him and his "love child" was fake, but the mainstream media never made that point. His disloyal aide, Andrew Young, said the picture was fake, both in his book and in at least one television interview, but years later people were still saying that the NATIONAL ENQUIRER told the truth about Edwards; like most tabloids, they told some truths and some lies. The failure of the mainstream media to debunk that phony tabloid picture is similar to what has happened with Al Franken. Even the 11/26 Joy Reid panelists who pointed out that conservative dirty trickster Roger Stone was behind the attack on Franken didn't address the picture or question the motives of his original accuser, a conservative. If I had not watched how the media operated not only in the Edwards case but also during the OJ trial when I was shocked (as I reported in my memoir) by the difference between what I saw and heard while watching the trial and what the media reported, I would assume that the comments about original Franken accuser Leeann Tweeden and the phony photograph that I've found on social media were fake, but I knew how fake the mainstream media was before the phrases "false narratives" and "alternative facts" became part of our lexicon and before I read Donna Brazile's book, where she admitted that she was acting, playing the role assigned to her by producers of the news shows, when she served as a commentator on ABC and CNN. Although the obnoxious Gillibrand led the witch hunt against Franken for whatever reason, the media is the reason he has resigned.
The media don't just report on the news; they make the news. They choose what they will cover and what they won't cover. They choose what they will call horrifying and appalling and what they won't. That's why Trump was able to continue to be on television after his appallingly racist birther lies. The media folks, including the black ones, weren't sufficiently horrified to demand that he lose his jobs ("Celebrity Apprentice" and the pageants) on NBC. But Billy Bush and Matt Lauer lost theirs because of sexual misconduct. And let's be clear; the corporate media are political and conservative. I made that point in one of my earliest blogs (12/1/2013) when I was commenting on an ABC news special that focused on the top ten political scandals of this century. The top three scandals, according to ABC, were sex scandals featuring three liberal Democrats--Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and John Edwards. Spitzer and the now jailed Weiner had tried to restart their political careers in New York in 2013, but Edwards, whose sex scandal was listed in first place, was sitting quietly in North Carolina. He hadn't even been on television since his trial more than a year earlier. However, Baby Mama Rielle Hunter had recently apologized for a tell-too-much, mean-spirited book she wrote, and the corporate media probably thought Baby Daddy Edwards was preparing to "rise up" and start fighting for the poor and against insurance companies again. I saw another motive, however. This special, which did not include the WMD lies that led to a costly (we're still paying for it) war in Iraq or the Katrina disaster among the top ten political scandals of the 21st Century, appeared shortly after the government shutdown that turned Americans against Republicans. Disney's ABC had to help them by making Democrats look like the more scandalous politicians.
I thought of that special when I caught the end of Stephanie Ruhle's show on MSNBC one day last week. She was apologizing for not covering John Conyers' sex scandal when she had covered Roy Moore's as if she had to be fair and balanced by finding a Democrat to smear every time a Republican misbehaved. If the news media had been fair and balanced before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House. Her coverage was much more negative than that of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
If the media folks were just incompetent and being manipulated by politicians and other narcissistic celebrities, they would be annoying, but not sinister. However, they are manipulating as much as, if not more than, they are manipulated. The media launched this witch hunt, lynch mob moment that they are now celebrating. The NEW YORK TIMES, the NEW YORKER, the WASHINGTON POST, MSNBC, and CNN started this sexual assault, harassment "wave," as Lawrence O'Donnell called it recently, while the politicians and other celebrities just rode it. And the media are continuing to keep the wave going with TIME choosing alleged sexual harassment victims for their people of the year. I would have chosen the survivors of mass shooters or murderers, including the severely injured on a baseball field Republican Representative who still supports the NRA and the two Washington D.C. officers who saved his life and those of other Republicans. If we could include people who didn't survive, I would have chosen a true hero, civil rights martyr Heather Heyer, or the four soldiers lost in Niger. Maybe they could have pictured Heyer's mother or LaDavid Johnson's widow and a family member for each of the other soldiers. Certainly these whining women who are riding this sex-obsessed, fake media wave don't deserve to be named people of the year. Even Trump would have been a better choice.
Having created the monster Trump, not demonized him off television after his racist birther lies, given him free, usually uncritical publicity during most of his primary campaign, and helped him beat Hillary by focusing on the gossip from the Russian hacked DNC e-mails instead of on the hacking, the corporate media have continued to damage our culture by promoting narcissistic jerks like Kirsten Gillibrand and destroying true political heroes like civil rights warrior John Conyers and arguably the most popular Democratic Senator, annoyingly persistent fundraiser (no more money for the Democrats from me), and women's champion Al Franken.
I would stop watching the news if I didn't believe that I could occasionally make a difference in what is covered by calling news anchors and commentators out on Twitter. As I reported in my memoir, even before Twitter, I changed (however slightly) what was happening on the NBC station in L.A. during the OJ trial when I called the station, ranted in my husky, authoritarian teacher voice (I'm 100% sure they thought I was a tough, powerful man) about the biased coverage, and then asked where black newscaster Furnell Chatman (whatever happened to him?) was. KNBC continued to be biased against OJ, but Furnell started reporting on the trial. I've seen evidence recently that my tweets also are being considered, especially by some of the anchors and commentators on MSNBC. In fact, both Lawrence O'Donnell and Katy Tur (or their staff; I'm no fool) have "liked" one (not the same one) of my tweets.
