Remembering Diallo

Bassey Ikpi's tribute to Amadou Diallo on Def Poetry Jam.

"Will I Die Before They Get To Know Me?" On Oscar Grant

Politics and Activism
"Will I Die Before They Get To Know Me?" From J. Cole to Oscar Grant III
by Michael Ralph

"Will I live or will I die before they get to know me? If I go, I know the ones that's pourin' liquor for me ... "
-J. Cole, "Can I Live?" The Warm Up

While rappers from Kanye West to Jay Z have celebrated Obama's ascent to the US Presidency as a victory for black people and for the prospect of democracy in the US, more broadly, J. Cole remains unconvinced that we have entered the age of Hope, as he makes clear on "I Get Up," the sixth track from his standout mixtape, The Warm Up:

"We raisin' babies in Hades, where it ain't no Hope...Politicians hollerin' 'bout problems, but I ain't gon' vote. Keep talkin' 'bout Change, we floatin' in the same ol' boat."

Like the Notorious B.I.G. and Nas before him, J. Cole's lyricism centers on the unlikely prospect of individual success in a gothic underworld defined by corrupt social institutions ("like a corpse six feet, shit's deep," "Grown Simba"; "My mind's elsewhere: my mom's health care. To get out this hell, here," "I Get Up"). J. Cole specializes in elaborating an unruly cityscape where death is familiar, making fantasies of bling desirable (where social reproduction lies in the slim possibility that some of the "seeds" he and members of his cohort manage to help produce might survive to see a brighter tomorrow; where he and his peers might live on in legends told by the women they too often reduce to accessories and vehicles for sexual satisfaction, despite the longing they routinely express for a partner who could appreciate the social and psychological suffering that defines their plight). Precisely because J. Cole doesn't consider himself to be much interested in electoral competition or protest politics, I was struck by a single line from, "Can I Live," that echoes ominously in the aftermath of Oscar Grant III's tragic death: "He didn't even get a chance to run before the bullet hit his lung."

In the first few hours of 2009, Johannes Mehserle stood over, shot and killed, Grant, as the twenty-two year-old father lay face down on Oakland's Bay Area Transit platform, while another officer kneeled on the young man's neck. The bullet passed through Grant's torso and hit the ground before bouncing back into his lung, ending his life some hours later. In courtroom testimony, Mehserle maintained that he meant to reach for his taser but mistakenly drew his semi-automatic handgun, although he was wearing his taser on the left side and his .40 caliber on the right side of his body, and despite the fact that the former weighs about half as much as the latter.

On July 8, 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, marking the first time in the history of the state of California that a police officer has been convicted for shooting and killing an unarmed African American man, although it happens at an alarming rate. What some onlookers view as a just conviction was met with widespread disappointment and diverse methods of protest. Supporters of Grant, legal experts, and grassroots activists hoped the jury would return a verdict of second-degree murder or, perhaps, voluntary manslaughter. But then, Mehserle's defense team had insisted in pretrial correspondence, apparently with far-reaching effects, that the presiding judge should instruct the jury to limit its deliberations to either second-degree murder or acquittal. Even more unsettling, Michael Rains, counsel for the defense, managed to have each potential African American juror removed from consideration for the trial based on the dubious rationale that Oakland's black residents cannot be expected to deliver an unbiased verdict in a criminal trial involving a police officer suspected of violent conduct. The kind of shooting J. Cole writes about (involving miscellaneous "niggas" and rival drug crews) would seem wholly different from police violence wielded by a state employee, except that we are too often discussing "accidental shootings," in either case.

Read the Full Essay @ Social Text

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Michael Ralph teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His scholarship on crime, economics, political transformation and urban youth culture has been published in Public Culture, Social Text, Souls, Transforming Anthropology, Afrique et Développement and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Disarm the Police After Oscar Grant?

Police should find a more rigorous way to do their job – unarmed

After Oscar Grant, Just Take Guns Away from US police Officers

by Lola Adesioye

People in America always ask me what police officers do in the UK without guns. They find it hard to comprehend how you can enforce the law or get people to comply without the threat of a gun. I tell them I find it weird and disconcerting that police officers in the US carry guns, particularly when I hear about the various accidents that happen as a result.

One of these "accidents" is currently the source of intense upset and was the reason for several large protests in Oakland, California. Last year, millions of people watched cellphone videos captured at the scene of the shooting and killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by police officer Johannes Mehserle on a train station platform in Oakland. We watched in horror as we saw an unarmed Grant, lying face down with a police officer's foot in his neck, shot in the back by Mehserle, a transport officer.

Mehserle, who was yesterday found guilty of involuntary manslaughter – a charge that carries a maximum, laughable four-year sentence – claims that he did not mean to shoot Grant, mistaking his Taser for a gun. That is one of the reasons why I am deeply thankful that police officers in the UK do not carry guns.

