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Cincinnati. Judge blames talk radio as most important factor in racial tensions.
Cincinnati: "Judge Nathaniel Jones ... blames talk radio -- more than any other single factor -- for the increasing racial tensions." --Akron Beacon Journal. Living in Cincinnati, I can easily agree with this Akron Beacon Journal article. It says that talk radio is the root cause of the increasing racial tension in Cincinnati. I say that hate radio is therefore also the root cause of the increasingly frequent, police urge to shoot-to-kill, and is therefore the root cause of the riots. This article shows why we have an immediate need more independent media outlets.
----------PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY------------
The April 15, 2001 Akron Beacon Journal article is after the comments and the news links.
All the links are clickable in the copy of this at Ohio Valley IndyMedia:
http://www.ohiovalleyimc.org
WKRC 550AM and WLW 700AM are code-word racist (and often blatantly racist), 24-hour, Cincinnati talk radio stations with huge power, both in influence and wattage (WLW is 50,000 watts). All other talk radio is infrequent, and/or has very weak and noisy signals in most areas of greater Cincinnati. I can\'t even hear the 1000-watt signal from the black station mentioned in this article.
This article fails to mention that the far-right, white police union leader, Keith Fangman is a frequent guest on the two 24-hour hate radio stations. Many of his fellow police officers probably listen to this non-stop, hate radio indoctrination, since they voted Fangman as their leader. Keith Fangman may be pulling in his fangs this week to try and act slightly more moderate. But people in Cincinnati have heard his far-right thoughts for a long time on hate radio and elsewhere. Even the mayor (a conservative Democrat) has little positive to say about Fangman. Even during the unrest when prominent people are trying to mend fences, Fangman is scorned by many. With justification. There are many Cincinnati policemen who should be fired immediately.
The hate-radio talk show hosts specialize in generalizing about blacks, poor people, Democrats, \"liberals,\" single parents, women, feminists, ad nauseum. Typical Rush Windbag kind of call-in hate-radio. But those living outside Cincinnati have no idea just how bad it gets. It is far worse than the all-Republican all-the-time cable channels such as Fox News, etc..
The hate radio hosts in Cincinnati frequently get many overtly racist callers. And the hosts allow them to spew for long periods of time, and only occasionally try to steer the racist callers into more code-word types of racism. So the hosts can cover their ass by seeming only to be code-word racists with an open forum where anybody can exercise their free speech.
But it is not really an open forum. Callers have to wait a long time to get through. This alone weeds out saner, more progressive callers. And when the occasional, brave progressive gets through, they are interrupted constantly (as at the conservative cable TV show \"The O\'Reilly Factor\"), shouted over, or have the subject changed when the progressive begins to make persuasive points. And they are rarely allowed to speak as long as the far-right callers.
During rare calls with progressives, or the parts of calls when a conservative begins to drift toward progressive sanity, the host will then talk 90 percent of the time, and then the host hangs up on the caller abruptly. So conservatives learn that if they want to talk longer, then they must follow the far-right party line. It\'s positively Pavlovian! Most progressive people in Cincinnati long ago learned that calling in will result in this abuse.
Here are some good (and true) quotes from the Akron Beacon Journal article:
\"Judge Nathaniel Jones, a Youngstown native who moved to Cincinnati in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, blames talk radio -- more than any other single factor -- for the increasing racial tensions. ... It is a place where the city\'s charter prohibits discrimination against people of Appalachian descent, but where a human rights amendment prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals was struck down at the ballot box. It is a city of which Mark Twain once said, `If I heard the end of the world was coming tomorrow, I would rush to Cincinnati. Everything there happens 10 years later.\' ... The phone lines at `The Big One,\' a 50,000-watt station that reaches 38 states on a clear night, have been jammed non-stop all week. ... [Jones said:] `Unfortunately the impact of talk radio drowns out the positive elements of the community that are working daily to solve these problems,\' he said. `They don\'t have the megaphones and the mass media.\' ... Livingston welcomes the national media spotlight. But he, too, said reporters don\'t tell the whole story. For instance, he said, they failed to note that Police Chief Thomas Streicher Jr. himself shot and killed an unarmed man during an undercover drug bust gone bad in 1980.\"
Since Timothy Thomas was killed April 7, WLW 700AM, \"the big one,\" and WKRC 550AM have been spewing their code-word racism almost non-stop when the arch-conservative local hosts are on. There are a few non-far-right local hosts on these stations, but they usually don\'t talk about politics or controversial issues anyway.
There are some characteristic quotes from Bill Cunningham in the article. Believe me, these racist and code-word racist quotes are only the tip of the iceberg.
