Dr. Jason Johnson discusses race relations on the 5th year anniversary of the police shooting death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MI. Other panel members are Trymaine Lee (MSNBC), Ashley Parker (The Washington Post), and host, Stephanie Ruhle.
Professor of Political Science. Politics Editor for The Root. Latest Book: Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell
Dr. Jason Johnson discusses race relations on the 5th year anniversary of the police shooting death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MI. Other panel members are Trymaine Lee (MSNBC), Ashley Parker (The Washington Post), and host, Stephanie Ruhle.
As the race for the Democratic nomination gets tighter, the serious gaps between presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and the black Democratic voters they seek become more and more apparent.
The Clinton name in the black community has retroactively sunk faster than the names Tavis Smiley, Bill Cosby and Stacey Dash combined. Her campaign’s grotesque race-baiting in the 2008 primary against then-Sen. Barack Obama is still fresh on the minds of many voters. Combine that with Clinton’s silence on the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s handling of the Laquan McDonald case, and her years as a “tough on crime” advocate in the ’90s, and it’s apparent that these missteps have made her a tough sell for many black voters.
Sanders, for his part, isn’t doing much better. Sanders seems to have all but discovered that black people existed last summer. He is a nonentity with the Congressional Black Caucus, despite having been in the Senate for almost 30 years, and he alienated much of the Black Lives Matter movement with his crusty Larry David impression during the Netroots Nation convention in the summer of 2015.
So, what do these campaigns do? In a move that pushes the envelope regarding both political expediency and decency, the two campaigns have embarked on a Black Lives Matter endorsement primary that seems more about their political lives than the lives of black folks.
What is the Black Lives Matter endorsement primary? It’s the rush from both team Clinton and team Sanders to secure the public support and endorsement of victims. Yes, victims of horrible acts of violence by police officers, vigilantes and eventually the justice system. Moving beyond elected officials or public activists, both Democratic candidates have sought endorsements from the families of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and others. Starting late last year, several members of those families have actually come out and publicly endorsed one campaign or another.
Families of the Slain | Bernie Sanders | Hillary Clinton |
---|---|---|
Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin | X | |
Benjamin Crump, attorney for Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice families | X | |
Justin Bamberg, lawyer for Walter Scott family | X (Switched from Clinton) | |
Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner | X | |
Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner | X | |
Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice | Met with Clinton | |
Lesley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown | Met with Clinton | |
Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland | Met with Sanders |
Endorsements are extremely important during political primaries; the more endorsements you get, the more likely you are to win your party’s nomination, especially at the presidential level. A senator’s endorsement gives you access to donors and voter lists, while a mayor may introduce you to local activists and volunteers.
None of these men and women in the Black Lives Matter primary, however, are elected officials, and none of them have stocks of cash. It’s not even clear that African-American voters would be moved by the endorsement of any of these people, despite their notoriety. Is it even appropriate to ask or accept the support of victims’ families? More important, why are these campaigns so desperate for these symbolic taps of authenticity?
“I find it downright vulgar and basic,” said Niambi Carter, a professor of political science at Howard University. “These endorsements are a way for these candidates to skirt past the serious issues facing the black community by saying, ‘Hey, I’m down with this family that’s suffered a tremendous loss.’”
Politics is a cynical game, and although it’s possible that both campaigns just want to rack up as many black endorsements as possible—no matter who the endorsers are—it still begs the question as to whether any real policies are being offered that could have changed the suffering of these families.
“If Bernie got Erica’s [Garner] vote, he did something to earn it,” said Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a prominent state senator representing Ferguson, Mo., and an advocate within the Black Lives Matter movement.
Chappelle-Nadal, who has yet to endorse any presidential candidate, has nonetheless been approached by both campaigns. She notes the importance of Black Lives Matter endorsements from elected officials but thinks that endorsements from victims’ families are a different thing entirely.
“I like Lesley,” she said, referring to Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother. “But this is not about her only. … If [a candidate is endorsed by] Mike Brown Sr., then maybe her endorsement doesn’t mean as much. Everyone has their own thing.”
It’s a result that we’ve already seen in the Black Lives Matter endorsement primary in a somewhat awkward way. In late January, Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, penned an essay endorsing Clinton. Just over a week later, Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, wrote an essay endorsing Sanders in the Washington Post. Justin Bamberg, a state representative in South Carolina and lawyer for Walter Scott’s family, initially endorsed Clinton, then switched after a sit-down with Sanders. In none of these cases do these endorsements make any real policy distinctions between the Democratic candidates. Which makes the aggressive pursuit of these endorsements by campaigns more about symbolism than any actual policy changes.
