Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.

To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.

Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.

Steve meant so much to us.

We will miss him terribly.

Seitan Worshipper: "Charges Dropped in Duke Case"

Prosecutors drop charges in Duke case

RALEIGH, N.C. - North Carolina's top prosecutor dropped all charges
Wednesday against the three former Duke lacrosse players accused of
sexually assaulting a stripper at a party, saying the athletes were
innocent victims of a "tragic rush to accuse" by an overreaching
district attorney.

"There were many points in the case where caution would have served
justice better than bravado," North Carolina Attorney General Roy
Cooper said in a damning assessment of Durham County District Mike
Nifong's handling of the sensational, racially charged case. "In the
rush to condemn, a community and a state lost the ability to see
clearly."

Cooper, who took over the case in January after Nifong was charged
with ethics violations that could get him disbarred, said his own
investigation "led us to the conclusion that no attack occurred."

"I think a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to a lot of people,"
Cooper said in a news conference held before dozens of reporters in
the press room at the arena where Raleigh's NHL team plays.

...

The Duke case was troubled almost from the start. DNA failed to
connect any of the athletes to the 28-year-old stripper. One of the
athletes claimed to have ATM receipts and time-stamped photos that
provided an alibi. It was also learned that the stripper had leveled
similar gang-rape allegations a decade ago, and no charges resulted.

The case came down to her word against the athletes, and her story
kept changing. In December, Nifong dropped the rape charges after the
woman said she was no longer certain she was penetrated.

Nifong came under furious criticism from the community, the
university and other members of the bar for pressing ahead with a
case that they said seemed pitifully weak.

The district attorney withdrew from the case in January after the
North Carolina bar charged him with making misleading and
inflammatory comments to the media about the athletes under
suspicion. It later added more serious charges of withholding
evidence from defense attorneys and lying to the court.

Labels: duke, race

What a mess, baby

Parents say fertility clinic botched in-vitro & girl's got the wrong dad

Thomas Andrews and his wife, Nancy, got a surprise when daughter Jessica (l.) was born: Looks like Thomas wasn't the dad.

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A Long Island woman and her husband are suing a Park Ave. fertility clinic for allegedly inseminating her with the wrong man's sperm.

After struggling to conceive their second child, Nancy Andrews and her husband, Thomas, turned to New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine for in-vitro fertilization treatments, according to a lawsuit.

Andrews soon became pregnant and the couple was overjoyed. They only discovered the clinic's "colossal blunder" after Andrews gave birth to her daughter Jessica, court papers charge.

"While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her," the Commack couple said in documents filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. "It is simply impossible to ignore."

Thomas Andrews is white and his wife is Dominican. But Jessica, who was born Oct. 19, 2004, has darker skin than either of them as well as "characteristics more typical of African or African-American descent," the lawsuit states.

Labels: medicine, race

Don't be black on my account
A black mother's gift to her biracial children.

By Debra J. Dickerson


March 5, 2007 | Out of the blue last week my son, who is 5, asked me if I'd ever been "burned." I thought he was referring to the tattoos that I always tell him and his sister are boo-boos (how else to justify voluntary scarring when I won't even let them use a butter knife?), so I repeated my usual lie and added that "Mommy would never play with fire." I thought this was a safety discussion. He looked confused.

"Oh. I thought that was why you were brown."

My biracial, white-looking baby is discovering race.

. . .

Like most kids, mine love to "give me five" to signal any sort of triumph. Last night, I realized that I'd stifled a reflexive impulse to teach them part of the high-five -- "on the black hand side." Back in the militant '60s and early '70s when I was a kid, black men would often slap each other five, then flip their hands over and do it again on "the black hand side" or "the black man's side." Now it's rarely done and only then as kitsch, but what explains my hesitance, my refusal, to initiate my children into the club when this relic of my identity formation naturally surfaced? As I thought about that, all at once it hit me that I never "talk black" with my kids either. None of the "used ta coulds" and "mighta woulds" and "he be's" that I slip into so comfortably with my Miss'ippi mama and relatives back home. Without realizing it, I had made Chez Debra Ebonics-free when the kids were in earshot, even though my bilingualism has been the key to my mainstream success. So why wasn't I teaching them to be bilingual? Why was I refusing them their ghetto pass?

If I'm honest, I know why. It's because I know they're not black. I am but they're not. They're biracial.

I lived blackness. All they can do is study and perform blackness. My parents were Mississippi sharecroppers who became part of the Great Migration north. My great-grandfather, who lived well past 100 and was still kicking when I was a child, had been born a slave. His son, my grandfather, got a "Klan escort" out of Mississippi. I saw "Whites only" signs when we went visiting down south and remembered white cops coming to my A'int Mazelle's to "urge" her to teach her kin from up north in St. Louis "how to behave." Clueless, I hadn't yielded my place in line to whites at the country store. At my own home in Missouri I knew not to enter South St. Louis after dark, and I grew up sharing my World War II combat veteran father's bitterness at the racism of the Marine Corps. Segregation made black culture pervasive in our lives; the same oppression that so limited our options gave us all a common frame of reference. My kids can only study that in books.

