Flying While Black

Flying While Black:
Border Control, DNA and the Case of the Lips
by Simone

After tracing his maternal ancestry in 2005 through genealogical DNA testing, or personal genomics, and finding his ancestral links to the Mende and Temne peoples of Sierra Leone, actor Isaiah Washington attested to his “rebirth” saying he believes that “DNA will finally become the tool to bridge the gap between our brothers and sisters who have been lost.” Earlier this year, now “DNA-branded” [see note at end on this term] as Sierra Leonean, Washington was sworn in as a citizen of that country. Citizenship by way of mitochondrial DNA.

But what about the role of DNA for our brothers and sisters who have been stranded or detained abroad? Enter “the lips case”.

On May 21st 2009, Somali-born Canadian citizen Suaad Hagi Mohamud attempted to board a flight out of Nairobi to return home to Toronto, after a three-week visit to Kenya. Upon inspecting her passport, Dutch KLM airline authorities claimed that her lips looked different than that observed in her four-year-old passport photo, branded her an “imposter” and not the rightful holder of the passport that she presented. Mohamud was detained overnight in the airport. Two Canadian High Commission officials met with her the following morning, told her “you are not Suaad” and confiscated her passport. Mohamud was held in the airport for four days until she was released on a bond, tasked with proving her identity within a two-week time frame.

Canadian High Commission officials did not accept Suaad’s ID cards and she was charged with using a false passport, impersonating a Canadian and with being in Kenya illegally. Subsequently she was jailed by Kenyan authorities from June 3rd to June 11th, facing possible deportation to Somalia. While Mohamud was in limbo in Kenya, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon was quoted on July 24th as saying, “there is no tangible proof” that Mohamud is Canadian and that “all Canadians who hold passports generally have a picture that is identical in their passport to what they claim to be.”

It wasn’t until Mohamud requested DNA testing through a motion filed before the Canadian Federal Court by her attorney in Toronto, and then had that test conducted on August 10th 2009 that charges against her were dropped. Mohamud’s DNA was compared to that of her Canadian born son, confirming her identity with a probability of 99.99%. She was issued an emergency passport and she boarded a plane to Amsterdam to make her way home to Toronto arriving on August 15th. This DNA verification not only proved who she said she was, but, apparently, determined her citizenship status as well. This case raises the question of “who can be abandoned by the state and by what technological means? and “will this case be used to argue for even more surveillance by way of a genomic encoded passport?”

Read the Full Essay @ Racism Review

Panel Discussion on Racial Profiling @ NCSU

Racial Profiling: The Effects of Distrust
Panel Discussion

Tuesday September 1, 2009 @ 7pm

North Carolina State University
African American Cultural Center
126 Witherspoon Student Center
Washington Sankofa Room


Panelists

Mark Anthony Neal, Duke Professor of African & African American Studies
Steve Carlton, NCSU Crime Prevention Officer
Rick DellaFave, NCSU Professor of Sociology
Derrick Harris, NCSU Public Safety Officer
Richard Potts, NCSU Police Officer
Melvin Thomas, NCSU Associate Professor of Sociology
Marquis McCullough, NCSU senior in Science Education
Moderator, Traciel Reid, NCSU Associate Professor of Public International Affairs


Co-sponsors

Student Government, University Scholars Program, The Office for Equal Opportunity, Campus Police, and the Office for Diversity and Inclusion


Questions?
Contact: Marcia Gumpertz at gumpertz@ncsu.edu or (919) 515-7826

www.ncsu.edu/diversity

Bicycling While Black

special to NewBlackMan

Bicycling While Black
by Lawrence Jackson

When I was seventeen and the undercover policeman put a pistol to my head until I urinated on myself and accused me of stealing my father’s car, I was powerless to do anything.

When I was nineteen and the policeman detained me while I was walking to the bus stop for the regularly scheduled bus, I was powerless.

But as a forty-one-year-old Emory University professor I don’t have the excuse of powerlessness. And as the father of two Georgia-born sons I have the responsibility of making sure their native land does not persecute them on account of their gender and color.

This was what went through my mind one night in June at 10:50 p.m. when I was detained and fined by three Decatur City police officers in two patrol units (#1016 and #1017) for twenty-five minutes on brightly lit Clairemont Road across from the YMCA for… riding my bicycle without a light. My house, where I have lived for the last six years, was a mile-and-a-half away. Emory University, where I am tenured faculty member in two departments, was a mile away. I was across the street from the Y where my son plays soccer and T-Ball, next to the credit union where I bank.

