Judges, Black Cops and Sub-humanity

Police Officer Omar Edwards and Son

Both the nomination of the first Latina Supreme Court Justice
and the murder of a plain clothes, Black police officer Omar J. Edwards by a
white police officer, Andrew Dutton, occurred last week.

The media's response to both of these events has reaffirmed the
way in which men and women, who are not white, are often
classified as subhuman.

If they are not overtly classified as such, the ways in which
they are treated certainly indicated that they are.

Sean Bell. Oscar Grant. Lovelle Mixon. Amado Diallo. Abner Louima.

When I learned that a white officer killed a black officer I was
curious as to whether the NYPD would drastically reform the
ways in which new officers are trained.

Then I saw that both Al Sharpton and the 100 Black Men in Law
enforcement were calling for an independent investigation
and I thought, maybe.

I know, that the white police officers see each other as human,
they are taught and socialized to.

As I said in May in my Camus and Torture post, it is much easier
to kill a "nigger" than it is to kill a Black person, a "chink" than a
Chinese person, a "kike" than a Jewish person, a "wetback"
than a Mexican person, a "bitch" than a Black woman.

Classification is powerful.The law traffic's in classification's.
Being reclassified in the eyes of the law can entail being
guaranteed certain legal protections.

Thinking about classifications, humanity and the police,
I began to wonder, that perhaps it would take a white officers
being murdered by other white officers in order for police
training procedures to be amended.

When I saw that the news was reporting the event as friendly fire
it became clear that a white office could have killed another
white officer that night, and the police training and protocol
would not be changed. It became clear that white non white,
human sub human dichotomy was so pervasive in our
society, as it pertains to law enforcement, that the killing of white
officers would not trigger a change in police protocol, training
and procedures.

It became clear that there is so much invested in maintaining
a racist human/subhuman classification, that the hierarchy of power within
police departments would arguably sit back and allow other white
police offers to kill each other, before they would voluntarily change
how and when they shoot perceived criminals.

The New York Daily News reports,

An off-duty rookie cop chasing a suspected car thief in East Harlem with his gun drawn was shot and killed Thursday night when an officer mistook him for a criminal.

"Police! Stop! Drop it!" cops from the 25th Precinct shouted at Omar Edwards, 25.

As he started to turn toward him - the gun still in his hand - an officer opened fire, sources said.

The officer involved in the shooting is white, Edwards is black and had no visible NYPD identification on him, sources said. It was unclear if Edwards identified himself.

"This is always a black cop's fear, that he'd be mistaken for a [suspect]," a source said.

His father couldn't fathom how such a fatal mistake could happen.

"If a police officer sees someone with a gun, you don't just fire without asking questions or trying to apprehend the person," said Ricardo Edwards, 72. "If the person was firing at a police officer, I understand."

Ricardo Edward's words haunt me.

Back to Sotomayor. When I learned that Sotomayor's credentials
were being questioned, I was not surprised.

This blog is called Model Minority for a reason.

Based on their comments, in the eyes of many vocal Republican's,
Sotomayor's accomplishments are irrelevant, because what is
lurking beneath the thin veneer of their words is that Latina women
are not human, thus their accomplishments will never approach
those of a similarly credentialed white man.

This is the party of inclusion and progress, no?

I will never forget a joke that an old friend, a Black man from
South Carolina once told me. What do you call a Black man
with a Ph.D? A "Nigga."

When I heard the Republican's attacks on Sotomayor, I thought of
this joke because it goes to the fact that for very long, in the United States,
the ability to be a human was solely the domain of white men.

