Move over Zimmerman! You have company
Commentary by Black Kos Editor JoanMar
For 18 long months, one family in North Carolina has been fighting for justice for their murdered son, and with little success. For some reason, young Christian Griggs's death has not made it into the national conversation. CNN has not deemed the circumstances surrounding Christian's death worthy of the much abused-breaking news banner. Right wing media has spent no time on this injustice because frankly, for them, it is as it ought to be. And so Tony and Dolly Griggs have been fighting against the twin evils of entrenched racism coupled with police corruption all by themselves. Maybe, just maybe we can make a difference.
Christian Griggs's life mattered.
The personalities:
A young black man (deceased); a white ex-wife and a beautiful child; a white father-in-law with very influential connections; the grieving parents; Vernon Stewart, the District Attorney.
Meet Christian Griggs:
The 23-year-old son of two military veterans earned an ROTC scholarship to attend North Carolina State University after graduating Harnett Central High School. But his daughter Jayden was born during his freshman year. Christian decided to drop out of college, marry his high school sweetheart, Katie Chisenhall, and enlist in the U.S. Army to provide for his new family. Murderer and “pastor” Pat Chisenhall, Katie’s dad, performed the ceremony.
The basics of the case:
On October 12, 2013, Christian went to pick up his daughter at his then separated-wife's family home. Soon after, he called his father, Tony Griggs, asking him to come over.
On October 12, 2013, white local Pastor Pat Chisenhall brutally killed his black son-in law 23-year-old Christian Griggs, fatally shooting Christian 6 times, 4 in the back as he lay wounded. The state medical examiner ruled Christian’s death a homicide.
Shot four times in the back, manner of death ruled a homicide, and the shooter is known; but yet there has been no arrest, no charge, no trial.
Sounds familiar?
According to Christian's parents:
* Months ago we were told by officials that no gunshot residue tests were performed, but when picking up Christian’s personal belongings this week we were presented with documentation revealing gunshot residue tests (GSR) performed on both Katie and Pat Chisenhall. GSR would determine who discharged the firearm and confirm or contradict their narrative of the shooting
* Christian's father, Tony Griggs, was the first to arrive at the scene (his son called him just before he was killed) and his description of what he saw differs from pictures shown to the legal counsel and it’s clear the crime scene had been doctored.
* The police report also indicates that the case was closed the day of the shooting with no investigation and prior to the autopsy release.
* Pat Chisenhall’s attorney is DA Stewart’s former partner, who is also a financial contributor to Stewart’s election committee.
* Pat Chisenhall claims not to remember the events of that day
I spoke to Christian's mom Dolly Griggs and invited her to become a member of the site. She is now a member (I'll not link to her profile as I am unsure of the protocol. We'll wait until she comments.). I told her that I planned on writing a diary about what happened to her son and that we want to do everything we can to put the spotlight on this injustice.
Here's how you can help:
Justice for Christian!
The family has a petition page up at iamcolorofchange.org seeking to get 8,000 signatures. They aim to get North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Thomas Walker, to take a second look at the case. When last I checked, they needed 850 more signatures.
Can we make that happen?
Tweet:
"Join me in securing justice for my son, #ChristianGriggs, shot 4x in back while picking up daughter" #ThisStopsToday http://d.shpg.org/...
Welcome to Daily Kos, Dolly Griggs. Please accept our heartfelt condolences on the loss of your precious son.
Rest in peace, Christian.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The title is 100% correct. Talking Point Memo: Why We Need Cameras.
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A white police officer has been charged with murder after video emerged showing him shooting a black motorists as he ran away. The video is shocking.
The camera was not a dash or body cam. It appears to have been shot by a bystander. But in almost every case cameras are the friend or whoever is telling the truth. And just as important, they shape behavior, probably actually preventing some tragedies from happening in the first place.
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When cops stop black drivers for minor traffic violations, it’s often a pretext for something more sinister. Slate: Broken Taillight Policing.
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Simply put, Slager’s stop of Scott—on an ordinary road in a sprawling Southern city—seems to fit a pattern identified by sociologists Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel in their massive study of traffic stops in the Kansas City metropolitan area, Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship. The authors identify two kinds of stops: traffic safety and investigatory. In the former, drivers are stopped for clearly breaking traffic laws, from speeding to driving under the influence. These stops are straightforward. Officers explain the offense, follow a procedure, and issue a ticket. The process is quick and unremarkable. This is true for whites and blacks. “In traffic-safety stops,” write Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel, “gender and age hardly matter at all and has race has no significant influence.” Or, as they say a little later in the book, “In stops for excessive speeding … the driver’s race has no relevance to the likelihood of being stopped. It is driving behavior, pure and simple, that determines whether a driver is stopped to enforce the traffic-safety laws.”