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Video, audio, text, photos, breaking news and more about the Cincinnati Ohio protests, riots, killings of 4 blacks (one by asphyxiation) by police since November, investigations, politics, racial profiling, police brutality, beanbag hospitalizations, etc.. 15 blacks killed by police since 1995. No whites. Corporate and progressive news URLs:
http://www.cincinow.com --TV 9. Video, audio, text, photos.
http://www.channelcincinnati.com --TV 5. Video, audio, text, photos.
http://www.cincynation.com --Various news sources compiled.
http://enquirer.com --Cincinnati Enquirer.
http://www.cincypost.com --Cincinnati Post.
http://www.citybeat.com --alternative weekly. Early firsthand reports.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/Local/Cincinnati_Riots/ --Yahoo Full Coverage.
Check AP and Reuters wires. Watch for Cincinnati articles to show up:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ts/nm/?u --Top Stories - Reuters.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ts/ap/?u --AP text and photos.
http://www.newsday.com/ap/text/topnews/index.htm --AP text.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/index.html -- Off The Wire. Raw news.
http://www.ohiovalleyimc.org --Ohio Valley Independent Media Center has many Cincinnati Unrest articles on the homepage and/or in the archives. To see more, click the \"display all articles\" link at the bottom right, and then keep clicking \"display next articles.\" Post articles! Links (full URLS) in articles are made clickable.
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Published Sunday, April 15, 2001, in the Akron Beacon Journal.
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/030292.htm
OHIO NEWS 7-DAY ARCHIVE
Monday ~ Tuesday ~ Wednesday ~ Thursday ~ Friday ~ Saturday ~ Sunday
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Cincinnati waits to exhale.
Radio hosts distill Queen City into sound bites that bite back.
By Gregory Korte
Beacon Journal staff writer
CINCINNATI: Cincinnati is not in Ohio.
Despite the popular belief, Cincinnatians will tell you, Columbus is not their state capital. They want nothing to do with Cleveland, and they\'ve only vaguely heard of Akron.
Cincinnati is a city-state, a place unto itself.
Too often when Cincinnati is in the national headlines, it\'s for something negative: Marge Schott. Robert Mapplethorpe. Pete Rose. Larry Flynt.
And now the riots -- the worst in the United States in almost a decade -- that have followed the shooting of an unarmed 19-year-old man last weekend.
``Needless to say, we haven\'t done ourselves any favors in the last week in terms of our image,\'\' Mayor Charlie Luken said Friday.
As a result, Cincinnatians have grown defensive of their city, distrustful of outsiders and skeptical of the national media that often portrays them as a conservative backwater.
These are things you have to know about Cincinnati in order to understand the reaction to the police shooting of a 19-year-old unarmed black man last weekend.
It is a proud city that, perhaps until last week, was a serious contender in its bid for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
It is a community whose black population has grown from 28 percent to 44 percent in the last 30 years.
It is a place where the city\'s charter prohibits discrimination against people of Appalachian descent, but where a human rights amendment prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals was struck down at the ballot box.
It is a city of which Mark Twain once said, ``If I heard the end of the world was coming tomorrow, I would rush to Cincinnati. Everything there happens 10 years later. \'\'
It is a town with four network television stations and two daily newspapers, but where talk radio is king.
Talk radio is king.
The phone lines at ``The Big One,\'\' a 50,000-watt station that reaches 38 states on a clear night, have been jammed non-stop all week.
WLW talk show host Bill Cunningham gives out the call-in number every 10 minutes, but after three hours, he turns the microphone over to afternoon drive host Gary Burbank, saying, ``Do you know how many calls I took? None. You\'ve got them all.\'\'
On this Thursday of last week, Cunningham monopolizes the three hours with monologues and interviews with a long line of high-powered guests, from the mayor on down. At night, Cunningham makes appearances on national cable news shows, forming his arguments into conveniently packaged sound bites.
On his radio program, his rhetoric is consistently conservative and his attitude is unabashedly -- perhaps stubbornly -- provincial.
Listen in to what he said:
On Wednesday: ``There was more racist rioting by black males yesterday in Cincinnati than the entire history of the Ku Klux Klan.\'\'
On Thursday: ``If it\'s black on white violence, we don\'t cover it much. If it\'s white on black, all hell breaks loose. There\'s a double standard.\'\'
On Friday: ``Does it make sense for the curfew to be only for black males under 30, since they\'re the ones causing all the trouble? Of course it does. Will it happen? Of course not, because it\'s racially insensitive. And the biggest crime you can commit in this day and age is to be racially insensitive.\'\'
A divorce lawyer before he landed a radio show dispensing free legal advice, Cunningham calls himself ``the voice of the common man.\'\' After 18 years on the air, he has parlayed his fame into a chain of sports-themed restaurants called Willie\'s.
In an interview, Cunningham said he doesn\'t care what the rest of the country thinks of his hometown.