As part of the resistance, we the people have to not only sign petitions while tweeting and calling politicians, we must also tweet and call the news stations and their commentators. We must write letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers. We must keep the news media honest because they are the key to saving not only our democracy but also our culture. Right now they're destroying both.
Never Blind: Celebrity Justice
Several years ago (probably around a decade), I discussed with a friend an odd phenomenon I had noticed. It involved celebrities who were on trial. I noticed that in direct contrast to what happens with ordinary people, black male celebrities (OJ Simpson, Puff Daddy, aka P Diddy, Todd Bridges, Michael Jackson, maybe even R Kelly) were found not guilty by juries while white females (Martha Stewart, Winona Ryder, Kim Basinger) were found guilty. My friend, a white female colleague who had almost caused a civil war by running for chair of our department during the eighties, had an explanation. She claimed it was because everyone hated powerful women. That might explain the Martha Stewart verdict, but I don't think most people saw Kim and Winona as powerful women. They were more like what Michael would call PYT's--pretty young things. And her theory didn't explain why the black men were set free. My theory did. Celebrities are given the presumption of innocence that we all are supposed to receive when the crime is major and/or shocking--murder, gun violence, child molestation, rape--but not when it's the kind of crime that we might engage in (shoplifting) or that we expect famous, rich, and/or powerful people, whatever their race or gender, to commit (breaking a movie contract, insider trading). I don't remember what happened to Winona, but Kim didn't go to jail, and I believe some of the jurors who convicted her were shocked that Martha did; they probably expected her to be sentenced to community service and/or a big fine. If the black men had been convicted, they would have spent considerable time in jail (in OJ's case, life). Lately, I've noticed a different phenomenon that affects all celebrities, whatever their race or gender. Bill Cosby, Jussie Smollett, Felicity Huffman, and Lori Loughlin have all been treated unfairly by the supposedly blind Lady Justice. In Bill's case, race and gender were a factor (See 7/19/15, 6/18/17 posts), but in the other cases, even Jussie's, they were not. Publicity-seeking prosecutors, cops, and/or defense lawyers and the garbage-collecting media have tipped the scales of justice against these usually privileged (despite being black or female, or in Jussie's case, gay) celebrities.
In all of these cases, prosecutors, judges, and/or law enforcement officers have behaved inappropriately. In Bill's case, the prosecutor ran for office (and won) on the "Lock Up the Famous Black Man For Having Freaky Sex With White Women" platform. The judge allowed evidence from a civil trial deposition (OJ was forced to testify in his civil trial because he had already been found not guilty in the criminal trial; a defendant is supposed to be protected from testifying against himself) as well as prejudicial evidence of past alleged misbehavior to be used against Bill. In the initial trial where the jury was hung, he did not allow the defense attorneys to use evidence against the accuser to help their client. Then after Bill was found guilty in the second trial, probably because of the media-generated METOO movement, the judge sent the 81-year-old, legally blind black entertainment icon to jail immediately instead of letting him stay at home during the appeal process the way other famous and not so famous defendants like the Governor of Virginia did. Bill, who didn't beat or even force himself on any of those mostly white female "victims," was portrayed as a violent and dangerous sex offender so that he would spend some time in jail before he won his appeal. In Jussie's case, the Chicago police leaked information, some of it false, to the news media, then held a news conference complaining about the press coverage. Even more bizarre was the decision to appear on "Good Morning, America" attacking Jussie by the man, the Chief of Police, who was complaining about the coverage. When the prosecutor dropped the charges after overcharging Jussie in an attempt to bully him into taking a plea deal (apologizing and paying for the cost of the investigation), the Chief of Police, joined by the outgoing mayor of Chicago, held a news conference in which they blasted Jussie as if he were a mass murderer. In the two actresses' cases, the prosecutors reversed the usual procedure for handling multiple offenders. In Jussie's case, the two Nigerian brothers who participated in the alleged beating hoax weren't charged because Jussie was allegedly the mastermind, but in the college cheating scandal case, the mastermind flipped on his rich, powerful, and occasionally famous clients. An article in the L.A. Times claimed it was like the mafia boss being the informer. I compared it to the drug supplier flipping on the people who bought the drugs. Without Mr. Singer, this crime wouldn't have been committed. If I were a lawyer for Felicity or Lori, I would discuss the thin line between cooperation as part of a plea deal and entrapment by a criminal who lured my client into committing a crime. The despicable Mr. Singer recorded his conversations with his clients, possibly manipulating them into making incriminating admissions.
Of course, publicity is the key to explaining why these celebrities were targeted and treated unfairly. I'm sure most people could not name the man who initiated the college cheating scandal or the one who took the tests or changed answers on the tests for the children of these rich and powerful parents. They also probably can't name any of the other parents who have been indicted, but Felicity and Lori have been on the covers of multiple magazines and featured in television news coverage of the indictments. It's the price of fame, but is it a fair price? As a semi-expert on pop culture (I read US and PEOPLE every week and used to watch shows like "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" five days a week), I can recognize media whores like Michael Avenatti (see 11/24/18 blog) when others can't. On the Kardashian scale of publicity seekers, even Bill, who was making a major power move when the years-old sex scandal was reignited by the media in 2014, is not near the top. Lori and Jussie, who was accused of staging the attack against himself to raise his profile, would be near the bottom. Perhaps Felicity appears in the pop culture magazines and at award shows (most of which I watch) more often than the others because she's married to another actor (William Macy). I did, however, spot a media whore in Jussie's case--no, not the Chicago Chief of Police, although he might be one, the lawyer for the two guilty brothers. Why was she talking on television instead of her clients? If Jussie wanted publicity, he would have gone on multiple shows, not just "Good Morning, America," to describe the assault that he allegedly staged. He would tweet and post on Instagram. He could have a reality show. Why would having two men attack him raise his profile in a positive way? The profiles that have been raised by his case are those of the talkative Chicago Chief of Police and the definitely guilty brothers' defense lawyer.