While it may be harsh to say, these families have nothing significant about them other than the fact that their loved ones were victims of police or vigilante violence and a corrupt and racist justice system. And that, unfortunately, is a fraternity of pain that actually has many more members than the short list of people who have become well known and whose endorsements are being so desperately sought.
The degree to which any member of any victim’s family feels the need to endorse a particular candidate is his or her prerogative. However, given both candidates’ newfound religion when it comes to criminal justice, this Black Lives Matter endorsement primary smacks of exploiting, in the name of political symbols and campaign expediency, families who are desperate for hope and justice. With so little to stand upon to earn the black vote, Clinton and Sanders are willing to cover up the holes in their own policy histories with lives of slain African Americans. Hopefully they’ll care more about black lives in the future than they have in their policy pasts.
This article originally appeared online at The Root.
America has a creepy almost NASCAR crash like obsession with “The Next Ferguson”.
No slight to Baltimore, but the idea of a sleepy Midwestern town going up in flames over racial abuse and protests shakes America more to the core than unrest in a big mid-Atlantic city known (fairly or not) for crime and dysfunction.
In my conversations with people in Charleston, Oklahoma City and Cleveland over the last year about police abuse of African Americans, at some point someone will say, “But hey, we’re no Ferguson.” I get what they mean: Ferguson is defined by weeks of rioting and violent circumstances that no one believes will happen in their neighborhood.
However, riots are a reductionist view of what happened in Ferguson. It was the racism, stunted community discussion and corrupt local prosecutors that really define what happened in Ferguson. With Cleveland Prosecutor Timothy McGinty announcing there will be no indictment in the Tamir Rice case, whether they like it or not, Cleveland may be following the same dangerous path as Ferguson, Missouri.
The shootings of Mike Brown and Tamir Rice both include police officers of questionable competence who’d been fired from previous suburban jobs before moving to the big city. Both cases ultimately turned on the behavior of country prosecutors who consistently demonstrated favoritism and partial leanings towards the officers they were tasked with prosecuting.
In Cleveland, prosecutor Timothy McGinty subpoenaed Officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner Officer Frank Garmback to testify. However both officers decided to submit written statements, which the prosecutor accepted, instead of demanding Loehmann comply with the court order. Which is pretty much the same racism, arrogance and resistance we saw from the Ferguson police when they released Darren Wilson’s shooting statement with so many redacted sections that it looked like morse code.
Some parts of Officer Loehmann’s statement are clearly contradicted by the video of the Tamir Rice shooting:
The car’s antilock brake rumbled as car slid to a stop. As car is slid, I started to open the door and yelled continuously “show me your hands” as loud as I could. Officer Garmback was also yelling “show me your hands” …
I observed the suspect pulling the gun out of his waistband with his elbow coming up. Officer Gramback and I were still yelling “show me your hands” with his hands pulling the gun out and his elbows coming up, I knew it was a gun and it was coming out.
You don’t have to be an expert on CSI to see that video of the shooting and Loehmann’s version of events don’t match up. It’s pretty hard to believe that Loehmann and Gramback yelled audible and understandable warnings to Tamir Rice when the time between the officers arriving on the scene and the shooting was about 4 seconds.
What’s worse, allowing this statement to be read to the jury is something that by all accounts will make it more difficult to get an indictment. However we saw the same racist misconduct when Robert McCulloch gave the Ferguson grand jury false information knowing full well it would damage any case against Darren Wilson. In both cases it’s questionable as to whether an indictment was actually asked for by the prosecutor.
Unfortunately there are even sadder and more distressing similarities between Cleveland and Ferguson. Both communities seem incapable of having or maintaining discussions of not only these high profile shootings but the causes of the community rifts that led to the deaths.
In Ferguson this was epitomized by the “I Love Ferguson” movement, while well intentioned, it was a passive aggressive silencing of any real discussion of the community’s ills, highlighted by “community” meetings that included few if any African American town residents.
In Cleveland that same attitude is being perpetuated by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, with equally good intentions but equally distressing results. On December 1, the same day that Loehmann’s statement was released, the Plain Dealer announced that they were officially shutting down all online comments sections on any stories written about Tamir Rice. The reason:
The simple answer is that we don’t fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters… — The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Essentially the Plain Dealer abdicated its role as community news source and discussion forum because a bunch of bigots want to spoil the party. This specious notion that if we just don’t talk about race, somehow all the problems will disappear. Even if history says the opposite usually happens.