``As a Cincinnatian, I couldn\'t care less,\'\' he said, laughing. ``When I look at New York and Los Angeles, and the filth and the degradation, I am sickened to my stomach. And I say, if you don\'t like Cincinnati, then up your nose with a rubber hose.\'\'
Cunningham said television news has fixated on the image of a seemingly peaceful woman getting sprayed with mace -- point blank -- by a Cincinnati police officer in riot-control gear last Tuesday.
They don\'t show video, he said, of incidents like the one on Wednesday, when a white woman in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Avondale was pulled from her car and beaten by an angry black mob.
Reporters recite the fact that 15 black males have died at the hands of police since 1995, he said. But they do not point out that, according to Cunningham, the use of force was justified in 13 of those cases.
``You shoot at cops and you tend to get shot back,\'\' he said. ``The black politicians have used this as a pretext to advance a left-wing radical agenda in this town, and they\'re winning.\'\'
Cunningham asks: ``Where is the black leadership, when black people are rioting and looting? . . . I would like to know where black kids are taught their hatred of white people. Is it their homes? Is it their churches?\'\'
Radio wars
Uptown, in a nondescript office building in Roselawn, a cast of lesser-known talk show hosts has been answering calls constantly since Monday.
At WDBZ ``The Buzz,\'\' the 1,000-watt signal doesn\'t make it past the I-275 belt surrounding the Cincinnati area. But the station\'s audience is mostly urban anyway.
This station also has high-powered guests: the mayor, the mother of the 19-year-old man shot by police last weekend, Black Panther leader Malik Shabazz and rapper Master P.
Afternoon host Nate Livingston worked for WLW until 1997, when he got fired for remarks about then-Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters, now state treasurer.
After a man had shot and killed two police officers before turning the gun on himself -- an event that many blame for setting police on edge and leading to the recent shootings -- Livingston said: ``Don\'t kill the police officers! Go kill the prosecutors! Don\'t kill police officers because you\'re mad at Deters! Go kill Deters!\'\'
A grand jury convened to consider charges of menacing but it cleared Livingston, who said he now regrets the remark.
A 32-year-old former neighborhood activist, Livingston said the recent riots are a symptom of much deeper racial problems -- problems the city has refused to address in 30 years.
There are the 15 black men killed at the hands of police, of course, but there\'s also routine racial profiling.
When white kids skip school to attend Cincinnati Reds Opening Day, he said, police look the other way. When black kids stayed out past curfew to attend a jazz festival last year, they were arrested.
``They wouldn\'t have dreamed of bringing out the paddy wagons and handcuffing white kids for truancy,\'\' Livingston said.
As whites have fled the city, so too have police officers. Cincinnati abolished its residency rule for city employees a decade ago. And while the city is 44 percent black, the percentage of blacks on the police force is about half that.
As a result, Livingston contends, police don\'t understand the neighborhoods they patrol. And rookie cops are sent to the worst neighborhoods.
``Some people say the issue is, a guy was running from the police, and the police are scared,\'\' Livingston said. ``If you\'re a police officer and you say you\'re scared, you\'re in the wrong line of work.\'\'
Livingston welcomes the national media spotlight. But he, too, said reporters don\'t tell the whole story. For instance, he said, they failed to note that Police Chief Thomas Streicher Jr. himself shot and killed an unarmed man during an undercover drug bust gone bad in 1980.
``Cunningham asks where the black leadership is,\'\' he said. ``The question I have is, where are the white leaders when black people are getting shot by the police?\'\'
Blaming show hosts.
Judge Nathaniel Jones, a Youngstown native who moved to Cincinnati in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, blames talk radio -- more than any other single factor -- for the increasing racial tensions.
``If you listen to those stations, you get the full measure of the gap that faces our two communities,\'\' he said, referring to ``The Big One\'\' and ``The Buzz.\'\'
In a speech two months ago, he called Cunningham\'s show ``trash, profanity and filth.\'\'
And the judge, who is black, doesn\'t give Livingston a pass, either. ``Let me give you a word of warning about Nate Livingston. He\'s been a very divisive factor in this community. Only in the last few days has he begun to moderate his remarks.\'\'
Jones said there are many reasons for Cincinnatians to be hopeful. The police department, while still not as diverse as the population, has improved from 20 years ago when 4 percent of officers were black.
He sees more black-white interaction in the city than 20 years ago, and he said, ``Blacks have never had more influence in shaping the agenda of the city than they have now.\'\'
``Unfortunately the impact of talk radio drowns out the positive elements of the community that are working daily to solve these problems,\'\' he said. ``They don\'t have the megaphones and the mass media.\'\'
Mayor blamed
One thing the two radio hosts agree on -- albeit for different reasons -- is that the mayor has mishandled the situation.
Cincinnati\'s charter has a city manager form of government. It\'s a purposefully conservative structure in which the top vote-getter for City Council becomes the mayor -- a title that conveys little power.
While some Council members have called for the resignation of the city manager, there\'s no one elected official who can take charge of the situation -- as can the mayor in a strong-mayor form of government.