As Michael Avenatti, Gloria Allred, Mark Geragos, Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, and all of the OJ defense lawyers know, the best way to raise one's profile as a lawyer or prosecutor is to have a famous client or opponent. That's why prosecutors target celebrities, and that's why they will set the actual criminals free to catch the sometimes more innocent celebrities. That happened in the not so innocent OJ's Las Vegas trial and in innocent John Edwards' campaign finance trial. As one Edwards juror said, the wrong man was on trial. Despite his famous name and somewhat famous late father, Andrew Young, the Edwards aide who stole money from a rich old woman (Bunny Mellon) to build a house, was unknown, so the prosecutor, who wanted to run for a higher political office, flipped him on his boss.
When I watched Jussie and his team's moves, I wondered if Edwards, who was a lawyer before and after he was a politician, was advising them. Jussie's team demanded that his trial be televised so that everyone could see the evidence. When I wrote about OJ and Edwards in my memoir, I pointed out that I didn't really know what happened in the Edwards trial because I had to rely on the always unreliable media to report the truth. If the media has chosen sides (and they almost always do), they will report only the information that supports their side. As with Felicity and Lori (but not Bill), Jussie and Edwards were expected to plead guilty. Prosecutors often overcharge defendants (even less celebrated ones) to bully them into taking a plea deal. It didn't work with the innocent Edwards because he's a lawyer and thus not easily intimidated. It also didn't work with Jussie, maybe because he's also innocent and definitely because he's self-righteous.
As with too much that has gone wrong in our country and culture, this unfair treatment of celebrities is largely the fault of the media. If they treated the trials of celebrities the same way they treated other trials (ignore those involving white collar and minor crimes), then media whore prosecutors and cops would not target innocent (Edwards, possibly Jussie) and not so innocent (Felicity, Lori, and Bill) celebrities.
Lady Justice isn't really blind, nor should she be. Children should not be treated the same way adults are. People with learning disabilities should not be treated the same way those of us who can reason and distinguish between right and wrong are. The weak and poor should also be treated differently (with more leniency and compassion, not less) than are the rich and powerful, but famous people should not be treated differently than those of us who will not attract media attention if we're arrested for cheating to help our children be accepted at USC.
Lady Justice should not be blind, but she should be fair. Felicity, Lori, Bill, and Jussie have not received fair treatment in our justice system. I believe they've paid too high a price for fame and fortune.
In all of these cases, prosecutors, judges, and/or law enforcement officers have behaved inappropriately. In Bill's case, the prosecutor ran for office (and won) on the "Lock Up the Famous Black Man For Having Freaky Sex With White Women" platform. The judge allowed evidence from a civil trial deposition (OJ was forced to testify in his civil trial because he had already been found not guilty in the criminal trial; a defendant is supposed to be protected from testifying against himself) as well as prejudicial evidence of past alleged misbehavior to be used against Bill. In the initial trial where the jury was hung, he did not allow the defense attorneys to use evidence against the accuser to help their client. Then after Bill was found guilty in the second trial, probably because of the media-generated METOO movement, the judge sent the 81-year-old, legally blind black entertainment icon to jail immediately instead of letting him stay at home during the appeal process the way other famous and not so famous defendants like the Governor of Virginia did. Bill, who didn't beat or even force himself on any of those mostly white female "victims," was portrayed as a violent and dangerous sex offender so that he would spend some time in jail before he won his appeal. In Jussie's case, the Chicago police leaked information, some of it false, to the news media, then held a news conference complaining about the press coverage. Even more bizarre was the decision to appear on "Good Morning, America" attacking Jussie by the man, the Chief of Police, who was complaining about the coverage. When the prosecutor dropped the charges after overcharging Jussie in an attempt to bully him into taking a plea deal (apologizing and paying for the cost of the investigation), the Chief of Police, joined by the outgoing mayor of Chicago, held a news conference in which they blasted Jussie as if he were a mass murderer. In the two actresses' cases, the prosecutors reversed the usual procedure for handling multiple offenders. In Jussie's case, the two Nigerian brothers who participated in the alleged beating hoax weren't charged because Jussie was allegedly the mastermind, but in the college cheating scandal case, the mastermind flipped on his rich, powerful, and occasionally famous clients. An article in the L.A. Times claimed it was like the mafia boss being the informer. I compared it to the drug supplier flipping on the people who bought the drugs. Without Mr. Singer, this crime wouldn't have been committed. If I were a lawyer for Felicity or Lori, I would discuss the thin line between cooperation as part of a plea deal and entrapment by a criminal who lured my client into committing a crime. The despicable Mr. Singer recorded his conversations with his clients, possibly manipulating them into making incriminating admissions.