Labels: race

Labels: immigration, race

As a progressive Christian, I always wondered why many on the secular Left felt it necessary to cut off potential political alliances with progressive religious people, to alienate most of America with nasty anti-faith diatribes, and to choose to ignore the history of most of the social reform movements in this country, where religion often served as a powerful motivator and driving force – as in the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, establishing child labor laws and social safety nets and, of course, the civil rights movement. In recent years, the Left and even the Democrats managed to appear hostile to faith and to people in faith communities

As I always want to scream when Wallis writes, WHO ARE THESE DEMOCRATS and how did they passive voice "manage to appear hostile to faith and to people in faith communities." Perhaps because Wallis keeps writing various versions of that sentence.

Labels: race, religion

HAMPTON, Va., Feb. 11 — At a gathering here Saturday of roughly 10,000 people who came for a conversation concerning the problems confronting blacks, Tom Joyner, the conference co-host, told the audience he had been “ready to be angry” as he took a tour about the Jamestown settlement nearby and thought of slave ships. What he experienced instead, he said, was not anger but something akin to his feelings about mainstream media coverage of blacks: a story certainly not from a black perspective.

“We’ve got to stop going to other people to get what we need,” Mr. Joyner told the predominantly black audience, here for “State of the Black Union,” an annual event, held this year at Hampton University in conjunction with the 400th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the first permanent English colony at Jamestown.

For the past 13 years, Mr. Joyner has been the host of “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” which is dedicated to offering what he thinks blacks need: an unfiltered conversation about black life and black issues from a black perspective. Far less known outside African-American communities than other radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern, Mr. Joyner has an estimated eight million listeners in a given week in the roughly 120 markets where his show is syndicated, making it the nation’s largest black-oriented radio show.

Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., Democrat of Illinois, said that black radio was “probably the most central vehicle for communicating with the masses of African-Americans.” And within that niche, he continued, Mr. Joyner’s show is “the pre-eminent vehicle.”

Unlike Mr. Stern or Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Joyner does not aspire to shock his audience or to hammer home a partisan position. In Mr. Joyner’s town square on the radio five mornings a week (with a recap on Saturdays offering highlights of the week’s shows), the conversation ranges from speculation about the White House to jokes about Whitney Houston. His guest list in the last year has included former President Bill Clinton; the actors Will Smith and Jamie Foxx; Senator Barack Obama of Illinois; the singers Lionel Richie and Aretha Franklin; the comedian Bill Cosby; the scholars Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker; and Bishop T. D. Jakes, the televangelist.

Mr. Joyner’s show blends such interviews with radio staples like news, sweepstakes and comedy. There’s a “cash call contest” and a humorous soap opera called “It’s Your World,” about a fictional, prosperous all-black town. The four-hour show also includes news analysis with Jacque Reid and celebrity news with Jawn Murray. Mr. Joyner’s site, BlackAmericaWeb.com, includes news, surveys and games.

As Martin Luther King’s Birthday approached last month, Mr. Joyner and his crew — which includes Sybil Wilkes, a newscaster, and the comedians J. Anthony Brown, “Ms. Dupre” and Myra J., who delivers tongue-in-cheek tips to single moms — joked on the air that listeners should remember to wish their white colleagues a happy holiday.

Mr. Joyner has had his share of setbacks, of course. He has failed to make a go of it in either Los Angeles or New York, the biggest markets in radio. His comedy-variety television series, “The Tom Joyner Show,” which was syndicated in 2005 in more than 100 markets, including New York, lasted only one year; Mr. Joyner blamed production costs for its demise.

Some critics say Mr. Joyner’s emphasis on his core audience — mostly female, middle-aged and middle-class — has led him to neglect certain issues. “A lot of issues on the younger end don’t get touched,” Paul Porter, a founder of Industry Ears, a research group dedicated to promoting justice in the media, said of Mr. Joyner’s radio show. Mr. Porter said that Mr. Joyner had largely missed the debate over the misogyny and violence found in the lyrics of some rap music. “There are topics he can’t discuss because of the advertisers,” Mr. Porter speculated.

Still, some people believe that Mr. Joyner is poised for greater visibility. Donna Brazile, the Democratic political strategist, is among them. “He is the black version of Rush Limbaugh, but he’s a lot different,” she said, in a telephone interview. “Rush Limbaugh speaks only to conservatives, the true believers. Joyner crosses over all the lines in the black community.”

Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University and the director of the university’s Institute of Critical U.S. Studies, said: “I think you could make the argument that he’s the most important black man in black America. There are 32 million African-Americans and he reaches about one in four. He’s impacting people in their cultural quarters and in their everyday lives.”