Sunday night, I decided to ride my bicycle after three quarters of Laker dominance. But do I really need an excuse to go bike riding? Between downtown Decatur and Oakhurst village I had seen multiple police units several times, marked and unmarked. I was certainly happy to be on a bicycle where I felt some degree of immunity from them. I should have avoided the police at all cost, as I did the week before when I drove around a block in the Grant Park neighborhood to evade some stopped patrol car with blue lights. The police are professionally suspicious of black men—“Number One Males” in their lingo--and in Dekalb County they have a reputation for shooting unarmed black men.

When I was returning home on Clairemont, on my way to Desmond, as fast as I could pedal, a police patrol car with flashing lights sat parked in the right hand lane. Another patrol car without lights raced by me near the intersection of Scott Boulevard and stopped beside the first car. The Decatur police were now blocking both lanes of northbound traffic. From my vantage they seemed to be having a discussion with one another in a non-emergency situation.

I rode past the two units blocking the street. Both cars then began pursuing me and sounding different sirens and horns. Like most people who don’t believe they have broken any laws, I assumed that they had some useful purpose unconnected to me. But I was their target. After I stopped my bicycle I said to them that I couldn’t believe that they did not have more useful ways to spend their time. My Stanford roommate once was forced from his bicycle and taken to the station where they photographed his thighs. I was boiling. When I walked toward their car to give them a piece of my mind they reacted as if I meant them bodily harm and their useful police training took the entire situation to another level.

Personally, I can’t remember containing that level of fury. The eight thousand dollars in tax I paid to Georgia last year, squandered so relentlessly in “over-policing.” I’m still furious, as I was standing there in a spotlight, being monitored by a man in pre-shooting position with his hand on his gun, paces away from so that he could have enough room to unloose his weapon if I proved unmanageable. During the whole stretched out circus in the 2,000 watt spotlight and Mason’s blue light, as gawking drivers cruised past, I couldn’t stop thinking about the inevitably puzzled look my boss Jim Wagner would have if he happened to drive by with his family. “Is that Jackson, but he seemed responsible...”

I am awfully curious to know how many of my white neighbors have been detained and fined for breaking any bicycle operator’s code in Decatur that didn’t involve an accident. I am going to try to find out. I know it can’t have been many because it took three officers with computers more than fifteen minutes to locate code number 40-6-296 of the purported infringement that I had made. If that’s how Decatur’s police are keeping busy then the city and the county should spend their money more wisely.

Since my middle child was born in 2005 I have looked admiringly at City of Decatur schools and considered seriously trying to buy one of the expensive homes in “The Great Lakes” or Winona Park. Now I have a hard time thinking the sacrifice worth it.

***

Lawrence Jackson is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies and the author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (Wiley 2002; Georgia 2007) and Renaissance of Indignation: A History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 (Princeton 2010). He can be contacted at lpjacks@emory.edu

Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless...

special to NewBlackMan

Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless…
by Wilfredo Gomez

Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless/Some die with a name, some die nameless…its all the same Pain
--Lost Boyz “Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless”

It all started with a message on facebook received at 1:34 a.m. on Tuesday, July 21, 2009. The message came from a friend and dear colleague, Rudy Aguilar, a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. The message sent with a hint of urgency simply read: “Yo yo did you hear the news?” He proceeded to inform me of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. I had heard about the news earlier via the social networking site facebook. Had it not been for the site, I may not have heard about the news until reading the New York Times. The fact that I could be informed via facebook is telling on a number of levels. I am of that generation of students whose formative college experience as an undergraduate was had with the advent of facebook. At that time facebook was still exclusive to college students and seen as more “sophisticated” version of other social networking sites such as Myspace. As such, were it not for the activists, intellectuals, and students that are “in the know” I may not have known of Gates’ arrest.

As the conversation proceeded my friend sent me a link to the Boston Globe’s story highlighting the details of the arrest. He pointed out that the comments in response to the piece were an indication of the “quotidian racism” that passes in America. While some comments were arguing for a more nuanced critical eye, others settled on flat out ignorance. To this I pondered, what is the real and imagined significance and impact of such an experience as it relates to the broader spectrum of incidents regarding the treatment of marginalized and oftentimes silenced communities across America. Allow me to explain.

In the confidence of my friendship I shared that I had been staying with some friends on the Main Line of the Philadelphia suburbs. On three separate occasions within a week and a half I had been stopped by Lower Merion police where I encountered a barrage of questions: “What are you doing here/?” “Where do you belong?” Can you prove that you’re staying where you have stated?” “Can I see some form of identification?” All of these incidents have taken place while I was on a cell phone and walking around the neighborhood. On the first of these encounters a police officer on patrol did a u-turn at a light and proceeded to blind me with the lights from his vehicle. This is assuming that I did not see him as he so clearly saw me late at night. After producing some ID (from the state New Jersey where I was born and raised) I defended myself by telling the officer that I was an alumnus of the school nearby, and that I would begin my doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. With that information the cop proceeded to leave before I could get his badge number and name. For the record I am a light skinned Puerto Rican who also has a disability, cerebral palsy.