Of course, publicity is the key to explaining why these celebrities were targeted and treated unfairly. I'm sure most people could not name the man who initiated the college cheating scandal or the one who took the tests or changed answers on the tests for the children of these rich and powerful parents. They also probably can't name any of the other parents who have been indicted, but Felicity and Lori have been on the covers of multiple magazines and featured in television news coverage of the indictments. It's the price of fame, but is it a fair price? As a semi-expert on pop culture (I read US and PEOPLE every week and used to watch shows like "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" five days a week), I can recognize media whores like Michael Avenatti (see 11/24/18 blog) when others can't. On the Kardashian scale of publicity seekers, even Bill, who was making a major power move when the years-old sex scandal was reignited by the media in 2014, is not near the top. Lori and Jussie, who was accused of staging the attack against himself to raise his profile, would be near the bottom. Perhaps Felicity appears in the pop culture magazines and at award shows (most of which I watch) more often than the others because she's married to another actor (William Macy). I did, however, spot a media whore in Jussie's case--no, not the Chicago Chief of Police, although he might be one, the lawyer for the two guilty brothers. Why was she talking on television instead of her clients? If Jussie wanted publicity, he would have gone on multiple shows, not just "Good Morning, America," to describe the assault that he allegedly staged. He would tweet and post on Instagram. He could have a reality show. Why would having two men attack him raise his profile in a positive way? The profiles that have been raised by his case are those of the talkative Chicago Chief of Police and the definitely guilty brothers' defense lawyer.
As Michael Avenatti, Gloria Allred, Mark Geragos, Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, and all of the OJ defense lawyers know, the best way to raise one's profile as a lawyer or prosecutor is to have a famous client or opponent. That's why prosecutors target celebrities, and that's why they will set the actual criminals free to catch the sometimes more innocent celebrities. That happened in the not so innocent OJ's Las Vegas trial and in innocent John Edwards' campaign finance trial. As one Edwards juror said, the wrong man was on trial. Despite his famous name and somewhat famous late father, Andrew Young, the Edwards aide who stole money from a rich old woman (Bunny Mellon) to build a house, was unknown, so the prosecutor, who wanted to run for a higher political office, flipped him on his boss.
When I watched Jussie and his team's moves, I wondered if Edwards, who was a lawyer before and after he was a politician, was advising them. Jussie's team demanded that his trial be televised so that everyone could see the evidence. When I wrote about OJ and Edwards in my memoir, I pointed out that I didn't really know what happened in the Edwards trial because I had to rely on the always unreliable media to report the truth. If the media has chosen sides (and they almost always do), they will report only the information that supports their side. As with Felicity and Lori (but not Bill), Jussie and Edwards were expected to plead guilty. Prosecutors often overcharge defendants (even less celebrated ones) to bully them into taking a plea deal. It didn't work with the innocent Edwards because he's a lawyer and thus not easily intimidated. It also didn't work with Jussie, maybe because he's also innocent and definitely because he's self-righteous.
As with too much that has gone wrong in our country and culture, this unfair treatment of celebrities is largely the fault of the media. If they treated the trials of celebrities the same way they treated other trials (ignore those involving white collar and minor crimes), then media whore prosecutors and cops would not target innocent (Edwards, possibly Jussie) and not so innocent (Felicity, Lori, and Bill) celebrities.
Lady Justice isn't really blind, nor should she be. Children should not be treated the same way adults are. People with learning disabilities should not be treated the same way those of us who can reason and distinguish between right and wrong are. The weak and poor should also be treated differently (with more leniency and compassion, not less) than are the rich and powerful, but famous people should not be treated differently than those of us who will not attract media attention if we're arrested for cheating to help our children be accepted at USC.
Lady Justice should not be blind, but she should be fair. Felicity, Lori, Bill, and Jussie have not received fair treatment in our justice system. I believe they've paid too high a price for fame and fortune.
Throwback 2020: What The Sixties Tell Us About Now
I loved it when I heard Chris Cuomo say, “HELTER SKELTER” while attacking Trump last week. I had recently encouraged the media and liberal politicians on what I call Team America to compare Trump to Charles Manson. They’re both cult leaders trying to start a race war. The difference is most of Manson’s cultists were women carrying knives while most of Trump’s are men carrying guns. As I watch in horror the events of this first year of the twenties, I keep being reminded of the sixties. We can understand what’s happening now if we remember (those of us old enough and still sane enough to remember) the events of that “HELTER SKELTER” decade.
Some people may have forgotten how the now revered Reverend Martin Luther King and his disciple John Lewis were treated back in the sixties. Just as the BlackLivesMatter activists are being called anarchists and terrorists by white supremacists like Trump and his enabler/protecter AG Bill Barr, King and Lewis were called outside agitators (they were both born in the South) and Communists during the early years of the civil rights movement. And just as three white people have been killed while protesting racism (four if we count the Antifa guy who killed a white supremacist and then was killed by the police), several whites participating in the civil rights movement were killed in the sixties.
