A Secret Service agent keeps an eye on President Barack Obama
Racism in the Secret Service
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
After the recent news release about bullets fired into the White House back in 2011, I though I'd revisit some of the worrisome thoughts I've had for years about the Secret Service and the safety of President Obama and his family. Why are we supposed to automatically trust those assigned to the protection of the President when it is patently clear that security has been lax? Could racism inside the agency be one of the variables that comes into play? In the spate of news articles and blogs about the Secret Service screw-ups recently, I find it interesting that few have linked the ongoing suit in the courts by black agents to what seems to be only slipshod security as a potential factor.
We have been paying attention to racism in police departments. We know the history of racism in the FBI, promulgated by the now deceased (racist) J. Edgar Hoover. Back in 2001 the FBI had to settle a discrimination suit, brought by black agents.
Wending its way through the courts is this class action suit against the Secret Service:
Moore, et al v. Napolitano
The Secret Service has a long history of racial discrimination. African-American Special Agents describe: African-American Agents being referred to as "ni--er" by peers and supervisors; an African-American Agent receiving a phone message after he transferred to a new office stating "You little Ni--er. You better leave Philly or you'll never leave alive;" a high-performing African-American Agent being referred to as "Super Ni--er;" a swastika and the word "Ni--ers" being painted on the wall of a field office; and communications between African-American Agents being referred to as "ni--er talk." The environment of racial discrimination and hostility continues today in the Secret Service. In April, 2008, a noose was found hanging in a secure building at the Secret Service's James J. Rowley Training Center in Beltsville, Maryland. That same month, the Secret Service produced a series of racist emails that were sent to and from Secret Service e-mail accounts in just the last few years and involve at least twenty current or former Secret Service supervisors.
(n-word edits are mine)
When I read news reports of the investigations, like this one - they give me pause.
Agents Discuss Alleged Racist Acts in Secret Service
Leroy Hendricks, currently assigned to Vice President Al Gore’s detail, described his first assignment while in the Springfield, Ill., field office — advance work for Marilyn Quayle. He sat through a dinner with fellow agents and local police who told racial jokes all evening. “I thought it was an initiation,” he said. Attorney Ron Schmidt said black agents assigned to protect Gore complained about the racial atmosphere on the detail, but the agency would not divulge its report on the complaints.
‘Good Ole Boys’
Shaffer also revealed new evidence of Secret Service members being involved in the “Good Ole Boy Roundup” in Tennessee.The roundup has been described as a “whites-only” gathering of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and other federal law-enforcement officers and at which these agents discriminated against blacks by posting racist signs, wearing racist T-shirts, performing racist skits and playing racist music. The roundup was allegedly held annually in Tennessee over a period of 16 years. “The roundup was the good ole boy roundup,” Shaffer said, “and the good ole boys of the Secret Service still run this agency. They just do it covertly and secretly in private meetings held in Washington.”
The lawsuit claims in two separate years a white Secret Service agent was elected president of the roundup, and one year an agent was elected, “Redneck of the Year.”
At this morning’s press conference, two agents who worked in the Atlanta field office said they knew of co-workers who attended the roundup and saw flyers promoting the event.
“They taunted me: ‘You should come, you’d get a bang out of it,’” said former agent Janelle Walker Clark.
I know the Secret Service is promoted as an agency where every agent is willing to "take a bullet for the President" and agents are reportedly free from the taint of political positions. Interesting that a former agent,
Dan Bongino is currently running for congress in Maryland as a TeaPublican wingnut, and is a current Fox favorite guest.
One of the most vocal congressional critics of the Secret Service has been the ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-Miss). He has been following the discrimination suit, has been a part of investigations of the "slip-ups" and recently called for the agency to be headed up by someone brought in from the outside, rather than someone who is part of the Secret Service culture. During the hearings and subsequent resignation of agency head Julia Pierson, he made this clear.
Several senior Democrats joined Republicans in saying the next director should come from outside the agency’s insular culture.
“The Secret Service needs a seasoned law enforcement professional who is not a product of the Secret Service to bring about needed reforms,” Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement.
Insular culture, from my perspective can also mean a culture in which racism is a factor in how well the agency protects a black President and his family.
What do you think?
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Meet LGBTQ racial justice activists in the South. Color Lines: ‘We Are the South’ Rises with LGBTQ Racial Justice Activists.
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LGBTQ activists at the intersection of race, place, class, sexuality and so much more working toward racial justice in the South? No, you’re not dreaming. This week, the Better Together Southern Leadership and Action Cohort, a network of eight organizations gathered by Colorlines’ publisher Race Forward, launched We Are the South. It is a photo campaign highlighting the people at the center of this week’s launch. On social media, #WeAretheSouth and #SomosElSur amplified those activists’ experiences.