At Racism Review, Adia Harvey, goes into more detail about
the history of American racism and the role that Sotomayor may
play on the court. Harvey writes,

What makes Sotomayor’s nomination especially relevant right now is that Chief Justice Roberts has issued some of his most telling decisions and statements on cases related to racial discrimination and civil rights . Despite his clear intelligence and stellar academic credentials, Roberts is woefully uneducated when it comes to the realities of racial oppression in this nation. Operating from the color blind racist perspective, Roberts is apparently of the opinion that any focus on race—even with the intent of diversifying, correcting ongoing racial inequalities, or addressing systemic racial imbalances—is in and of itself racist. This willful refusal to recognize that racism is built into the very core of the political, economic, and social foundations of this nation, has always worked to disadvantage people of color, and will continue to do so if left unchecked, is an egregious blind spot on the part of our Chief Justice. So too is his inability to distinguish between taking race into consideration when trying to make a school system diverse (in compliance with Brown v. Board) and focusing on race in efforts to create and maintain segregated, unequal social systems.

Two systems indeed.

As the first person in my family to attend college, as a one time
law student and as someone who is preparing to enter a
doctoral program in the fall, I have been called "articulate"
by more than one school administrator.

My credentials have been questioned and patronized and as soon
as I open my mouth "people" want to know where my parents
"went to school."

But I ain't trippin'. In fact, I get it. I wasn't suppose to make it
this far. Word to Combahee Survival. In those moments, what
I remember is that I am of spirit (at least I am when I am at my best),
I am not of flesh, and I will make it as far as God would have me to,
one day at a time.

I was fascinated by the way in which the Republican critique of Sonia
Sotomayor dominated her news coverage.

I was interested in what kind of lawyer she was, what kind of judge
she was. I wanted to know her positions on labor, abortion, civil rights,
gay marriage, environmental justice and lastly where she stood on
a customers ability to sue a company for faulty
products (pace makers, cars, etc.)

Yes, Sonia Sotomayor, has, presumably, female reproductive organs and
cafe au lait brown skin.

However, I remember Clarence Thomas and I wanted to know
more about how she was and how she is perceived by her peers.

As I finish writing this piece I reminded of two things that inspired
me to write it in the first place. The first is the mainstream media's
complete unwillingness to consider the way that race may have
played a role in Police Officer Edwards shooting. The second is
the mainstream media's complete and utter focus on what a
few grumpy Republicans were saying about Sonia Sotomayor.

Perhaps the best thing to come out of all of this is that
we can finally stop talking about "post racial' America get on
with the nitty gritty of having a discussion about what we
want Obama America to look, feel and sound like.

More Reading
-Lanny Davis Judge Sotomayor: A Great Judge and Strict Constructionist
-Sotomayor and the Last of the Wasps
-Right Wing Hate Machine Launches Vicious Campaign of
Racist and Sexist Attacks on Sotomayor
-Sotomayor's Problem isn't that She is Too Latina
-Anita Hill Speaks on Sotomayor

What do you think would have to happen to get the police to
change their protocol and procedures?

Doesn't this entire conversation make the words post racial
sound like spiritual cowardice?

What do you think of the human/subhuman classification?
Do you agree, why or why not?

Lovelle Mixon x The Wire x Residential Cesspools

Graphic by Kevin Weston and Arturo Tejada.

Below you will find an excerpt to Kevin Weston's and Aurturo Tejada's

artist's statement, titled "Hating Lovelle Loving Obama." They write,

As artists we were trying to provoke thought and raise questions. Lovelle Mixon is a product of this society, just like our current president....

...People are going to demonize Lovelle Mixon for what he did. In this society’s eyes he was a rapist, a thug, a murderer, a cop killer. He was all of those things.

What Mixon wasn’t, even before he committed these brutal murders, was a human being. No one—and I mean no one—gives a fuck about the Lovelle Mixons of he world. If he died at the hands of another black man (which is the case for most murders of black men) there would have been barely a blip on the radar screen. Because he was a convicted felon—constitutionally he was a slave (read the 14th and 15th amendments carefully).

...The Graphic is intended to raise questions, not answer them.

Below is an excerpt from the transcript
of the above David Simon interview. I have posted
it because I think it is relevant to the this discussion about
East Oakland, Capitalism, rape, Lovelle Mixon and
the post crack urban economy.

DAVID SIMON: Right. You see the equivocations. You see the stuff that doesn't make it into the civics books. And also you see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a corner. Or where parenting comes in. And where the lack of meaningful work in all these things, you know, the decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because THE WIRE is not a story about the America, it's about the America that got left behind.