The behavior of the twenties police has also been similar to that of notorious sixties racist bullies like Bull Connor from Alabama. Although they’ve yet to use the vicious dogs that white supremacist Trump threatened to employ, nor have they used water hoses, these 21st Century “law and order” bullies have more dangerous weapons. Who needs dogs when they have tasers and rubber bullets? And who needs water when they have gas and pepper spray? They don’t need horses either (although I believe I saw some in Washington, D.C.) because they can use their jeeps and tanks to intimidate and even injure the peaceful protesters. And unlike the sixties killer cops, the twenties cops don’t hide in the dark and kill black folks and their allies when no one’s watching. They kill them in broad daylight, sometimes when they know they’re being filmed. The cop who killed George Floyd with a knee to the neck stared into a cellphone camera like Norma Desmond ready for her closeup. We thought the sixties cops who brutally beat John Lewis and the other peaceful protesters in Selma were bold and bad, attacking preachers and women with the whole world watching, but these twenties racist cops put the “b” in bad, bold, and brutal. Even after the worldwide demonstrations against police brutality targeting black people, even after BLACKLIVESMATTER finally went viral, with celebrities, politicians, and even businesses joining the movement, a cop in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot a black man in the back seven times in broad daylight, with three of the man’s children and several adults watching. Forget Bull Connor! These twenties cops act like they’re in the Mafia.
Among the celebrities who have joined the BLM movement are athletes. Male and female basketball players refused to play after Jacob Blake was shot in Kenosha, and tennis, football, and baseball players have followed their lead, cancelling games, wearing the names of black people murdered by cops on their uniforms, and painting BlackLivesMatter on equipment or the floor of the arenas where they play. Even more important, some of them, including star basketball player LeBron James, are working on getting out the vote. James and the other activist athletes are running in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali, who refused to fight in the Vietnam War, as well as football player Jim Brown, tennis player Arthur Ashe, and basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who all refused to shut up and play. In fact, the long retired Kareem is still active in racial politics, writing opinion columns and sounding off on television. But just as the athletes who are protesting now are being criticized for their actions, with the football fans booing as the two teams linked arms last week as a show of solidarity in the fight for racial justice and disgusting rich jerks like Wannabe Prince Jared Kushner commenting on how much money they make, the sixties athletes also paid a price for their activism. Jim and Kareem weren’t as popular and didn’t make as much money as the apolitical OJ Simpson and Magic Johnson. And Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two track stars who staged a silent protest by raising their black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics while the national anthem was playing, were vilified as much as former quarterback Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling during that same phony (“land of the free,” my black, descendant of slaves behind, and this was the home of the braves—the Indians—until white folks stole it), racist anthem.
Many of those who still can’t accept the truth about systemic racism like to point out how much progress has been made since the civil rights movement started in the late fifties, and they’re right. There were no black female mayors and police chiefs during the sixties. There also weren’t as many black folks in the House of Representatives or in state legislatures. Now we have a black woman chairing the Finance Committee, and a black man is the Majority Whip. Obama, our first (half-) black President, is the most admired man in our nation and probably the world. And soon (if Trump and his Republican and Russian allies don’t cheat) we will have a black and Asian female Vice President. We also have more black people in mainstream journalism. Lester Holt, for instance, is the anchor of NBC News. But we still have Fox News, where the once seemingly reasonable conservative Tucker Carlson has become a white supremacist, and there are multiple conservative radio hosts who don’t mind flying their racist flags.
What the sixties tell us about today is that we can get through these troubled, chaotic times, and progress will be made. Except for those fighting (and dying) during the last years of the Vietnam War, the seventies were a great time to be black! But what 2020 tells us is that the bad times will return. We may never overcome racism and reach the figurative mountain top that Reverend King talked about the night before he was assassinated. But some of us will survive and keep fighting. We will go up the mountain, moving nearer to the top, fall (or be pushed) down, and then start back up again. Let’s keep climbing.
Some people may have forgotten how the now revered Reverend Martin Luther King and his disciple John Lewis were treated back in the sixties. Just as the BlackLivesMatter activists are being called anarchists and terrorists by white supremacists like Trump and his enabler/protecter AG Bill Barr, King and Lewis were called outside agitators (they were both born in the South) and Communists during the early years of the civil rights movement. And just as three white people have been killed while protesting racism (four if we count the Antifa guy who killed a white supremacist and then was killed by the police), several whites participating in the civil rights movement were killed in the sixties.
The behavior of the twenties police has also been similar to that of notorious sixties racist bullies like Bull Connor from Alabama. Although they’ve yet to use the vicious dogs that white supremacist Trump threatened to employ, nor have they used water hoses, these 21st Century “law and order” bullies have more dangerous weapons. Who needs dogs when they have tasers and rubber bullets? And who needs water when they have gas and pepper spray? They don’t need horses either (although I believe I saw some in Washington, D.C.) because they can use their jeeps and tanks to intimidate and even injure the peaceful protesters. And unlike the sixties killer cops, the twenties cops don’t hide in the dark and kill black folks and their allies when no one’s watching. They kill them in broad daylight, sometimes when they know they’re being filmed. The cop who killed George Floyd with a knee to the neck stared into a cellphone camera like Norma Desmond ready for her closeup. We thought the sixties cops who brutally beat John Lewis and the other peaceful protesters in Selma were bold and bad, attacking preachers and women with the whole world watching, but these twenties racist cops put the “b” in bad, bold, and brutal. Even after the worldwide demonstrations against police brutality targeting black people, even after BLACKLIVESMATTER finally went viral, with celebrities, politicians, and even businesses joining the movement, a cop in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot a black man in the back seven times in broad daylight, with three of the man’s children and several adults watching. Forget Bull Connor! These twenties cops act like they’re in the Mafia.