Participants at the 2014 FYRE Media Justice Camp this summer Photo: wearethesouth.org
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These innocuous objects were perceived as weapons by law enforcement, and such racially charged presumptions cost too many black men their lives. The Root: This Is Not a Gun: So, Officers, Stop Shooting Unarmed Black Men.
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Too many black men have lost their lives because of encounters with police officers whose racially charged presumptions about what the men were holding in their hands informed their decision-making minutes before the men were gunned down.
In fact, it’s what Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a Stanford psychologist and one of this year’s recipients of the MacArthur “genius” grant, works on day in and day out: the ideology that black men are associated with criminality. Her studies indicate that if you show people an image of a black man and then immediately show them a blurred image, they will most likely make out a gun, a knife or some sort of object associated with crime, simply because they were shown a photo of a black man seconds prior. That kind of unconscious prejudice toward black men is ingrained in some collective psyches, and it’s time we address it.
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A white woman was accidentally impregnated with a black donor’s sperm. Now she’s suing. Slate: Bespoke Babies.
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All in the Family, the megahit show that dominated the TV of the 1970s, routinely made audiences roar and squirm by inserting the most ignorant sort of bigotry into the yap of patriarch Archie Bunker. In one memorable episode, he freaked out when he discovered he’d been transfused with blood from a black man. His misconceptions about the possible results were characteristically ridiculous: “The colored chromosomes, inside of them corpuscles there, they could maybe make certain changes.”
Funny, but is it so very 40 years ago? Maybe not. Earlier this week a white Ohio woman sued the Midwest Sperm Bank, a Chicago-area company she’d used in trying to conceive. The alleged error? Providing her with the wrong “product”—the sperm of a black man. The plaintiff, Jennifer Cramblett, didn’t learn of the error until well along in her pregnancy—a pregnancy that resulted in a healthy, biracial daughter, Payton, who is now 2 years old.
Should she have a claim against Midwest Sperm Bank? Before you answer: What, exactly, are her damages? And should we have more sympathy for her than for addled Archie?
Her complaint, if true, cries out for some legal penalty to attach to Midwest’s conduct. She lists a buffoonish set of errors, including taking the order over the phone—in ink, and with no electronic backup; the subsequent mistranscription of the anonymous sperm donor’s number (“330” was written for “380”); and a receptionist who seems to have doubled down on the error before Cramblett became pregnant, when it could have still been corrected. And to top it off, upon realizing the mistake, the company’s receptionist … hung up on Cramblett. The company did send her a letter of apology (oops!), and refunded the purchase price of the offending sperm. (The complaint doesn’t say how much that was, but it appears the price can vary substantially depending on a number of factors, including donor profile and sperm motility. One news report put the amount in this case at unspecified “thousands.”)
But is that all Cramblett should get? She’s asking to be compensated for her emotional distress, her medical expenses, and other “economic and non-economic losses.” Most of the complaint is about the emotional pain and suffering. She describes the difficulty of living with Payton in an all-white community, with its “stereotypical attitudes.” One of Cramblett’s uncles, for example, “speaks openly and derisively about people of color.” And she acknowledges her own limited cultural competence. (For instance, Mom has found it “stressful” to go into a “black neighborhood” in order to get Payton “a decent [hair]cut.”)
What happens if the wrong vial is chosen?
Photo by Fred Prouser/Reuters
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If you can't say anything good,..... Slate: Haiti’s Brutal and Corrupt Dictator “Baby Doc” Dies at 63.
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Jean-Claude Duvalier died of a heart attack on Saturday at his home in Port-au-Prince. It was a way too peaceful end for the 63-year-old who presided over a regime that seemed to torture and kill for sport while he made himself wealthy by stealing from the state and plunging the Haitian people further into poverty and despair.
Duvalier, known as “Baby Doc,” took over the post of “president for life” at the young age of 19 after his father, Francois Duvalier, who was known as “Papa Doc,” suddenly died in 1971. And while there was some hope in the beginning that he would open up the country Baby Doc ended up following in his father’s footsteps, keeping a “well-established terror apparatus—most notably the Tontons Macoutes, the shadowy militia whose name means “bogeymen”—and added new techniques for skimming hundreds of millions of dollars from the national treasury,” points out the Washington Post. Human Rights Watch has estimated that some 30,000 Haitians were killed under the two regimes.