There are racial disparities in police stops—blacks are stopped twice as often as whites—but they aren’t related to traffic safety offenses, in which cops exercise a little less discretion and violations are equal within groups. Where we see a difference—even after we adjust for driving time (on average, blacks drive more and longer than whites)—is in investigatory stops. In these, drivers are stopped for exceedingly minor violations—driving too slowly, malfunctioning lights, failure to signal—which are used as pretext for investigations of the driver and the vehicle. Sanctioned by courts and institutionalized in most police departments, investigatory stops are aimed at “suspicious” drivers and meant to stop crime, not traffic offenses. And as the authors note, “virtually all of the wide racial disparity in the likelihood of being stopped is concentrated in one category of stops: discretionary stops for minor violations of the law.”
The difference between the two kinds of stops is dramatic. Where traffic safety stops are mostly painless (other than tickets), investigatory stops involve searches, impromptu interrogations, and occasionally handcuffs and weapons.
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In the study, 60 percent of all stops for whites were for traffic safety, versus 35 percent for blacks. By contrast, 52 percent of all stops for blacks (versus 34 percent for whites) were for events in which the reasons were minor (“You didn’t signal at the stop sign”). For 18 percent of black drivers, the reasons for the stops were nonexistent, while only 8 percent of white drivers weren’t given reasons for their stops.
But even this doesn’t capture the full picture. For that you need to look at the likelihood of stops as it relates to a host of demographic and vehicle information. And there, the pattern holds. Again, the authors say, for traffic safety stops, “the most important influences … are how people drive and not how they look.” The more you break traffic laws, the more likely it is you’ll get stopped. This isn’t true for investigatory stops. For white men, the odds of being stopped in this manner peak when they’re between 16 to 25 years old—when there’s a 15 percent chance—and decline so that by middle age, a given white man will have a smaller than 10 percent chance of being in an investigatory stop. (For white women, it’s less than 10 percent in youth and less than 5 percent in middle age.)
Black men aren’t so lucky. For them, the odds of being stopped this way start at 30 percent and don’t reach the 10 percent mark until they’re in their 50s. (For black women, it starts at roughly 20 percent and declines to under 10 percent by age 40.) Indeed, a black man at 70 is more likely to be stopped for a minor offense and investigated than a white man in his 30s, despite a much lower chance of criminal activity. The same pattern holds for your odds of being stopped more than once in a year; for young black men it’s upward of 35 percent, while for young white men it’s around 15 percent. Black men don’t reach 15 percent until their 40s, while the odds for white men dip to less than 10 percent by that time.
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75% of the record-breaking film's North American audience was nonwhite. Time: This Is the Real Reason Furious 7 Is a Box-Office Smash.
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Given how whitewashed this summer’s blockbusters look — from The Avengers to Jurassic World — it’s no surprise that audiences rushed to see Furious 7 this weekend, which grossed a whopping $385 million internationally. People want to see characters who look like them represented in the movies, and Fast & Furious is currently the only major action franchise that boasts a truly diverse cast.
In any other series, a handsome white guy like Paul Walker would be the sole hero. With the baby blues of Daniel Craig and a six-pack like Channing Tatum, he looks the part — it was a piece of what made him such a bankable star in the years leading up to his death. And ostensibly, Walker was the star of the first two films. But by the fifth installment, he was just one of an impressively diverse entourage that included an Italian-American man, a Japanese man, two black men, a Latino woman and an Israeli woman.
Yes, as it turns out, women can drive fast too. Fast & Furious has been surprisingly progressive when it comes to gender equality. Letty throws a punch as hard as Dominic. And when we meet an attractive female hacker (played by Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel) in the latest installment, one male character is quick to admonish another who assumes that only nerdy boys can be programmers.
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Akilah Hughes charges YouTube with biased promotion based on race. Color Lines: Are All YouTube Stars Created Equally?
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YouTube chooses to push certain personalities and channels via prominent placement on their homepage as well as endorsing them on their social media outlets. When Akilah Hughes of Fusion noticed a lack of promotion for YouTube creatives of color, she decided to keep track of the number of black Youtubers who received promotion during Black History Month on YouTube’s Twitter feed, which has 49 million followers.
Hughes counted 15 tweets total, 10 of which were well-known, award-winning musicians. In the same month, 167 tweets went out in promotion of white YouTubers.