That structure will change next year, when voters will elect the first-ever strong mayor, who will have veto power over City Council and the ability to hire and fire the city manager.
So far, Luken is the only candidate. He is the 49-year-old son of a congressman, a former congressman himself and a former news anchor on WLWT-TV. (He succeeded Jerry Springer, who was mayor of Cincinnati himself in the 1970s.)
Luken is ``trying to curry favor with black radical liberals, who see police as an occupying force, and with the corporate Procter & Gamble types,\'\' Cunningham said.
``He\'s on this teeter-totter trying to do a balancing act, and he\'s not doing a very good job of it. And I consider Charlie Luken a friend.\'\'
Cunningham criticized Luken for allowing out-of-control black radicals to hijack a City Council meeting this week.
``I could imagine what would happen in Akron if 1,000 militia types went to City Council, jumped up on the desk, and said, `We\'re not leaving until you change the gun laws,\' \'\' Cunningham said. ``Would the mayor say, `They have a viewpoint that needs to be heard?\' I don\'t think so.\'\'
Still, Livingston said Luken is talking about police brutality, but not doing anything about it.
And he said blacks and whites are talking to themselves about the racial issues dividing the city, but not to each other.
``It\'s like we\'re on two different planets in Cincinnati,\'\' Livingston said.
``Talk radio can be used as a force for good, or a force for bad,\'\' he said. ``Personally, I like Bill Cunningham. He\'s a smart guy. He\'s an attorney. He\'s witty. He\'s funny at times, and he\'s persuasive.
``But I think what that guy does is to constantly beat into white Cincinnatians this idea that they\'re losing their rights, that they\'re slowly losing their way of life,\'\' he said. ``Bill, under the cloak of diversity of opinion, tells white Cincinnatians that it\'s OK to be racist.\'\'
Gregory Korte, who grew up in Cincinnati, has been in the Queen City this week covering the racial tension. He is the City Hall reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal.
Gregory Korte can be reached at 330-996-3542 or gkorte [at] thebeaconjournal.com
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Here is the clickable copy of this at Ohio Valley IndyMedia:
http://ohiovalleyimc.org/cgi-bin/imc.pl?where=display&article=209
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More synchronicity (Is this a word? It ought to be.) Found this below also at Global IndyMedia today.
I especially like the racist history of the police outlined here. And also the discussion of the many white riots in the last few years. Also the discussion of Cincinnati\'s FOP, Keith Fangman, the Klan cross on Fountain Square, and much more Cincinnati lore. Racism on the message boards, etc.. Good stuff.
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15 Dead in Ohio: The Black and the Blue in Cincinnati (english)
by Tim Wise 6:58am Tue Apr 17 \'01
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=34910&group=webcast
In seeking to justify the deaths of the 15 black males, Cincinnati Police Sergeant Harry Roberts noted that those killed were all \"criminals who resisted arrest,\" leading one to wonder just what is the allowable punishment for \"resisting arrest\" in Ohio nowadays? I mean damn, I knew the death penalty was still popular with most folks, but execution for running away from a cop?
Sometimes, folks don\'t even bother hiding their racism. Take Keith Fangman, President of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police. In the wake of this past week\'s uprising to protest the killing of Tim Thomas and fourteen other black men by his colleagues since 1995, Fangman said:
\"If we give one inch to these terrorists in the form of negotiations, then we\'ve got no one to blame but ourselves when we turn into another Detroit or Washington D.C.\"
Now, he could have said that negotiating with the \"rioters\" would turn Cincinnati into another Boulder, Colorado, or Carbondale, Illinois, or East Lansing, Michigan, or Eugene, Oregon, or State College, Pennsylvania, or Storrs, Connecticut, or Pullman, Washington, or Tucson, Arizona--all sites of major riots by drunken white college students in recent years. But he didn\'t. He picked Detroit and D.C.--two places that haven\'t had any riots lately, but which both have a lot of black people. And that, after all was his point.
Now frankly, for any representative of the official Police Corruption and Brutality Protection Union (commonly known as the FOP) to refer to those who rebel against cop violence as terrorists, is, well, precious to say the least. I think the old saying \"takes one to know one,\" probably applies here. Oddly enough the only \"terrorists\" in evidence in Fangman\'s town are the Klansmen he and his pals protect every Christmas season when they erect their lit cross in Fountain Square. The rights of a 135-year old paramilitary hate group apparently count for more to Cincinnati authorities than the lives of young black men.
To hear police representatives tell it, blacks in Cincinnati still have no rights that a member of the FOP is bound to respect. In seeking to justify the deaths of the 15 black males, Cincinnati Police Sergeant Harry Roberts noted that those killed were all \"criminals who resisted arrest,\" leading one to wonder just what is the allowable punishment for \"resisting arrest\" in Ohio nowadays? I mean damn, I knew the death penalty was still popular with most folks, but execution for running away from a cop?