Labels: black, race, radio

Labels: race

.................
Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Labels: Biden, elections, race, washington

CHARLESTON, S.C. - White students at Tarleton State University in Texas hold a party in which they dress in gang gear and drink malt liquor from paper bags. A white Clemson University student attends a bash in black face over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. A fraternity at Johns Hopkins University invites partygoers to wear "bling bling" grills, or shiny metal caps on their teeth.

From Connecticut to Colorado, "gangsta" theme parties thrown by whites are drawing the ire of college officials and heated complaints from black and white students who say the antics conjure the worst racial stereotypes.

At the same time, some black academics say they aren't surprised, given the popularity of rap music among inner-city blacks and well-to-do suburban whites alike.

The white students, they say, were mimicking the kind of outlaw posturing that blacks themselves engage in in rap videos. They suggest the white students ended up crossing the same line that says it is OK for blacks to call each other "nigger," but not all right for whites to do it.

Whites often don't realize their actions are offensive because they are imitating behavior celebrated in music and seen on television, said Venise Berry, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Iowa who has researched rap music and popular culture.

"The segment of rap music that is glamorized and popularized by the media is gangsta rap," said Berry, who is black. "It has become an image that is normalized in our society. That to me explains clearly why they don't see it as wrong."

Labels: race

It was a fairly horrific scene. Long Beach, California: On a public street, in the dark of night on Halloween, a gang of about thirty youths beat three girls ages nineteen and twenty one. One of the girls was battered so severely she will require ongoing surgery to repair multiple fractures around her face and to reposition one of her eyes.

That there were taunts alluding to the girls' race and gender made the beating fall under the special circumstances of a crime motivated by hate.

The perpetrators were caught. The cops ID'ed nine of them as worthy of prosecution. Kids all. Thirteen to seventeen years of age when the crime was committed.

This past Friday eight of the nine were convicted, their sentences yet to be determined.

This story, beyond being sad for both the savagery of the crime and the youth of the offenders, also has a certain "through the looking glass" quality. In this hate crime the perps were black and the victims were white.

The far right soldiers of the Retro Guard will have you believe that the liberal concept of "hate crime" means that when people of color are the perpetrators the law overlooks the very concept of racial motivation.

Clearly that is not the case.

But the fact that blacks have been convicted for violence against whites is no cause in particular for documentation and certainly not celebration of this crime. Violence, and especially violence motivated by hatred of race or gender or religion or sexual orientation or merely the fact that the vic is "different" is deplorable.

Equally deplorable are those who pretend to stand for equality but who hypocritically allow such an injustice to pass without taking a stand against it.

So in the aftermath of this whole mess there is one thing that stands out to me: the conspicuous absence from the scene of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. How is it that these two men, these two supposed champions of racial justice who went into a fit of histrionics when Michael Richards went on his "nigger" rant, were nowhere to be found when actual racial hatred manifest itself.

The simple fact is, and this is no revelation but rather confirmation of what has been painfully obvious going on decades, neither Jesse nor Al are truly committed to any ideal higher than raising their own profile. To a degree, as with any public advocate, that's to be expected. It is a profile that gives one a platform from which to advance an agenda.

Labels: race, sharpton, wingnuttery

NOT THAT HE'S APPROVING OF STEPIN FETCHIT -- WHY, THAT FELLOW WOULD MAKE AN AWFUL CLERK AT TARGET. Did you catch James Lileks' passionate defense of olde-style Negro servitude?

The Steward was one of those peculiar archetypes of American apartheid – along with the Porter and the Maid. Unlike the domestic servant, though, he contained no sass. Think Uncle Ben: big toothy smile, yassir. Domestic servants, however, were allowed a great deal of sass – listen to the old Great Gildersleeve shows, and you get a perfect picture of the popular idea of this idealized relationship. Gildy is henpecked and outdone by all his domestic associates, but the only person who comes across with any degree of pride or level-headedness is Birdie, the servant, and Gildy’s relationship to her is one of kindness and deference. You could say that’s easy: she didn’t count, so it was easy to be nice to her. But that’s wrong. There was a fundamental decency and mutual affection in their relationship. Yes, yes, idealized depiction of inherent inequalities, etc. As the argument no doubt goes, the shows perpetuated inequality by pretending they really didn’t exist. But it’s instructive to note what the popular culture held out as the ideal. Equality, not subjegation. Birdie was fully integrated into the family, and shared the same values. Nowadays I suspect a sitcom with a Black servant in a middle-class family would milk the clash of cultures, not the similarities. Wanda Sykes would star.

There's something missing here.... something... oh yeah -- the wounded, pre-emptive dismissal of accusations!

I am now bracing for the mail that accuses me of missing the days of Jim Crow. Whatever.

That's how the pro wingnuts do it, folks! Next up: why the passing from the scene of Joe Jitsu harmed our relations with China.

Labels: black, race, wingnuttery