BILL MOYERS: I was struck by something, I forget where I read it, that you said. You were wrestling with this one big existential question. And you talked about drug addicts who would come out of detox and then try to steel jaw themselves through their neighborhood. And then they'd come face to face with the question, which is?

DAVID SIMON: "What am I doing here? What am I doing here?" You know, all the same problems that a guy coming out of addiction at 30, 35, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. The fact that these really are the excess people in America, we-- our economy doesn't need them. We don't need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we're actually including them in the American ideal, but we're not. And they're not foolish. They get it.

DAVID SIMON: Again, we would have to ask ourselves a lot of hard questions. The people most affected by this are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And we don't, as we said before, economically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. I don't think-- since we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.

BILL MOYERS: Which says?

DAVID SIMON: If you don't need 'em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you're doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There's no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.

When I learned that Lovelle Mixon killed three Oakland
Police Officers, Sgt. Mark Dunakin, Sgts. Ervin Romans,
and Daniel Sakai, 35, and one John Hege, was on life
support, I was sitting in the living room, working on a blog post.

I was devastated because I knew that this could conceivably
mean grimier policing in Oakland, California.

To that end reached, I out to a woman that runs an organization
in New York City, that I would like 100 Visionaires to be based on.
She mentioned that she operates without a permanent place, so I took
it upon myself to help her find a permanent location. (Trust
I soon learned that, in order to be helpful, it is important to
ask folks what they need instead of assuming.) My heart
was in the right place, my process was a little janky.

Personally, I knew that I had to do something after Oscar
Grant was murdered, after Rihanna Fenty was beaten publicly and
now after Lovelle Mixon killed four police officers
and was murdered himself. Doing something was my only option.
Otherwise I would begin to feel like a victim, and you know that,
God willing, we don't do that in 2009.

I decided that I was going to try and meet with Bob Kerry,
President of the New School, of which I am an alum, to
see whether he could introduce me to someone in the Bloomberg
administration that could help us secure a permanent location
for the aforementioned non-profit. ( Mind you, this is right before
all the protests started happening, I have a post coming
on The New School student activism later this month).

So I got fresh and dipped and went to the New School, and
who was walking out of the building as I was walking in?
Bob Kerry. I stopped him, and told him what I was interested
in and he told me to make an appointment with his assistant.
I am unsure what, if anything, may come of it, but it felt good
to move from thinking to doing, instead of just complaining
and feeling paralyzed.

Which brings me back to Lovelle Mixon.
I haven't said anything about the incident because I was
unsure as to what to say. About a month ago, I did a podcast
with Faith of Acts of Faith blog. Near the very end she
made a comment, that struck me about the neighborhood
that Lovell Mixon was murdered in, being a residential
cesspool. Now, I am pretty talkative, but in that moment I was
silent. I knew that I had something, but I wanted to
choose my words carefully because of the nature of the topic.

After the podcast, I watch the Bill Moyers interview with
David Simon, the creator of The Wire. For the record, historically,
I had always thought David Simon was trafficking in Black
death. After seeing this video I realized that Simon may
love the hood as much as I do. Perhaps what I found to be
more relevant was his critique of capitalism
and the fact that he understood that the dope game was a perverted
capitalist economy (I would argue that the dope game is
capitalism at its core), and that the corner kids in The Wire
don't believe the hype, they know that based on history,
the American Dream isn't for them and that the corner is their
destiny. Peep the transcript,

DAVID SIMON: They understand that the only viable economic base in their neighborhoods is this multi-billion drug trade.

BILL MOYERS: I've done several documentaries over the last 40 years. The first one I did was about the South Bronx, called "The Fire Next Door." And what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.

DAVID SIMON: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: To pacify these people who don't have any economic-

DAVID SIMON: Absolutely. In some ways it's the most destructive form of welfare that we've established, which is the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It's basically like opening up a Beth Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, "And you guys are all steel workers." To just say no? That's our answer to that? You know, the economic model does not work. And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did.