And as for the \"criminals\" whose lives have been snuffed by the Cincinnati police, they include not only Tim Thomas--whose rap sheet was filled with traffic offenses like not wearing a seatbelt (the savage!)--but also Roger Owensby Jr., who had no criminal record, but whose \"attitude\" convinced police to arrest him for \"disorderly conduct\" and apply a deadly chokehold in the process. And then there was Lorenzo Collins, a mentally handicapped and emotionally disturbed young man whose shooting was explained as necessary since he was wielding a solitary brick and threatening to throw it at police--fifteen of them who surrounded him before dropping him in a hail of bullets. Sounds like a fair fight. Or Michael Carpenter, who was shot in the back of the head during a traffic stop. Or Courtney Mathis, a \"menace to society\" all of twelve years old who borrowed a relative\'s car and who was shot to death for trying to flee after being pulled over.
Apparently the Cincinnati police have a hard time distinguishing between children and hardened criminals. Following the funeral for Thomas on Saturday, cops opened fire with rubber bullets and beanbag ammunition, shooting a seven year old black female during a demonstration and march.
But hey, as the FOP\'s official slogan boasts, they\'re just \"building on a proud tradition.\" A tradition that reaches all the way back to 1915, to a time when many a proud member of this proud organization proudly and rather openly engaged in the murder of African Americans by joining in anti-black riots and lynchings. In the first forty years of the twentieth century, about half of all blacks who were killed, were killed by law enforcement, including, one can be sure, many a dues-paying member of the FOP\'s Aryan brotherhood in blue.
In recent years the Cincinnati police in particular have been building on a proud tradition of racism that has finally resulted in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and a local coalition of African American leaders. Among the dozens of racist actions prompting the suit, perhaps the most egregious involves a pregnant mother of two and her husband who were detained and handcuffed at gunpoint in front of their children, even as the officers involved explained to them that they were looking for two adult males driving a similar kind of car.
But rather than focus their attention on weeding out those officers who engage in racist and brutal practices, the FOP prefers to concentrate on such important tasks as boycotting movies whose stars are supportive of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Seeing Mumia killed and picketing Rage Against the Machine concerts have been among the group\'s top priorities in recent years. And even though the FOP rejected racial profiling at their September 2000 National Board Meeting, they insisted on the legitimacy of \"criminal profiling,\" the definition of which apparently still includes race as a factor of suspicion.
And of course there are those who think this is just fine. On many a chatroom bulletin board one can find any number of angry whites, defending the actions of the police and chastising the black community in Cincinnati in only the most thinly concealed racist terms.
\"Most cop killers are black,\" comes the cry from some--an argument that is both historically false and irrelevant. Even if true, who but the most racist, unfeeling soul could use such a \"fact\" to justify killing someone whose skin color happened to match that of the offending group? In fact, by this logic of \"rational\" discrimination or rational murder, blacks would have far greater reason to kill white police officers than these officers would have to kill black people. After all, most of the cops who have killed blacks have been white. But somehow I doubt that those who think statistical models should be used to justify unequal treatment would appreciate the use of the one to which I\'m alluding here.
\"Police put their lives on the line every day,\' say others, \'and we shouldn\'t second-guess them when they have to use deadly force.\" But police are actually half as likely to die on the job as farmers, fishermen, truckers, construction workers or miners. And a lot less likely to die from being police officers than black folks are, just from being black. Whether from police violence itself, or inadequate health care services, the excess mortality rate for African Americans is far higher than that of police, yet rarely is there much sympathy for how often black people \"put their lives on the line every day\" just trying to survive in this country.
\"Notice that we whites don\'t go riot every time something bad happens to us,\' comes the mantra from still others, followed by the predictable, \'and look at what animals those blacks are--they burn down their own neighborhood!\" True enough, whites don\'t riot over things like police brutality, mostly because we aren\'t often the victims of it; but also because we are too busy rioting over other things--like the outcomes of sporting events or crackdowns on underage drinking. Yep, at over twenty college campuses since 1995, white co-eds have taken to the streets in their own neighborhoods and gone absolutely ape-shit: burning furniture and cars in giant bonfires, hurling bottles and rocks at police, and smashing glass in business windows. 1500 people at Colorado University, 1500 at Penn State, 500 at the University of New Hampshire, 300 at the University of Oregon, and over 10,000 at Michigan State in 1999.
And yet, when whites riot (and don\'t even get me started on Woodstock \'99 again), not only do we not call them \"terrorists,\" cops rarely if ever shoot them with rubber bullets or spray them at point-blank range with mace. Although many arrests were made and harsh sentences handed out in the wake of the Michigan State riot two years ago, coverage was still largely sympathetic, with media asking \"what made good kids do bad things?\" and focusing on the otherwise \"straight arrows\" who got caught up in the moment. Hell, in that particular riot, white students were caught actually trying to pry a loaded shotgun from a police car (before trying to push the vehicle into the fire)--an act that surely would result in death number sixteen were a black Cincinnatian to try it, but which, in East Lansing, only prompted a brief volley of tear gas, in order to disperse the crowd.