Duvalier and his family flew off to exile in 1986 after a popular uprising. But he surprised everyone by returning to Haiti in 2011 and was charged with human rights crimes days later, reports CNN. But he managed to remain a free man by arguing that the statute of limitations had expired. He claimed he wanted to help his country rebuild after the devastating 2010 earthquake although rumors quickly flourished that he was looking to recover some cash he had stashed away. Earlier this year he announced he was forming a political party, although it isn’t clear whether it was a serious move “or a thumb in the eye of the rival he loathed and who succeeded him, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, another formerly exiled president who had also returned and is still seen as a political force,” notes the New York Times.
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Tom and Jerry was openly racist, because American media at the time was openly racist! Slate: Of Course Tom and Jerry Was Racist. The Question Is What to Do About That.
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Is that cartoon cat racist? Amazon Prime and iTunes now feature a warning for Tom and Jerry cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s, which notes that they “may depict ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society.”
The warning, let’s call it the Disclaimer, continues, “Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.”
Cue large amounts of Internet outrage from those decrying political correctness.
There's no way in hell that Tom and Jerry is racist. http://t.co/... This cartoon show is a classic! Lay off of it, leftists.
-- Gabriella Hoffman (@Gabby_Hoffman) October 2, 2014
Old Tom and Jerry cartoons to carry warnings of 'racial prejudice'. Give me strength. I am a foreigner in a culture I no longer understand.
-- Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) October 1, 2014
RIP My Childhood RT @WashTimes: #Amazon adds #racism disclaimer to 'Tom and Jerry' cartoons http://t.co/... pic.twitter.com/MGf47McLXc
-- Cameron Gray (@Cameron_Gray) October 1, 2014
In fact, the language appears adapted from an introduction to the 2005 DVD box of Tom and Jerry: The Spotlight Collection, Volume 2. In it, Whoopi Goldberg discusses the supporting character of Mammy Two-Shoes, a stereotypical black housemaid who never became more than an aproned, drawling, doddering fodder for cheap laughs.
It is unclear whether Amazon or iTunes made an editorial decision to flag these particular cartoons for their content, or simply auto-published the warning in the same way they might list a movie with its MPAA rating. But these days, it seems the first two things jettisoned in any conversation about race are history and proportionality.
So first, history. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s 1940 creation for MGM was a quintessentially American tale. The antagonist, Tom, was big and scary, but slow and possessed of more will than wit. The underdog—in this case, a mouse named Jerry, sly, jestering, and adorable—always won. It was also thoroughly American in its nod to racism.
After George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” set the standard for mid-century cartoon storytelling, no human being could ever be smarter than animals. In Tom and Jerry, as with Mickey and Bugs and the rest, that human would have to be of color. Enter Mammy Two-Shoes, whose face was almost never depicted. Henry Sampson’s comprehensive study, That’s Enough Folks! Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960, summarizes 15 cartoons between 1940 and 1952 featuring Mammy, including scenes in which she sings about pork chops while washing dishes, has a pair of dice fall out of her dress when Jerry shakes her down, and is buried by an avalanche of coal, which gives occasion for Tom to continue his antics in Stepin Fetchit blackface.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Contributor
As some may know, I had a very brief dance with that black robed Grand Chess Master, carrying his scythe and smiling his consoling grin. Though I didn't suffer the true suffering of a gnawing eaten from within agony, that dance with that Grand Chess Master got me to thinking.
I know Life is precious, its colors and smells, the flutter of a lover's eyelash on the cheek could be taken for granted. But when time and existence are telescoped into minutes left; everything is examined.
I thought of how Audre Lorde chronicled her fight with cancer, not as a survivor, or of the defeated; but with the sweet embrace of Dream. Life is not limited to what we can touch and kiss, it also includes all that we can imagine. It is the poignant tragedy of losing that imagination that makes Life so precious. It is the knowing that these silken threads that tie us fast to life are so fragile.
It is the knowing that when we close our eyes for the last time, we are...
Never To Dream Of Spiders
Time collapses between the lips of strangers
my days collapse into a hollow tube
soon implodes against now
like an iron wall
my eyes are blocked with rubble
a smear of perspectives
blurring each horizon
in the breathless precision of silence
One word is made.
Once the renegade flesh was gone
fall air lay against my face
sharp and blue as a needle
but the rain fell through October
and death lay a condemnation
within my blood.
The smell of your neck in August
a fine gold wire bejeweling war
all the rest lies
illusive as a farmhouse
on the other side of a valley
vanishing in the afternoon.
Day three day four day ten
the seventh step
a veiled door leading to my golden
anniversary
flameproofed free-paper shredded
in the teeth of a pillaging dog
never to dream of spiders
and when they turned the hoses upon me
a burst of light.
-- Audre Lorde
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