The New Klan: The Real Threat For Young Black Men

The New Klan: The Real Threat For Young Black Men

The past several weeks my social media timelines and threads have been full of commentary about the Michael Dunn trial. At this point, trials like these are becoming an annual event—as expected as the Olympic games, only more frequent. But there are no medals to be won here. Just graves to be dug. Questions left unanswered. Parent left to grieve. Much of the commentary surrounds the controversial Florida “Stand Your Ground” law. Like an experiment of a “mad scientist” legislature, its passage, in some people’s opinion, has meant open season on young, black men. It’s the culprit that claims victim after victim. In some ways, the law itself has taken on the profile of a serial killer—similar modus operandus and similar victims.

CHICAGO, IL – JANUARY 02: Gang graffiti is painted on a stop sign on the 5800 block of South Sacramento Avenue near the spot where 19-year-old Devonta Grisson was killed in a drive-by shooting on New Year’s Day, on January 2, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. Grisson was one of fifteen people shot in Chicago on the first day of the year, three fatally. While Chicago saw more than 500 murders last year, Aurora, Illinois’ second largest city, had no murders in 2012. (Photo Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Why I Mourn

Though I am a lawyer, I’m not here to denounce the Florida law. That’s not my primary concern when it comes to young, black men. Don’t get me wrong, I mourn with the nation. I mourn with the parents of those young men whose lives were cut short in Florida. It’s a travesty.

But I also mourn with a nation that finds an average of about 6,500 blacks killed annually—most by other blacks. In our two most recent wars, spanning over a decade, there were about 8,000 soldiers killed—a truth that’s hard to swallow. Almost as many black lives taken in one year as the total death toll in two wars.

There were 421 homicides in Chicago alone last year. The locals call it Chi-raq—embracing the comparison to the conflict in Iraq. They speak of war zones and battles like they are playing a war-time RPG on an XBox or Playstation. But there’s no reset button in this game. No extra lives. The end result? Cemeteries filled with young, black men. Gone too soon.

The New Klan

I want to argue that we’ve found the new Klan. Not in its ideology, but in its impact and fear. Over an eighty-six year period, there were close to 3,400 lynchings in the South—many at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2011, more than 7,000 blacks were killed in this country. Again, eighty-six years vs. one year. The one year total of black homicides is double the eighty-six year total of lynchings.

Blacks make up about 6.5% of the population, but almost half of the homicides. Black-on-black crime accounts for most of those homicides. It looks like we’ve exchanged fear of hoods for fear of the hood. We’ve gone from looking for black men to protect us from whites to looking for the government to protect us from black men. There’s a new nocturnal threat out there and its calling card isn’t a burning cross. Ironic, is it not?

We get squeamish when we see those iconic photos—photos of our ancestors. Strange fruit hanging from southern trees. But the nightly news hardly moves us when a 15 year old is brutally shot and killed in an inner city neighborhood. We’re unfazed when we see a dotted map of homicides in our city that are as numerous as the straight pins in grandma’s sewing needle pin cushion. We’re more concerned about our hashtags than we are our kids bodies being tagged by coroners. Are their lives not just as valuable? Why aren’t we as concerned about what’s going on every day in our own back yard?

Please Do Something

Last week, I did something I’ve been putting off for a long time. I submitted an application to become a mentor for a young person here in Chicago. I found an organization I really believed in and decided to get off my lazy behind and actually do something. Sure, it might just be one kid. But it could make all the difference in the world for that one kid. It could preserve that kid from being squeezed by the noose that life in the inner city tells them is inevitable.

I’m not saying this as some savior figure who wants to go in and save the day. Just a man whose Savior did just that for him. And because Jesus saved me, I’m expected to serve others in humility and love. This is one way I’ve found to do it. If you are capable—especially if you are an older, black male—I implore you to do the same.

A Letter to the 33 Black Law Students at UCLA

A Letter to the 33 Black Law Students at UCLA

Dear 33 black law students at UCLA,

I saw the video you made Feb. 10 — apparently in honor of Black History Month – about how “stony the road” has been for you all while trying to earn your degrees.