And most telling of all, in the wake of the two most serious white college riots--Colorado and Michigan State--police and residents in the riot zone actually reached out to students in an attempt to \"understand their frustrations\" more fully. According to Boulder officials, the riots led to a greater attempt by police to improve their relations with students; and in East Lansing, local residents launched a campaign to \"adopt\" entire dorm floors, invite students to backyard barbecues and let the kids know \"that we appreciate them in the community,\" according to one neighbor. I will swallow my keyboard if anything like that happens in Cincinnati.
After all, in Cincinnati there\'s plenty of room for Klan crosses in public parks, racist baseball team owners like Marge Schott, and blowhards like Keith Fangman and the FOP, but no room apparently for civilian review of the police, accountability for cop violence, or a real challenge to institutional racism at the highest levels. It will be up to the folks in the streets to change that.
http://www.zmag.org/15dead.htm
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Tue Apr 17 11:37:56 2001 -- As Rush Windbag might say, \"Great Minds Think Alike\" or \"Excellence in Broadcasting.\" Global Indymedia article on Hate Speech.
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This seems to have been posted at Global IndyMedia the same day. I like the synchronicity.
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The Power of Hate Speech (english)
by Par Tridge 8:12am Tue Apr 17 \'01
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=34918&group=webcast
The power of hate speech and the capacity for evil in humanity.
What if Eminem didn\'t say he wanted to kill \"fags\". Let\'s say he used the words \"Jews\" or \"N***s\"? What if he started wearing swastikas and such? What if he played arenas dressed in full Nazi regalia? Would you be so sanctimonious about the first amendment and the right to say/express whatever we wanted?
The reason we need to pay attention to the prevalence of hate speech in music and ALL MEDIA is the fact that most people are little better than mindless followers. They do not condemn evil because it is evil, they condemn it because some leader told them to condemn it. People are profoundly SOCIAL creatures, easily led and eager to conform. They can do great good, i.e. building bridges or they can do great evil, i.e. killing/ torturing millions.
Media outlets have done a masterful job of absolving themselves of any responsibility for any social ills historic or current. The fact is that they have played a major role, sometimes as the primary instigator, of most major horrors of the modern day.
I urge everyone to read \"Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America\" James Allen (Editor). Tens of thousands of black men were tortured and killed in the deep south after the civil war (when their physical well being was no longer a financial interest of whites). Most lynchings were orchestrated by newspapers in the south. Public sentiment was inflamed with vicious hate speech and wild accusations against the lynching victim whose real crime was a matter of skin color. People came from all over the south to attend what was often termed \"n** barbeques\". The brutality of the mobs was horrifying and mutilation often involved cutting off fingers, ears, and other body parts. The newspapers would print detailed accounts of the lynching, obviously unafraid of legal consequences. Often, the whites involved in the mob were so proud of their handiwork, postcards were made of the lynched mans picture for all to take home and send to friends.
For most newspapers, lynchings were a guaranteed money maker. They could sell a lot of papers this way. Why not revive this tradition, if we so treasure free speech? I guarantee you that you could jail every member of a mob after one lynching and the newspaper could whip up another mob in a day. When would we decide to hold the correct parties responsible?
Remember, millions died not due to Hitler\'s direct order, but to the atmosphere and encouragement of his speech.
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The April 15, 2001 Akron Beacon Journal article is after the comments and the news links.
All the links are clickable in the copy of this at Ohio Valley IndyMedia:
http://www.ohiovalleyimc.org
WKRC 550AM and WLW 700AM are code-word racist (and often blatantly racist), 24-hour, Cincinnati talk radio stations with huge power, both in influence and wattage (WLW is 50,000 watts). All other talk radio is infrequent, and/or has very weak and noisy signals in most areas of greater Cincinnati. I can\'t even hear the 1000-watt signal from the black station mentioned in this article.
This article fails to mention that the far-right, white police union leader, Keith Fangman is a frequent guest on the two 24-hour hate radio stations. Many of his fellow police officers probably listen to this non-stop, hate radio indoctrination, since they voted Fangman as their leader. Keith Fangman may be pulling in his fangs this week to try and act slightly more moderate. But people in Cincinnati have heard his far-right thoughts for a long time on hate radio and elsewhere. Even the mayor (a conservative Democrat) has little positive to say about Fangman. Even during the unrest when prominent people are trying to mend fences, Fangman is scorned by many. With justification. There are many Cincinnati policemen who should be fired immediately.