When I write (most of the time), I don't write to win, I
write to educate. I imagine that there is a clear
between the posts that are educational and just some
funny stuff or personal matters that I want to share.
That being said, I know how to win arguments, I have
been trained academically to do so. Consequently,
winning arguments isn't relevant to me on this site.

What I am interested in is sharing the critique that
I have of the world for the purposes providing
information that may help work towards a more
just and sustainable democracy.

With regard to Lovelle Mixon, I had incredibly mixed feelings,
and it makes sense because his case is one in which
class, race, gender, alleged rape, the prison industrial complex,
and the Oakland police state are all intertwined.

Let me be clear. Victims do not have an excuse to be perpetrators.
Every person is accountable for their own actions AND as a community
we are responsible for one another, especially our most vulnerable.

I will say it again.Victims do not have an excuse to be perpetrators.
Every person is accountable for their own actions AND as a community
we are responsible for one another, especially our most vulnerable.

I was once a little Black girl in East Oakland. I have every interest
in having an alleged rapist investigated, identified, evaluated,
and treated as such. A person who has raped people is sick
and needs to be treated or locked up and dealt with.

Before he was an alleged rapist he was a human being.
No one was born selling crack, owning slaves, pimping
women or consuming black death as a form of entertainment.
The young man who told me two Sunday's ago that he wanted to "stick his
dick in my butt" is a human being as well. He is sick,
and needs to be dealt with, not coddled or ignored. It is a public
health and public safety issue.

That being said, I have been thinking a lot about our
personal, local and global willingness us to see that
we are all responsible for the world that we have.

I have been thinking about the fact that we create the
conditions in our society, that no one magically creates them for us.

I have been thinking about our rugged individualist tendencies
and how these tendencies fail to take into consideration that
we are all connected. Always. (The piece that I am writing about
Hip Hop, Globalization and Sustainability will further underscore
that.)

Human beings cannot live in a residential cesspool.
Sewage is the only thing that dwells in a cesspool.

Calling a neighborhood a residential cesspool is frankly
the language that an outsider would use.

Calling a neighborhood a residential cesspool
eliminates a neighborhoods past and leaves very little room for
transformation to create another future.

I remember my East Oakland, CA pre and post-crack,
and I remember my family pre and post-crack as well.

Pre-Crack, Oakland was a city in which you could leave
your front door open and go to the grocery store. Folks
would never think of doing that now, it would be down
right stupid because you would get jacked.

Pre-Crack Oakland has been on my mind recently, as
a month ago, I went to Kalamazoo, Michigan and was enamored
with the fact that it reminded me of pre-crack Oakland.
There was an arts scene, mixed class neighborhoods,
some well off white enclaves, a college area with the
requisite college scene, a bustling downtown that
was pedestrian friendly, Black working
class neighborhoods with owner occupied
homes and some neighborhoods with beat down
housing projects.

This isn't to say that Oakland doesn't have this now because it
does, but the post Crack violence residue, the always pending
threat of violence, that crackle in the air wasn't there
in Kalamazoo. In some ways this the essence of pre-crack
Oakland. However, I was a visitor, and I would imagine that there are
some long time Kalamazoo residents that may disagree with me.

(Kalamazoo also doesn't have the racial diversity of Oakland which
has a vibrant and visible South East Asian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Latino
communities.)

I wasn't going to publish this piece. There is SO much going on in it.
But, when Samhita Mukhopadhyay initially posted about Lovelle Mixon
and it didn't go very well but she turned around and posted again,
and the conversation and comments were inspiring. Based on her
courage, I knew that I had to take that step as well.

I realized that if I took my time, and thought clearly about
my intentions and was open to dialogue it would be fine.

More Reading:
-An Infamous Legend is Born and a Community is Under Seige
by Kevin Westin, New American Media
-Understanding the Dialogue around Lovelle Mixon, by Samhita
Mukhopadhyay , Feministing
-36 Hours in Oakland NY Times


Why is it so hard to see the humanity in folks?

What do you think of the Obama inspired image?