I, like many Americans hoped that Timothy Loehmann would have to stand trial and be forced to explain his actions under the full scrutiny of the law and a jury of his (and Tamir’s) peers. Unfortunately that will not happen.
From compromised prosecutors, to impotent leadership, to lack of community discussion, Cleveland is following all of the bad steps to what happened in Ferguson Missouri. A constantly silenced and marginalized community can only be silent so long.
For all of the times I’ve heard people say, “This [fill in the blank city] won’t be another Ferguson,” Cleveland is doing the best impression I’ve seen so far, and the end results could be much worse.
This article originally appeared online at NBC BLK.
Voters in Ferguson, Missouri, go to the polls Tuesday in the first election there since Michael Brown was shot to death and the city was gripped by the most explosive racial unrest in the United States in two decades.
The City Council races have themes far beyond the local politics of a city of 22,000 people. Here are three things to know.
Eight candidates in all are running for three open seats known as ward positions.
In Ward 3, which covers the neighborhood where Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, two African-American candidates are running. They are Wesley Bell, a young professor and local magistrate, and Lee Smith, a pastor who has lived in Ferguson for 27 years.
No matter what happens elsewhere, the race in Ward 3 guarantees that there will be at least one African-American on the City Council.
Ward 2 features two white male candidates whose backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Bob Hudgins, who joined in the protests against police, is a longtime Ferguson resident with a background in radio whose son is biracial. He’s been described as a “bridge builder” by some local activists.
The other candidate is Brian Fletcher, a former mayor of Ferguson and founder of the somewhat controversial “I Love Ferguson” campaign, which sprang up almost as a counter-movement to the Brown protests. Fletcher was credited with placing the last African-American on Ferguson City Council in Ward 2, Dwayne James, who declined to run again.
Ward 1 features four candidates, two African-American and two white. They will be replacing Kim Tihen, a police officer who stepped down from the council after her name was mentioned in the Department of Justice’s scathing investigation.
The two most prominent candidates are Ella Jones and Adrienne Hawkins, both African-American. Another candidate, Mike McGrath, is running on a platform of resisting the findings of a Justice Department report that was sharply critical of law enforcement in Ferguson.
Most of the candidates citywide are running on a platform of reform or cooperation with the Justice Department, although there are divisions within those groups. There is a slate of candidates — Smith, Hudgins and Jones — receiving strategic and organizational assistance from Patricia Bynes, a local Democratic committeewoman. If all three win, they are expected to vote as a bloc on future reforms.
Ferguson was criticized on the national stage for having low turnout for municipal elections — as low as 12 percent in most recent local elections, compared with more than 70 percent in presidential election years. More than half the city is registered to vote.
That’s not as rare as it might sound. Municipal elections in Los Angeles, for example, only have turnout of about 14 percent. In Ferguson, though, activists want the number to be higher. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other organizations have been knocking on doors for months to get out the vote.
Still, Maria Chapell-Nadal, a state senator and one of the most prominent protesters in the wake of the Brown shooting, told reporters that her guess was “it’s not going to change much.”
Only 608 people have registered since Brown was shot, and only about 200 absentee ballots have been requested, usually an indicator of voter interest.
The City Council will manage the recommendations of the Justice Department report including hiring new officers, providing officers with culturally sensitive training, revamping how the force handles stops and searches, dropping ticketing and arrests quotas, and setting up a policing system that does not target persons of color. They will also have to reassure businesses and residents that the city is recovering.
Mayor James Knowles, who is not up for re-election this year, has been criticized for failing to accept help and advice from other mayors during the crisis and has consistently denied systematic racism or discrimination in the city, despite the Justice Department findings.
“I think it’s unfortunate that the Department of Justice always tried to narrow it down to race,” he told The Huffington Post. “I think there are things in the report that were a miscarriage of justice, but every instance in the report they tried to make it about race. I don’t think that’s fair.”
The City Council has not yet implemented any DOJ recommendations. Thus far, all firings of police, magistrates and administrators have come voluntarily or under threat from the Justice Department, but the new City Council will be tasked with more firings, implementing training and replacing disgraced members of city government. Is it widely accepted that more people are going to be fired? Does the City Council have the power to fire other officials?