When I shared these experiences with another friend he replied, “well what do you expect, you look Puerto Rican. He probably thought you were from Philadelphia!” Coincidentally I am currently residing in Philadelphia, North Philadelphia to be exact.

If listening with great intent is possible during a conversation on facebook, Rudy waited patiently to share with me some of his own experiences during the June. While in his hometown of Chicago he was stopped in his neighborhood by police and immediately asked “Who do you ride with (what gang)?” While Rudy himself is a light skinned Mexican, such a question assumes that urban Latinos/as and by extension urban Black youth are ill equipped to deal with the racist antics of police that far too often go unchecked and unreported. For the record, Rudy was stopped while in a car by several Mexican cops and one Black cop.

I highlight these experiences to illustrate the kinds of experiences happening all across America on a day-to-day basis. It is perfectly fine, within the context of many of our experiences as residents of urban America to feel anger, resentment, mistrust, and a mixture of fear and awe when it comes to dealing with the police and the power they wield. As such, it is acceptable to trust your initial feelings and respond accordingly. I commend the director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Studies for being a groundbreaking scholar and expanding the field of African Diaspora studies. More importantly, I commend Gates for sticking up for himself, being fearless, for protecting his right to privacy, and for interrogating the policemen present as they would any of the “unknown urban Black males” Harvard Professor Lawrence Bobo alludes to in his piece “What do you call a Black man with a PhD?”

With time details will begin to emerge as to the specifics surrounding the arrest of Gates (the charges which since then have been dropped). As cultural critic and author Toure would suggest in his piece “Skip’s racist wake up call,” there are serious discrepancies between claims of truth in this particularly story. However, we should not let that obscure the experience of many at the expense of one. There are many truths to tell from these incidents and communities of color have consistently wrestled with pain when considering incidents involving Sean Bell, Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo, and Oscar Grant. “Disorderly conduct” can be interpreted to mean anything from asking a reasonable question as to the reasons for being stopped, to actual disrespect and disregard for the police. In the former, we are brought back to chargers of “vagrancy,” not producing ID, or not following racial norms in the Jim Crow South.

Gates is absolutely right in asserting that the police were not aware of who they were dealing with. But the fact of that matter is neither do we, the American public. Many of us dealing with police misconduct and harassment in post-industrial urban America did not graduate summa cum laude in history from Yale University. Nor did we receive an M.A. and Ph.D in English literature from Claire College in Cambridge University. Everyday working class folks are far more sophisticated than we give them credit for; they read and engage in critical discourses in spaces such as barbershops, the local library, and the local hangout spot. While some may be aware of Gates’ prolific and far-reaching scholarship, some if not most of us in urban America are unaware of an eight volume set, African American National Biography.

Many in North Philadelphia or my hometown have never heard of Encarta Africana or one of my favorites, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. The assumption that Gates is readily recognizable to the average person or Cambridge police for that matter is a rather presumptuous. Figures such as Denzel Washington, T.I., and President Obama are also well known Black men in America. Yet, they too are not immune from incurring the speculative wrath of hostile policemen. Gates is widely recognized and respected within certain spheres where access to resources, institutions and the privileged are the norm rather than the exception. When Michele Obama stated on 60 Minutes that (then) Senator Barack Obama could get shot on his way to the gas station, she spoke of a particular universal experience based on humanity. This sense of self-awareness seems different from the claims made Gates, though he too is speaking as a Black man in America who has obviously been “othered” by the police and neighbors who may well have known who they were calling the cops on. This episode ties Gates’ experience to those of communities of color all across America.

In closing, Henry Louis Gates represents one of he public “faces of America,” an America that has proven itself incapable of being described as anything post racial, post racist, or progressive when dealing with the disabled. The financial, social, cultural, and human capital Gates has access to (representation from fellow Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, an outlet such as PBS, one of the prestigious 20 University Professorships, a Ph.D, a phone call of apology from the mayor of Cambridge, and a shout out from President Obama) and the experience he has been unjustly subjected to are an appropriate place to find a synthesis between theorizing the deconstruction of race and race in practice. Bigotry is alive and well in America. This is just another instance of what hip-hop group the Lost Boyz succinctly described as the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless.” Some instances involving high profile figures such as Gates’ are well known and receive media coverage, while others are incidents pass without print or airtime, gone, but certainly not forgotten. It is all the same game and its time to flex some muscle.

If there is anything to be learned from this injustice, it is that we can use this experience to shed light on similar occurrences across the Diaspora and expand the dialogue to include the long list of the brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers living next door who are unjustly targeted by police precisely because of the way they look, and those who overstep their boundaries as individuals who are allegedly around to “serve and protect.”