Among the celebrities who have joined the BLM movement are athletes. Male and female basketball players refused to play after Jacob Blake was shot in Kenosha, and tennis, football, and baseball players have followed their lead, cancelling games, wearing the names of black people murdered by cops on their uniforms, and painting BlackLivesMatter on equipment or the floor of the arenas where they play. Even more important, some of them, including star basketball player LeBron James, are working on getting out the vote. James and the other activist athletes are running in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali, who refused to fight in the Vietnam War, as well as football player Jim Brown, tennis player Arthur Ashe, and basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who all refused to shut up and play. In fact, the long retired Kareem is still active in racial politics, writing opinion columns and sounding off on television. But just as the athletes who are protesting now are being criticized for their actions, with the football fans booing as the two teams linked arms last week as a show of solidarity in the fight for racial justice and disgusting rich jerks like Wannabe Prince Jared Kushner commenting on how much money they make, the sixties athletes also paid a price for their activism. Jim and Kareem weren’t as popular and didn’t make as much money as the apolitical OJ Simpson and Magic Johnson. And Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two track stars who staged a silent protest by raising their black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Olympics while the national anthem was playing, were vilified as much as former quarterback Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling during that same phony (“land of the free,” my black, descendant of slaves behind, and this was the home of the braves—the Indians—until white folks stole it), racist anthem.
Many of those who still can’t accept the truth about systemic racism like to point out how much progress has been made since the civil rights movement started in the late fifties, and they’re right. There were no black female mayors and police chiefs during the sixties. There also weren’t as many black folks in the House of Representatives or in state legislatures. Now we have a black woman chairing the Finance Committee, and a black man is the Majority Whip. Obama, our first (half-) black President, is the most admired man in our nation and probably the world. And soon (if Trump and his Republican and Russian allies don’t cheat) we will have a black and Asian female Vice President. We also have more black people in mainstream journalism. Lester Holt, for instance, is the anchor of NBC News. But we still have Fox News, where the once seemingly reasonable conservative Tucker Carlson has become a white supremacist, and there are multiple conservative radio hosts who don’t mind flying their racist flags.
What the sixties tell us about today is that we can get through these troubled, chaotic times, and progress will be made. Except for those fighting (and dying) during the last years of the Vietnam War, the seventies were a great time to be black! But what 2020 tells us is that the bad times will return. We may never overcome racism and reach the figurative mountain top that Reverend King talked about the night before he was assassinated. But some of us will survive and keep fighting. We will go up the mountain, moving nearer to the top, fall (or be pushed) down, and then start back up again. Let’s keep climbing.
Bill And Don: What Racial Awakening?
More than four years ago, as Donald Trump was beginning his disastrous stay in the White House and Bill Cosby was going on trial (the first time) for sexually assaulting a giant, foreign white woman, I tried to start a movement called FREECOSBY/LOCKUP TRUMP. The movement was such a failure that in September, 2018, Cosby was on his way to prison on the same day that world leaders were derisively laughing at the White Supremacist fake President as he spoke at the UN. I said at the time that if Cosby had been our President the other world leaders would have been laughing at his jokes, not at him and us. Well, as often happens in my life, Cosby was released from jail this week, and “coincidentally,” the next day, Trump’s company and its chief financial officer were indicted. Trump is still free to rant insanely at White Supremacy Anti-Democracy rallies, to hang around the southern border lying about the wall, and to brag about passing a mental competence test. But I was happy to see half of my goal fulfilled until I turned on the television and later read some social media comments. I had to switch to CNN during lunch because NBC’s sister station MSNBC was continuing to demonize the black man who saved the station once jokingly called the Negro Broadcasting Company during the eighties. Later, I had to mean-tweet a few younger black folks who had the nerve to call out the talented, intelligent, and very dignified Phylicia Rashad for supporting the man who helped her career, something that other women didn’t do (looking at you, Samantha G and Gayle K) when men far more decent than Donald Trump, but not than Cosby, had their careers and reputations destroyed during the fake movement started in October, 2017, to lock up the black superstar for touching white women and to change the subject from the August White Supremacy demonstration in Charlottesville and the September mass murders by a white man in Las Vegas. Just as Trump’s mob (TRASH) stole my thanks-Georgia-relatives-for- saving-the-country-and-the-world joy on 1/6, the knowledge that the so-called racial awakening summer of 2020, the rebellion of sane liberals against the attempt to demonize first Joe Biden and then Andrew Cuomo with fake METOO allegations, the stories of Tulsa and the Exonerated Central Park Five, and most of all the fact that the majority of white women voted for the insane White Supremacist again, and then some of them stormed the Capitol after he still lost, thanks primarily to black folks and other people of color, had not changed the perception of Cosby dampened my joy and turned my stomach on 6/30. Before I switched to CNN, I heard the black female assistant prosecutor who was the n-word the white bigots used to get the n-word (they also used a black comedian’s joke about Cosby being a rapist and a black woman’s anti-sexual harassment and assault movement) refer to the Cosby accusers as “survivors.” As I tweeted to MSNBC later, CNN was covering a real survivor—a brown woman who survived the collapse of the building where she lived in Florida and was heard on her brother’s voicemail looking for her neighbors, trying to help them. The white woman that despicable black prosecutor represented took 3.4 million dollars from Bill Cosby and then years later pursued him in a criminal trial. I wondered on Twitter why 3.4 million dollars and almost three years in jail were not enough payment from a black superstar who pawed a white woman after she voluntarily took three pills from him. Interestingly, a somewhat famous blonde actress named Allison (this black baby boomer, who has spent the last more than three years as an anti-METOO word warrior, kept picturing 1960’s Mia Farrow, Woody Allen’s demonizer, when I read about her, even after I saw her picture) was just sentenced to three years for tricking and luring multiple women into sex slavery. Yet people were upset that now 83-year-old, still legally blind superstar entertainer, super enhancer of the black image, generous philanthropist Bill Cosby was getting out of jail after slightly less than three years.