Didn't David Simon drop some joints in that interview?

When Did Being Smart Become Acting White?

The first thing that struck me when I walked into my
into my college prep high school was the
smell. It smelled of new paint, new carpet and
new books.

Books so new that they had never been used yet.

In fact, I stopped by there last August
and it still retained that new school smell. Creepy.

The public middle school that I came from?
There wasn't anything particularly NEW about it.

The biggest difference between the schools were the money
spent on each student and the students attitudes towards learning.

Regarding the cost difference, the public school was "free",
but we all know nothing is free. The prep school was $10K/year.

Regarding the students, there was a mixed bag.
Some dudes, came to play, get at girls, and the young ladies did the
same. Others guys came to both learn and socialize as well.
And then there were some known d-boys just passing the day
by until the could grind when the sun went down.

Now that I think about it, it was kind of bugged out to be in
middle school, with cats that were known to sell cracks,
but then again, thats Oakland/Chicago/Philly/Newark/DC....

I thought of this contrast in experience when I read the new
Will Okun post where he discusses being a teacher
and the frustrations that go with the territory.

Full disclosure. Will reached out this morning and requested
feedback on his post. I started writing an e-mail response
and before I knew it, I realized that it was way too long,
and that it would be a better blog post instead.

He used Dead Prez's song, "They Schools", to
illustrate his point.



Will goes on to quote a veteran teacher speaking
on what it feels like to teach middle schoolers.
She states,

“We are not teaching them about their lives or their communities because it is not in the curriculum. Instruction is driven by standardized testing. We are teaching testing, not knowledge. No one hears these kids, nor do we try. There is absolutely no respect for these students. These middle schools are like prisons where the spirits of our children are slowly crushed, and I have been an unwilling participant in the destruction of young lives. Simply being witness and not speaking out daily makes me feel the soulful guilt of a thief,”.

Almost every school that I have been in since high
school has been small- 350 to 450 students.

(In fact, that probably underscores why law school, which
was approximately 1500 people, was so difficult for me).

My experience in small school settings has taught me that
only when the school is small, will the transformative, soul bending
learning that needs to take place, actually occur.

I don't cosign on the notion that children can't learn
in environments where there are 1499 other students.

I just know that it is a formidable and damn near impossible.

I also know that public-urban-education
isn't designed to create critical thinkers.

People say, kids need to learn, "In my day...I walked
ten miles...blar, blar blar." I always respond to those statements
with, "If it were YOUR daughter in that school, what would you do?"

In fact, I have often wondered what schools would
be like if state or federal charters required that teachers and
administrators to live in the cities that they taught? What if
they were required to enroll their children in public school system
in which they worked as well?

Can we say "skin in the game"?

Black teachers and administrators had skin in the game
prior to integration. (The other side of That coin is the seperate
but equal learning that was taking place, damned if you do...)
I always think of this when people talk about our fear of
being told that we are "acting white" if we are high
achieving. Prior to integration, there was no one saying that
"being smart was acting white". There were no (or few if
any at all) white students in our schools for us to be compared to.

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Skin in the game and educational systems.

Acting white as a consequence of integration?

Nice combo, eh?

Oh, and I REALLY like the phrase "soul bending learning."

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M Dot Does Dallas: Birthday Gristle Edition

If you would have told me last year that I would be living in
the Bay and spending my born day in Dallas, I would have been like,
shut the f- up.

But I am, and its interesting.

The dope thing about coming
home is that you are around people that love you NO
matter what. They don't care about a fancy job,
law degree, your career aspirations. They just love you on g.p.


They are also obnoxious as SH*T, but hey, thats my fam.

Living in New York, I forgot what that felt like and I was never home long
enough to let those sentiments bubble to the surface.

Last year, Mean Sexy and I had a birthday jump off.
Our birthdays are a day apart.

I drove BL crazy last year. Buying balloons, schlepping Trader Joes
chicken and lemon grass fritters, veggie dumpling hor'd'eroes,
mixing a BIG -SSED Pot of Sangria.