Hughes writes:
The support of YouTube can launch a creator’s career, and turn mid-sized personalities into mega-stars. Sure, the company promotes YouTubers who have already garnered a substantial audience, but they are not merely reflecting precisely whatever is popular on the platform, but helping to create and shape their service. Their choices are a statement of values for the site.
Hughes also points out that the subjects of YouTube’s billboard, train wrap and commercial campaigning that took place last spring were three young girls who all had a similar appearance: “young, light-skinned, with brown hair.”
Writer, YouTuber Akilah Hughes Colorlines screengrab of Akilah Hughes YouTube video
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Actors of color on Hollywood's diversity push. Slate: This Is What It’s Like to Be an Actor of Color During TV’s “Diversity Push”.
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Last month, Nellie Andreeva wrote a particularly ill-advised piece for Deadline lamenting the sudden “uptick in ethnic casting.” (The original headline, “Pilots 2015: The Year of Ethnic Castings—About Time or Too Much of a Good Thing?” has since been changed to an only-slightly-less-egregious title in the wake of criticism.) In it, Andreeva referred to one anonymous talent agent who expressed relief at finally being able to pitch any actor who may seem right for the role, rather than having to ask casting directors ahead of time “if they would possibly consider an ethnic actor for a part, knowing they would most likely be rejected.”
Andreeva’s article implied that there is currently an (over)abundance of work for non-white actors in television. Sure, there has certainly been an increase in racial diversity on major network shows since the ’00s. But what does that “diversity” really look like for those who aren’t already established stars like Viola Davis and John Leguizamo? I spoke separately to three professional actors of color—Allen (who asked me not to use his real name because of the sensitivity of these issues), DeWanda Wise, and Arjun Gupta—about the current state of diversity in Hollywood, and their experiences navigating the boom in “ethnic casting.”
The cast of How to Get Away With Murder.
Photo by ABC Studios.
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In some ways this mirrors the issue with monuments to the confederate "heroes" in the US. The University of Cape Town (UCT) has voted to remove a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes that had become the focus of student protests. BBC: Cape Town university votes for removal of colonial statue.
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The monument will be taken down from the campus on Thursday and stored for "safe keeping", UCT's council said.
Students have been campaigning for the removal of the statue of the 19th century figure, unveiled in 1934. It was smeared with excrement last month. Other monuments to colonial-era leaders have also been recently vandalised.
The campaign has triggered a backlash. On Wednesday, crowds of white South Africans rallied at statues of Paul Kruger in the capital Pretoria, and Jan van Riebeeck in Cape Town, saying they were part of their heritage and should not be targeted.
Kruger, a contemporary of Rhodes, was an Afrikaner leader known for his opposition to the British in South Africa. Van Riebeeck was a Dutch coloniser who arrived in South Africa on 5 April 1652.
The statue of Cecil Rhodes was targeted last month
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Streets have received a new coat in a major makeover to welcome President Barack Obama, who flew into Jamaica late Wednesday for a historic visit. Miami Herald: Obama lands in Jamaica amid report that Cuba could soon be removed from terror list.
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Air Force One touched down at 7:30 local time, and Obama took off 14 minutes later in a helicopter for a Kingston hotel to meet with U.S. Embassy employees.
“I am overjoyed,” said Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, who gave Obama a brief hug.
What Jamaicans and Caribbean leaders can expect from Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Jamaica in three decades, is a matter of considerable debate. Obama planned to overnighton the island before meeting regional leaders then heading Thursday to the weekend Summit of the Americas in Panama, where Venezuela and Cuba are to be featured prominently.
The president landed in Jamaica amid a report that the State Department has recommended that Cuba be taken of the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. CNN reported late Wednesday that the administration was expected to made an announcement at anytime, perhaps as early as Thursday. Obama has long said that he favored removing Cuba from the list.
In Jamaica, a close neighbor to Cuba, residents had mixed reviews about the Obama visit.
“We feeling good, good,” said Elvar Barnaby, 57, a worker at National Heroes Park where employees spent Tuesday painting the rocks and trimming the grass while U.S. Secret Service agents made last minute checks. “We can’t stop talking about him even though we are not going to get to see him.”
Indeed, most of this nation of nearly three million will be lucky if they catch a glimpse of Obama, whose 2008 election was celebrated throughout the Caribbean but whose two terms as president have been marked by disappointment. Like others in the region, Caribbean nations have felt neglected by their largest security and trading partner as U.S. foreign policy focuses more on Iran, Ukraine and Islamic State militants.
U.S. President Barack Obama, right, visits the Bob Marley Museum with tour guide Natasha Clark, left, Wednesday, April 8, 2015 in Kingston, Jamaica. PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS AP
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