The video is well done, has gone viral, and is apparently generating substantial sympathy from several black people and probably some whites. As somber piano music plays gently in the background, you all are shown one by one pleading your cases about how “bitter the chastening rod” has been.

“I have to plead my humanity,” one of you says.

“I feel like I’m from another country – a European Country,” says another

“A lot of pressure… A lot of weight…Feels like I don’t belong…Unwelcoming and hostile.”

“It’s so far from being a safe space, that staying at home would be better for my mental health…”

“I have to police myself.”

“I’ve never felt the burden to have to represent my community until I came to law school.”

Lonely? Pressure? Burden?

You all are enrolled in one of the most prestigious schools in the country, which means you are among the best and brightest. Most of you are hopefully preparing to enter the criminal justice system, where your black perspective is sorely needed. Certainly you are all familiar with the book, “The New Jim Crow,” where attorney Michelle Alexander shows how prison has become the new plantation for black and brown people. You witnessed George Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict in the death of Trayvon Martin. And now “stand your ground” has deadlocked a jury on whether to convict Michael Dunn of murder in the shooting death of Jordan Davis. But instead of “facing the rising sun” and marching on, you turn a video camera on yourselves and whine?

Don’t misunderstand me. I actually get where you all are coming from. You see, growing up in the late 70s and 80s in Brooklyn, NY, I went through a traumatic academic experience. I was bussed away from my black low-income neighborhood to predominantly white middle class public schools. In middle school when we “bus kids” (that’s how they labeled us) stepped out onto the streets, we faced a gauntlet of screaming mad grown white folks spewing hateful threats of death for attending their school. We bus kids had to plead our humanity. We felt that we were in another country. Our parents told us that we had better police ourselves because we were representing our entire race. And to think, we were only children.

Have you all had it so good up until now perched upon the shoulders of previous generations that have sacrificed for you that you are now rejecting your birthright? How can your feet already be weary at “the place for which our father’s sighed?”

Sorry, but you’re not facing pressure. You’re facing your duty. Pressure is sneaking into the plantation down the road to set your wife free. Pressure is going to war for America in the hopes that your death will enable generations of black children to live free. Pressure is raising five children on your own in poverty because your deadbeat husband split.

What pressured W.E.B Dubois at Harvard into becoming the first African American to earn a Ph.D.? What burdened Paul Robeson while being an all-American athlete, multitalented artist and scholar at Rutgers who went on to earn a law degree at Columbia University? What loneliness drove Jane Bolin to not only become the first African American woman to graduate from Yale Law, but the first black woman judge in the United States?

“We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered…”

Here’s some advice that helped me when I was “the only one” while earning a master’s degree at the University of Arizona and even now as I pursue a doctorate at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Look to the past for inspiration. Read essays by African-American Jeremiads such as Maria Stewart and David Walker. Read poems like “I too Sing America” by Langston Hughes and “We Wear the Mask,” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Sit down and really digest “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (a.k.a The Black National Anthem) by James Weldon Johnson, who, by the way, was also a lawyer:

“…Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
–~~~~
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

 

Kellogg’s Boasts ‘Diversity,’ But Locks Out Black Workers

Kellogg’s Boasts ‘Diversity,’ But Locks Out Black Workers

c. 2014 LaborNotes

“We want every person to bring their ‘whole self’ to work every day,” says a Kellogg’s human resources manager in the company’s latest “diversity and inclusion” report.

A hundred locked-out Kellogg’s workers marched with 1,000 community members in the Martin Luther King Day parade in Memphis. The local NAACP is calling for a boycott. (Photo Credit: Schaeffer Mallory)

But for more than three months now, 220 locked-out cereal workers in Memphis, a majority black, have had to settle for bringing their “whole self” to the frigid picket line at the Kellogg’s factory entrance. Workers maintain a 24/7 picket, with four to 10 workers holding signs.