Have you ever tried driving in a car full of balloons? Tons of fun!

Birthday parties are hard work.

And now we are at a new year.

I came to Dallas for this one and its dope.

Its warm, the Barnes and Noble is Big as sh*t and
its my first OU/TEXAS weekend. <<<---I just wanna see the Cowboys. As far as life in general goes, Im in a New/Old City, I got a new gig, and Sweet Jesus appears to be positioning himself to be filing taxes
with me, lol.

Speaking of men, why your boy the graduate gonna e-mail me
last week talking about "I saw someone last week reminded me of
....." I just looked that the screen like, you ain't want me, but you liked
having me around and now you send THIS Messages?
I didn't respond to his last e-mail in August talking about
"Can I asked what happened?", so I hope he doesn't
think that I am going to start doing so now.

My rationale has always been, MUCH to the CHAGRIN of N*ggas
that if you ain't my DUDE then you can't expect shit.
CONVERSELY, if I ain't yours the same applies.
And trust, that led to some VERY disappointing summer holidays
for me.
But, my code was "he ain't mine" so I had to stand by that,
nah mean?

N*ggas bugg me out with they unsolicited-Asperger-influenced
random-e-mails.

I guess he misses me and that is his way of communicating it.

Men. Go figure.

Back to life changes. In the grand scheme of it all, honestly,
I am just happy to be able to read a West Elm catalog
and go into Ikea without thinking about all the lovely
furniture that I had hobbled together for my BK apartment,
then gave away when I moved.


I will say what was really helpful was talking to TMR
(the resident Katrinian), my momma, and my aunt about
how they recovered from losing mad sh*t when
they moved or just LEAVING ENTIRE apartments/houses behind.

With regard to the gig, it is with a non-profit, and they want me. So that
feels good. For the record, why do employers think its okay to
treat employees, temp or otherwise like WARM BODIES?


Talk about divesting in your OWN human capital.
CEO's and Human Resources NEED TEACHIN'.

Any hoo.

After working in the M & A in an investment bank for the first time (for
a VERY short period of time) in my life
I realize that the only way I will thrive in that environment
is if a white man with authority has a vested interested in my remaining there.
Otherwise, I can see myself- albeit talented, shrewed and hardworking,
getting FROZE the F*CK out.

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What new changes y'all going through?

You watchin' college ball?

Y'all heard the new 9th Wonder?

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My 9/11 Story.

I am a delayed stress kind of person.

Meaning that, when a crisis
occurs*, I go through it and make it to the other side.

Then I collapse after the fact.

Call it an East Oakland survival mechanism. I dealt
with 9/11 the same way.

The bug out is that, this is my first Non-NY 9/11.

Honestly, the memorial/anniversary of the event never
bugged me out too much.

In fact, you know what it was? The sight of those two glowing
lights in the sky is what usta have me shook.

I would be walking down the street a couple days after
Labor Day and boom, the lights would be up.

No warning, no announcement, no nothing.

It is a magnificent sight that can be seen from all 5 boroughs.

The most harrowing aspect of this time of year
is how the sky is always so clearly blue and the air is crispy.

Being on the west coast now, I have an understanding of how
people could perceive the event from the outside looking in.

Its like how people view drive by's from outside hood.

You never know the violence 'till you live through it.

The thing that I will never forget about that incident
is the fact that I went to the Whole Foods on 24th street.

Getting off the C train, I will never forget the smell
of burnt buildings, burnt air planes, burnt flesh, smoldering
gas and the sight of embers flakes floating in the air.

On a personal note, I think that my relationship w/ BBC never
REALLY recovered from 9/11.

I think there was a part of him that felt that one day I could walk
out the door and that something terror related could happen,
and I wouldn't make it back.

Oh. I am leaving out an important fact.

I was on my way to brunch w/ tha Leo Supreme that fateful
September morning.

So I guess it is reasonable to see how a dude could be concerned
over his lady walking out the door and never coming back.

*Most of the time.


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9/11. 6 years later.

Did 9/11 affect you or did you see
it as business as usual?

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