"Oops, I didn't know" has become a refrain that I have unfortunately heard too often while living in the US. Each year has brought another major incident, usually featuring a police officer who has shot and killed a young black person by accident. Just recently, it was seven-year-old Aiyana Jones. Last year it was Oscar Grant. In 2006 it was Sean Bell, who was riddled with bullets on the day before his wedding. All accidents. And these are just the ones that reach national attention.

People all across America are upset, disappointed and angry about the Oscar Grant verdict, which many see as symptomatic of a much deeper issue. They want to know why this type of accident only seems to happen to black kids. It's hard to remember the last time a police officer accidentally killed a young white person. Why do unarmed black people statistically overrepresented when it comes to police shootings?

Read the Full Essay @ The Guardian

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Lola Adesioye, a US-based writer, specialises in issues affecting the black community.

“A Grievable Death”: Karla F. C. Holloway on Aiyana Stanley-Jones

“A Grievable Death”

by Karla F. C. Holloway

The phrase is not mine. University of California, Berkeley, literature professor Judith Butler explains the precariousness of life – its ontological vulnerability. Some lives are known well enough and valued highly enough to be grievable. And others are only accidentally noticeable. These differential values are familiar terrain to cultural studies and bioethics scholars where the idea of excess mortality – deaths that exceed the predictive statistics for certain populations – are as familiar as a funeral refrain, “soon one morning death will come a calling.”

For 7-year-old Aiyana Stephens-Jones of Detroit, it was an evening death call when the launch of a flash grenade burned her delicate body just before a policeman’s fatal bullet entered her neck. The circumstances were violent and fleetingly public. A television crew was filming this police raid, as they had been filming others, for “public” programming. Some bodies are more public than others. It is a bit more difficult to imagine that film crew following a police raid into Bloomfield Hills rather than into urban Detroit.

The circumstances of this child’s death are, not surprisingly, under dispute. Was the gunshot intentional, accidental, or careless? Ironically, it will be helpful to the resolution of this question that a film crew was onsite. It does not, however, mitigate against the public invasion of private lives that vulnerable bodies – citizens who are poor or who are minorities or who are children – experience.

It does not change the familiar procession before the open casket of a child, where other little girls and boys will peer into its recesses and see a body that looks like their own and perhaps even marvel at the pretty pink dress she wore, the carefully placed rosary, and the spray of flowers and loving notes and prayers that surrounded her tiny body. It may be one of the loveliest if not most tragic images of their young lives. It may well be the one they romanticize and recall and even imagine for themselves instead of a prom or wedding dress, or a graduation gown or a carefully chosen tuxedo with matching vest and tie.

They will look down at Aiyana and wonder if they will be as pretty and as loved as she was on this day of her obsequies. They will not remember her life. This was not the value displayed at the moment and circumstances, and that made her vulnerable to a killing. Instead, they will recall her funeralizing and imagine the words spoken about them will be as passionate and emotive as those pronounced over the stilled body of this child, whose pitiful death brought her to our notice, albeit briefly.

Read the Full Essay @ the Bioethics Forum

Justice for Aiyana Stanley Jones?

Where Is the Justice for Aiyana Stanley Jones?

by Brittany Shoot

Anyone reading this blog likely knows a bit about the nauseating, disproportionate violence against women and children in this world. If you have empathic traits and tendencies like I do, it never really gets easier to process and absorb the ways innocent people are abused and destroyed. For me, the question is what you do, how you cope, in the face of unjustifiable violence, when the victim is a seven-year-old girl.

This weekend, Detroit police shot and killed a little girl named Aiyana Stanley Jones. At the little girl's home to execute a search warrant in a homicide investigation, they threw a flash bang — also known as a stun grenade — through the front window of the crowded apartment ... onto the couch where Aiyana was sleeping. Aiyana caught fire. As her grandmother tried to put out the flames, police entered, and a gun went off. Aiyana was shot in the neck and pronounced dead at the hospital. Her father, Charles Jones, told the AP that he had to wait several hours to find out what had happened to his daughter.

The police entered Aiyana's home searching for a suspect in the shooting death of Jerean Blake, 17, who was gunned down in front of his girlfriend on Friday. Blake's story is also a tale of senseless brutality, a painful reminder of the domino effect this kind of violence can have in a community.

There's nothing about this story that isn't horrific. It also raises important questions: why are military-type weapons being used in civilian homes? How do we hold law enforcement accountable while remembering their fallibility as humans? What does it mean that these types of crimes disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income communities? How does a family, a community, ever heal from such tragedies? How do we honor memory?

Read the Full Article @ womensrights.change.org

Philly Po-Po Beatdown--About Race?

from NewsOne.com

Philly-Beatdown Was All About Race
by James Braxton Peterson

It is somewhat disingenuous for Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, a black man, to suggest that Monday night's beat-down of three black men by about half-dozen uniformed officers was not about race. Of course it was about race (and class). Could this 'traffic stop' beating have possibly happened to three white men? I can't even imagine it.

Read Full Essay

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James Braxton Peterson, PhD is an Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University and the founder of Hip Hop Scholars, LLC.