Production continues uninhibited by the picketers. Scabs brought in by an Ohio company enter through a back gate. Cereal leaves by the trainload, heading east.

At a rally on Martin Luther King Day, the president of the Memphis chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) called for a boycott of Kellogg’s products.

Rev. Dwight Montgomery said he had spoken with an organization of 300 ministers in the Memphis area, and that they had decided to ask “our congregation members to go talk to their friends, family neighbors… We are not going to buy any Kellogg’s products.”

He said the Memphis SCLC had written two letters and made several phone calls to Kellogg’s CEO John Bryant—but had not heard back.

“I want to make it clear,” Montgomery said. “We first communicated, tried to move this in the direction of resolution, before calling a boycott. We have been fair. We’re calling it nonviolent direct action for social change.”

‘Diversity and Inclusion in Our Plants’

More than 60 percent of the locked-out workers are black, reflecting the demographics of Memphis.

In 2012 Memphis was the setting for a meeting of Kellogg’s African-American Resource Group, discussing how to create an “inclusive environment.” Apparently, according to the report, “recruiting and retaining diverse employees in the Memphis area was proving to be a challenge.”

But Rev. Montgomery said the company could easily fix its retention problem: “[Kellogg’s] locked out people who are diverse, so bring them back!”

Kevin Bradshaw is president of BCTGM Local 252G, which represents the workers. He said that “without us being at work they don’t have any diversity. All their K Values don’t mean anything. Everything they mean, they did the opposite of by locking us out.”

Kellogg’s K Values include “involving others in decisions and plans that affect them.” Another Resource Group, K-Pride and Allies, was created to “Stomp Out Bullying.”

Locked-out workers take these messages with a grain of salt.

When asked about the Employee Resource Groups and Kellogg’s attempts at diversity and inclusion, Bradshaw said, “They’ve never approached us about them on a local level. They’ve got a whole team, but they’ve never put forth the effort in Memphis.

“These are not honorable people. They’ll say anything to look good. It’s all a bunch of corporate lies.”

Vice President Earl Earlie said he had never heard of the Employee Resource Groups.

‘Just a Marketing Ploy

Kellogg’s boasts in its report of the “ongoing work we are doing on our diversity and inclusion journey.”

A more cynical view of this “journey” is revealed in a section of the report titled “Kellogg Connects with Latino Customers through Targeted Marketing and Product Development.”

Kellogg’s claims its efforts at branding and marketing to Latino customers demonstrate its commitment to diversity. “Christopher R., associate director of multicultural brand marketing” is quoted as saying “my focus right now is ‘all Hispanic, all the time.’”

In Hispanic markets, Tony the Tiger is now El Tigre Toño, selling Choco Zucaritas instead of Frosted Flakes Chocolate.

Locked-out Memphis workers appear to agree that Kellogg’s diversity programs amount to little more than marketing. Trence Jackson, a Local 252G officer, said, Kellogg’s also puts “African Americans, like Gabby [Douglas] on their cereal boxes each February.”

‘Memphis Boycott Again

Civil rights organizations have rallied to the Kellogg’s workers’ cause. The A. Philip Randolph Institute organized a January 12 rally including speakers from the SCLC and NAACP. Many recalled facing violence in the 1950s and ’60s, and called for a return to the militant tactics of the civil rights movement, including civil disobedience to stop scabs from continuing production.

In his famous “Mountaintop” speech in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. also called for a boycott in Memphis. What began as a labor dispute—a strike by sanitation workers—had quickly escalated into a fight between Memphis’s black majority and its white economic and political elite. King called on the black community to boycott white businesses until the strike was settled.

Almost a half-century later, Bradshaw said, “The community in general is tired of being used. The whole Memphis area is tired of being used. Big companies come to Memphis just because they have a cheap labor rate.

“The rich are getting rich and the poor are getting poorer, and the people of Memphis are getting tired of it. Employers need to change their tactics and treat us fairer than what they’ve been doing.”

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