Maybe because I didn’t watch BET or TVONE on Wednesday and no longer post on Google+, where I used to interact with several black groups, I didn’t read or hear anything about how unjust and racist it was that a prosecutor pursued Bill after he had been promised that he wouldn’t be prosecuted. No one condemned the Pennsylvania prosecutor who campaigned on locking up Bill Cosby. No one condemned the judge for allowing potentially incriminating statements that Bill made during a civil deposition after he was assured there would be no criminal prosecution, for allowing other alleged victims to testify against him, thus prejudicing the jury, or for declaring the then 81-year-old, legally blind superstar a dangerous predator (the most dangerous predator in America at that time was in the White House) so that he could be locked up instead of staying at home (as the former governor of Virginia did) after he was found guilty until the appeal process was completed. As far as I know, I was the only one who said that the racist judge wanted to put this old black man in jail for touching white women. I also didn’t hear anyone talking about or read any comments about the justice reform bill that three black people in Congress are working on or about how the eighties war on drugs and the nineties war on crime were really wars on black men. I pointed out the connection between accused rapist Donald Trump and the Exonerated Central Park Five and reminded people that the Tulsa massacre started because a white woman screamed when a black man entered the elevator. No one debated me, but I doubt that I changed any minds. White people and even younger black people want to believe that Bill Cosby was locked up because he drugged and raped women. They don’t want to believe that he could go to jail after being convicted of pawing only one white woman who took the drugs he gave her.
In an earlier post (7/31/16), “Assholes Versus Creeps: A Theory Of Donald Trump And Bill Cosby,” I argued that Bill Cosby was a creep, although he occasionally could be an asshole, and Trump was definitely an asshole but probably also a creep. I wrote that post before the “Access Hollywood” tape was released and before multiple women accused Trump of sexual assault and later one accused him of raping her in the dressing room of an expensive department store. I also wasn’t aware (or at least didn’t remember) five years ago that Trump had taken out ads (why was he allowed to do that?) during the eighties calling for the execution of the five young males of color who had been framed as the “wilding” Central Park rapists. Now I know that this insane, racist rapist is much creepier, much more of a sexual freak than Cosby could ever be because Bill didn’t secretly drug the foreign white woman (or possibly any of his mostly white accusers) as I thought he had when I was reading about his sexual misbehavior in 2016. She took the pills voluntarily. In the earlier post when I thought Bill was a sick freak (he’s still a little freaky), I said he was a better man than the asshole known as Donald Trump. That may be the understatement of this young century. Yet he’s still being demonized, and Trump still has a cult following. 74 million people voted for Trump to be President, and at least some media jerks are still demonizing the man who promoted HBCUs with his television shows and used his fake positive public image, his shows, and his money to improve our culture. What racial awakening?
I don’t know or care if Cosby was trying to buy NBC, but I do know that the media attacks on him started around the time (2014) that the BlackLivesMatter movement began. And as I said in the 2/27/15 post, OJ Simpson was also resurrected around that time. Interestingly, the day after a white man killed 58 people in Las Vegas, some media folks were in town because OJ was being released from prison. I wonder if any of these newly woke former racism deniers have noticed how much so many Americans are bothered by two superstar black men who were once beloved by people of all races not serving enough time in jail for crimes they allegedly committed against whites. I wonder if they have noticed that we don’t seem to be nearly as bothered by the many innocent black men who spend years, sometimes decades, basically a lifetime, in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. We’ll talk about the Central Park Five briefly, watch the 2019 movie “Just Mercy,” starring Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan, about an innocent black man framed for murder, maybe even read the book, but then go back to complaining about “toxic masculinity” and how the mostly white sexual assault “survivors” should be “heard.” And we seem much more upset about OJ and Bill Cosby not staying in jail forever than we do about those mostly unknown innocent black men who spent their lives in jail. Why don’t I know the name of the man Jamie Foxx played? Why can’t I remember or find the name of the man Rachel Maddow was talking about recently—an innocent black man who is still in jail because the governor is too “busy” to release him even though the prosecutors want him freed? We all know the answer—because black lives don’t matter. That’s why I don’t know the name of the black man who killed three of superstar Jennifer Hudson’s relatives but will never forget the names of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.