The hate-radio talk show hosts specialize in generalizing about blacks, poor people, Democrats, \"liberals,\" single parents, women, feminists, ad nauseum. Typical Rush Windbag kind of call-in hate-radio. But those living outside Cincinnati have no idea just how bad it gets. It is far worse than the all-Republican all-the-time cable channels such as Fox News, etc..
The hate radio hosts in Cincinnati frequently get many overtly racist callers. And the hosts allow them to spew for long periods of time, and only occasionally try to steer the racist callers into more code-word types of racism. So the hosts can cover their ass by seeming only to be code-word racists with an open forum where anybody can exercise their free speech.
But it is not really an open forum. Callers have to wait a long time to get through. This alone weeds out saner, more progressive callers. And when the occasional, brave progressive gets through, they are interrupted constantly (as at the conservative cable TV show \"The O\'Reilly Factor\"), shouted over, or have the subject changed when the progressive begins to make persuasive points. And they are rarely allowed to speak as long as the far-right callers.
During rare calls with progressives, or the parts of calls when a conservative begins to drift toward progressive sanity, the host will then talk 90 percent of the time, and then the host hangs up on the caller abruptly. So conservatives learn that if they want to talk longer, then they must follow the far-right party line. It\'s positively Pavlovian! Most progressive people in Cincinnati long ago learned that calling in will result in this abuse.
Here are some good (and true) quotes from the Akron Beacon Journal article:
\"Judge Nathaniel Jones, a Youngstown native who moved to Cincinnati in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, blames talk radio -- more than any other single factor -- for the increasing racial tensions. ... It is a place where the city\'s charter prohibits discrimination against people of Appalachian descent, but where a human rights amendment prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals was struck down at the ballot box. It is a city of which Mark Twain once said, `If I heard the end of the world was coming tomorrow, I would rush to Cincinnati. Everything there happens 10 years later.\' ... The phone lines at `The Big One,\' a 50,000-watt station that reaches 38 states on a clear night, have been jammed non-stop all week. ... [Jones said:] `Unfortunately the impact of talk radio drowns out the positive elements of the community that are working daily to solve these problems,\' he said. `They don\'t have the megaphones and the mass media.\' ... Livingston welcomes the national media spotlight. But he, too, said reporters don\'t tell the whole story. For instance, he said, they failed to note that Police Chief Thomas Streicher Jr. himself shot and killed an unarmed man during an undercover drug bust gone bad in 1980.\"
Since Timothy Thomas was killed April 7, WLW 700AM, \"the big one,\" and WKRC 550AM have been spewing their code-word racism almost non-stop when the arch-conservative local hosts are on. There are a few non-far-right local hosts on these stations, but they usually don\'t talk about politics or controversial issues anyway.
There are some characteristic quotes from Bill Cunningham in the article. Believe me, these racist and code-word racist quotes are only the tip of the iceberg.
---------
Video, audio, text, photos, breaking news and more about the Cincinnati Ohio protests, riots, killings of 4 blacks (one by asphyxiation) by police since November, investigations, politics, racial profiling, police brutality, beanbag hospitalizations, etc.. 15 blacks killed by police since 1995. No whites. Corporate and progressive news URLs:
http://www.cincinow.com --TV 9. Video, audio, text, photos.
http://www.channelcincinnati.com --TV 5. Video, audio, text, photos.
http://www.cincynation.com --Various news sources compiled.
http://enquirer.com --Cincinnati Enquirer.
http://www.cincypost.com --Cincinnati Post.
http://www.citybeat.com --alternative weekly. Early firsthand reports.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/Local/Cincinnati_Riots/ --Yahoo Full Coverage.
Check AP and Reuters wires. Watch for Cincinnati articles to show up:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ts/nm/?u --Top Stories - Reuters.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ts/ap/?u --AP text and photos.
http://www.newsday.com/ap/text/topnews/index.htm --AP text.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/index.html -- Off The Wire. Raw news.
http://www.ohiovalleyimc.org --Ohio Valley Independent Media Center has many Cincinnati Unrest articles on the homepage and/or in the archives. To see more, click the \"display all articles\" link at the bottom right, and then keep clicking \"display next articles.\" Post articles! Links (full URLS) in articles are made clickable.
===================================
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Published Sunday, April 15, 2001, in the Akron Beacon Journal.
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/030292.htm
OHIO NEWS 7-DAY ARCHIVE
Monday ~ Tuesday ~ Wednesday ~ Thursday ~ Friday ~ Saturday ~ Sunday
------------------------------------
Cincinnati waits to exhale.
Radio hosts distill Queen City into sound bites that bite back.
By Gregory Korte
Beacon Journal staff writer
CINCINNATI: Cincinnati is not in Ohio.
Despite the popular belief, Cincinnatians will tell you, Columbus is not their state capital. They want nothing to do with Cleveland, and they\'ve only vaguely heard of Akron.