This article originally appeared online at NBC BLK.
There is always a temptation, whether for the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, or the Selma March to try and ascertain what has gotten better or worse for African Americans when it comes to civil rights over the last 50 years.
But to be honest, that is a question better left to economists and statisticians, you can easily find information on home ownership, employment rates, education and life expectancy and see the mixed bag that the last half a century has been for African Americans. The more interesting question is how do we commemorate violent, complicated events of the past, and what that really tells us about the future of civil rights in the U.S.
The original civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery is heralded as the turning point in the American civil rights struggle. Led by a young Martin Luther King still coming into his full abilities, the hostile reaction of the local police department and state government was plastered all over American newspapers and television screens.
Galvanised into action
Complacent whites and heretofore intimidated African Americans were galvanised into action, and a week after bloody attacks by dogs and tear gas, President Lyndon Johnson was pushing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is a clean and convenient version of the story, one that can be told in quick speeches and recited by eager high-school students during evening programmes and rattled off by the clergy. The reality was much more complicated.
The entire conflict took weeks to prepare and organise. There were local and national activists, there were bitter conflicts between the “old guard” ministers led by Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the youthful activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
National attention didn’t turn to Selma until James Reeb, a white clergyman, was killed by local Klan members (even though violence against blacks had been commonplace for weeks) and even then the U.S. did not speak with one voice supporting the civil rights movement.
But that is not the story that we hear from U.S. President Barack Obama on the podium right in front of the Pettus Bridge as he commemorates the anniversary. Those are not the stories told by the young leaders and activists in the midst of crowds and celebrations. Because in the end, Americans want a mythical happy ending to our struggles, wars are over, conflicts are solved, rights are obtained and thus we can have a collective sense of accomplishment and move on. It is this kind of mythmaking that framed the president’s speech in Selma.
Obama spoke passionately about how much the nation had changed in 50 years for African Americans, for women, for Latinos and for the Gay/Lesbian and Transgender community. He challenged those who cynically suggest that Ferguson shows how little America has changed to realise that at least today the actions of that police department in 2014 are illegal, whereas they were not 50 years ago. All of this is true, and while Obama gives lip service to the notion that there is more work to be done, the harsh reality is that we have little true understanding of how hard it was to accomplish what happened 50 years ago which makes envisioning the next 50 years all the more complicated.
Whitewashing the struggles
By whitewashing the struggles of the past 50 years, it bolsters a level of impatience and naivete about the racial problems in the US today. The Ferguson protests, which spread to New York, San Francisco and the rest of the nation are criticised today as being disorganised, lacking true leaders, or unified goals to accomplish.
Subconsciously, all of these attacks are based on the mythologised view of the “past” civil rights movement, where everything was wrapped up conveniently with federal legislation. There is little or no mention of the decades of local legislative fights about housing, school integration and employment that raged into the 1980s.
In Selma, there was the celebration of change but the dismissal of the less exciting process of implementation. This is because America wants to celebrate results, not process, but change only occurs through process, thus our celebrations and commemorations always have a sense of telling only half the story.
In 2064, it’s likely that an American president will visit what remains of Ferguson, Missouri, and give a speech about Mike Brown. By then he will only be known in classrooms as the boy 48 hours from heading to college, gunned down blocks from his grandmother’s house by a white police officer who got off scot free with the help of a corrupt police force and a kangaroo court trial.
That president will say Ferguson changed America’s views on policing and race, and soon reforms occurred throughout the nation leading to more police oversight, less militarisation and the eventual adoption of non-lethal police weapons.
No one will talk about how Mike Brown was called a “thug” in 2014, or how shootings of unarmed black men continued unabated, or how many African Americans felt that the first black president wasn’t doing enough to address police brutality and institutional racism.
That “process” will be lost to history in favour of a commemoration. So the question is never how far Civil Rights have improved in the US, it’s more about how optimistic is the revisionist story we tell. And given that the Selma speech was delivered by an African American president, we can conclude that progress has been made, so long as we don’t have to talk about how hard it was for him to even get there.
This article originally appeared online at Al Jazeera English.
Dr. Jason Johnson is a professor, political analyst and public speaker. Fresh, unflappable, objective, he is known for his ability to break down stories with wit and candor. Johnson is the author the book Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell, a tenured professor in the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland and Politics Editor at TheRoot.com. Dr. Johnson has an extensive public speaking and media background ranging from … [Read More...] about About Jason Johnson