***

Wilfredo Gomez is a Doctoral Student in Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Rage of the Thinking Class
by Mark Anthony Neal

Most accounts of the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for disorderly conduct have described the 58-year-old Harvard scholar as the pre-eminent black scholar in the country—a leading public intellectual. Gates is loosely aligned with a particular generation of black public intellectuals like Cornel West, bell hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia J. Williams, and Manning Marable who came to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s—paragons of a contemporary American “thinking” class.

While many of these public intellectuals engaged a representational politics that interrogated the realities in which race, gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity are lived within American society, Professor Gates took the concept of a “marketplace of ideas” at face value; his “public” was rarely discrete from the marketplace. He boldly proclaimed that he was an intellectual entrepreneur and branded the field of Black Studies, much like Russell Simmons helped brand hip-hop and Barack Hussein Obama successfully branded himself as “change.” Few of us at elite institutions that can claim that we haven’t benefitted from Professor Gates’ entrepreneurial vision for the field of Black Studies.

According to a statement by his attorney—the equally prominent Harvard legal scholar Charles Ogletree—Gates had returned home from a trip to China where he was working on a documentary for PBS. Upon his return Gates found that his front door was jammed and after entering his home from the rear, turning off the alarm, Gates with the help of his driver jarred open the front door. Shortly thereafter Gates observed a police officer in his doorway who preceded to tell Gates that he was investigating a burglary. What ensued afterward is up for debate with the officer claiming in his report that Gates was belligerent, among other things, and that Gates at one point told the officer he would follow him outside to “see his mama.” That the officer implies that Professor Gates used language more appropriate for a Blaxploitation character from 35 years ago suggest that neither individual was doing much listening in this exchange. That said, few would begrudge Professor Gates’ rage or anyone else’s for that matter, in response to the questioning his right to be in his own home. The randomness of the officer’s assault on Professor Gates’ civil rights challenges claims that his privilege might protect him in such cases.

Though Professor Gates might be unknown to the average viewer of BET, in the parlance of his profession he is easily one of the most recognizable “Negroes” on the planet. That he is legitimately the most well known black person at Harvard University and Cambridge at large is beyond dispute. That any Cambridge police officer would not recognize Professor Gates or adhere to the confirmation by campus police that the figure he was arresting was indeed Professor Gates raises obvious suspicions—yet another iteration of the “uppity Negro” backlash that has reached a fever pitch in the Obama era. Thus Professor Gate’s charge of racism, in light of a Cambridge, MA police officer accosting him in his own home strikes a particular chord. Never given to the professional machinations comprising contemporary race politics—he’s been more Ralph Bunche than Malcolm X—Professor Gates’ response to the officer’s actions is so out of character that those familiar with the scholar’s professional profile would have to assume that the officer had crossed some line. Indeed the Cambridge police thought so also; the charges against Professor Gates were dropped.

But the attention that the case has attracted raises more troubling issues about which black bodies really matter. Few blacks—and fellow black scholars for that matter—are fortunate to have Charles Ogletree on their speed dial; or edit an on-line magazine in collaboration with The Washington Post and Newsweek Magazine. Indeed Antwi Akom, a professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at San Francisco State University didn’t have such a profile when he was arrested in front of his campus office in October of 2005 while retrieving books.

Without asking for or allowing Professor Akom to produce his campus ID, the officer arrested him while his children sat in his car. Professor Akom was formally charged with resisting arrest. Campus administration remained silent about the case, though the charges were eventually dropped months later. Professor Akom’s case didn’t generate the kind of attention that the Gates case has, but Professor Akom benefitted from a network of scholars and activists who spoke out about a clear case of racial profiling and Professor Akom’s unimpeachable reputation. What’s to be said though, for those folk for which such experiences range from a regular nuisance to real incidences of terror and death, far too frequent to even document?

This was a point that was made by one of my former students who upon hearing about Gates arrest, the former student joked that perhaps Gates should have been “carrying those DNA results from African American Lives when he found out he was 67% white.” As the former student, currently a teacher in New York City, further explained “if you put an officer in a position where they can be helpful, by answering their questions and asking for assistance, it can defuse a very tense situation…The louder you get the more you resemble Raekwon Jenkins and the closer you get to jail. Be compliant and if you still feel like you were wronged then file a complaint later.” His points are well taken and a product of the common sense logic that is developed within the context of a world where the kind of confrontation that Gates had is so commonplace. Call it every day survival instincts. Our concerns should reflect the regularity of such abuse, not just the selective outrage that befits those of more privilege.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke University. An author of several books including the recent New Black Man, Neal is a regular contributor to The Root.com and SeeingBlack.com.