I recently said that having Juneteenth become another federal holiday is nice, but I’d prefer to have my right to vote protected. BlackLivesMatter protest marches, documentaries about Tulsa, and anti-racism books sold in Target and WalMart are also wonderful. But if we have to wait decades before we recognize the injustice done to Bill Cosby, who was tried twice after racist, accused rapist Donald Trump was elected President, then that arc of the moral universe is bending too slowly for me. Until we wake up to the fact that white women screaming rape are and have always been more dangerous than sexually freaky men of any race or sexual orientation and that in America black men have been victimized much more than white women have and at least as much as have black women, there will be no justice, and our country will continue to be threatened by white supremacy, which always had a sexual undertone (maybe overtone). See the movie “Birth of a Nation.”
Maybe because I didn’t watch BET or TVONE on Wednesday and no longer post on Google+, where I used to interact with several black groups, I didn’t read or hear anything about how unjust and racist it was that a prosecutor pursued Bill after he had been promised that he wouldn’t be prosecuted. No one condemned the Pennsylvania prosecutor who campaigned on locking up Bill Cosby. No one condemned the judge for allowing potentially incriminating statements that Bill made during a civil deposition after he was assured there would be no criminal prosecution, for allowing other alleged victims to testify against him, thus prejudicing the jury, or for declaring the then 81-year-old, legally blind superstar a dangerous predator (the most dangerous predator in America at that time was in the White House) so that he could be locked up instead of staying at home (as the former governor of Virginia did) after he was found guilty until the appeal process was completed. As far as I know, I was the only one who said that the racist judge wanted to put this old black man in jail for touching white women. I also didn’t hear anyone talking about or read any comments about the justice reform bill that three black people in Congress are working on or about how the eighties war on drugs and the nineties war on crime were really wars on black men. I pointed out the connection between accused rapist Donald Trump and the Exonerated Central Park Five and reminded people that the Tulsa massacre started because a white woman screamed when a black man entered the elevator. No one debated me, but I doubt that I changed any minds. White people and even younger black people want to believe that Bill Cosby was locked up because he drugged and raped women. They don’t want to believe that he could go to jail after being convicted of pawing only one white woman who took the drugs he gave her.
In an earlier post (7/31/16), “Assholes Versus Creeps: A Theory Of Donald Trump And Bill Cosby,” I argued that Bill Cosby was a creep, although he occasionally could be an asshole, and Trump was definitely an asshole but probably also a creep. I wrote that post before the “Access Hollywood” tape was released and before multiple women accused Trump of sexual assault and later one accused him of raping her in the dressing room of an expensive department store. I also wasn’t aware (or at least didn’t remember) five years ago that Trump had taken out ads (why was he allowed to do that?) during the eighties calling for the execution of the five young males of color who had been framed as the “wilding” Central Park rapists. Now I know that this insane, racist rapist is much creepier, much more of a sexual freak than Cosby could ever be because Bill didn’t secretly drug the foreign white woman (or possibly any of his mostly white accusers) as I thought he had when I was reading about his sexual misbehavior in 2016. She took the pills voluntarily. In the earlier post when I thought Bill was a sick freak (he’s still a little freaky), I said he was a better man than the asshole known as Donald Trump. That may be the understatement of this young century. Yet he’s still being demonized, and Trump still has a cult following. 74 million people voted for Trump to be President, and at least some media jerks are still demonizing the man who promoted HBCUs with his television shows and used his fake positive public image, his shows, and his money to improve our culture. What racial awakening?
I don’t know or care if Cosby was trying to buy NBC, but I do know that the media attacks on him started around the time (2014) that the BlackLivesMatter movement began. And as I said in the 2/27/15 post, OJ Simpson was also resurrected around that time. Interestingly, the day after a white man killed 58 people in Las Vegas, some media folks were in town because OJ was being released from prison. I wonder if any of these newly woke former racism deniers have noticed how much so many Americans are bothered by two superstar black men who were once beloved by people of all races not serving enough time in jail for crimes they allegedly committed against whites. I wonder if they have noticed that we don’t seem to be nearly as bothered by the many innocent black men who spend years, sometimes decades, basically a lifetime, in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. We’ll talk about the Central Park Five briefly, watch the 2019 movie “Just Mercy,” starring Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan, about an innocent black man framed for murder, maybe even read the book, but then go back to complaining about “toxic masculinity” and how the mostly white sexual assault “survivors” should be “heard.” And we seem much more upset about OJ and Bill Cosby not staying in jail forever than we do about those mostly unknown innocent black men who spent their lives in jail. Why don’t I know the name of the man Jamie Foxx played? Why can’t I remember or find the name of the man Rachel Maddow was talking about recently—an innocent black man who is still in jail because the governor is too “busy” to release him even though the prosecutors want him freed? We all know the answer—because black lives don’t matter. That’s why I don’t know the name of the black man who killed three of superstar Jennifer Hudson’s relatives but will never forget the names of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.
I recently said that having Juneteenth become another federal holiday is nice, but I’d prefer to have my right to vote protected. BlackLivesMatter protest marches, documentaries about Tulsa, and anti-racism books sold in Target and WalMart are also wonderful. But if we have to wait decades before we recognize the injustice done to Bill Cosby, who was tried twice after racist, accused rapist Donald Trump was elected President, then that arc of the moral universe is bending too slowly for me. Until we wake up to the fact that white women screaming rape are and have always been more dangerous than sexually freaky men of any race or sexual orientation and that in America black men have been victimized much more than white women have and at least as much as have black women, there will be no justice, and our country will continue to be threatened by white supremacy, which always had a sexual undertone (maybe overtone). See the movie “Birth of a Nation.”