Cincinnati is a city-state, a place unto itself.
Too often when Cincinnati is in the national headlines, it\'s for something negative: Marge Schott. Robert Mapplethorpe. Pete Rose. Larry Flynt.
And now the riots -- the worst in the United States in almost a decade -- that have followed the shooting of an unarmed 19-year-old man last weekend.
``Needless to say, we haven\'t done ourselves any favors in the last week in terms of our image,\'\' Mayor Charlie Luken said Friday.
As a result, Cincinnatians have grown defensive of their city, distrustful of outsiders and skeptical of the national media that often portrays them as a conservative backwater.
These are things you have to know about Cincinnati in order to understand the reaction to the police shooting of a 19-year-old unarmed black man last weekend.
It is a proud city that, perhaps until last week, was a serious contender in its bid for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
It is a community whose black population has grown from 28 percent to 44 percent in the last 30 years.
It is a place where the city\'s charter prohibits discrimination against people of Appalachian descent, but where a human rights amendment prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals was struck down at the ballot box.
It is a city of which Mark Twain once said, ``If I heard the end of the world was coming tomorrow, I would rush to Cincinnati. Everything there happens 10 years later. \'\'
It is a town with four network television stations and two daily newspapers, but where talk radio is king.
Talk radio is king.
The phone lines at ``The Big One,\'\' a 50,000-watt station that reaches 38 states on a clear night, have been jammed non-stop all week.
WLW talk show host Bill Cunningham gives out the call-in number every 10 minutes, but after three hours, he turns the microphone over to afternoon drive host Gary Burbank, saying, ``Do you know how many calls I took? None. You\'ve got them all.\'\'
On this Thursday of last week, Cunningham monopolizes the three hours with monologues and interviews with a long line of high-powered guests, from the mayor on down. At night, Cunningham makes appearances on national cable news shows, forming his arguments into conveniently packaged sound bites.
On his radio program, his rhetoric is consistently conservative and his attitude is unabashedly -- perhaps stubbornly -- provincial.
Listen in to what he said:
On Wednesday: ``There was more racist rioting by black males yesterday in Cincinnati than the entire history of the Ku Klux Klan.\'\'
On Thursday: ``If it\'s black on white violence, we don\'t cover it much. If it\'s white on black, all hell breaks loose. There\'s a double standard.\'\'
On Friday: ``Does it make sense for the curfew to be only for black males under 30, since they\'re the ones causing all the trouble? Of course it does. Will it happen? Of course not, because it\'s racially insensitive. And the biggest crime you can commit in this day and age is to be racially insensitive.\'\'
A divorce lawyer before he landed a radio show dispensing free legal advice, Cunningham calls himself ``the voice of the common man.\'\' After 18 years on the air, he has parlayed his fame into a chain of sports-themed restaurants called Willie\'s.
In an interview, Cunningham said he doesn\'t care what the rest of the country thinks of his hometown.
``As a Cincinnatian, I couldn\'t care less,\'\' he said, laughing. ``When I look at New York and Los Angeles, and the filth and the degradation, I am sickened to my stomach. And I say, if you don\'t like Cincinnati, then up your nose with a rubber hose.\'\'
Cunningham said television news has fixated on the image of a seemingly peaceful woman getting sprayed with mace -- point blank -- by a Cincinnati police officer in riot-control gear last Tuesday.
They don\'t show video, he said, of incidents like the one on Wednesday, when a white woman in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Avondale was pulled from her car and beaten by an angry black mob.
Reporters recite the fact that 15 black males have died at the hands of police since 1995, he said. But they do not point out that, according to Cunningham, the use of force was justified in 13 of those cases.
``You shoot at cops and you tend to get shot back,\'\' he said. ``The black politicians have used this as a pretext to advance a left-wing radical agenda in this town, and they\'re winning.\'\'
Cunningham asks: ``Where is the black leadership, when black people are rioting and looting? . . . I would like to know where black kids are taught their hatred of white people. Is it their homes? Is it their churches?\'\'
Radio wars
Uptown, in a nondescript office building in Roselawn, a cast of lesser-known talk show hosts has been answering calls constantly since Monday.
At WDBZ ``The Buzz,\'\' the 1,000-watt signal doesn\'t make it past the I-275 belt surrounding the Cincinnati area. But the station\'s audience is mostly urban anyway.
This station also has high-powered guests: the mayor, the mother of the 19-year-old man shot by police last weekend, Black Panther leader Malik Shabazz and rapper Master P.
Afternoon host Nate Livingston worked for WLW until 1997, when he got fired for remarks about then-Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters, now state treasurer.
After a man had shot and killed two police officers before turning the gun on himself -- an event that many blame for setting police on edge and leading to the recent shootings -- Livingston said: ``Don\'t kill the police officers! Go kill the prosecutors! Don\'t kill police officers because you\'re mad at Deters! Go kill Deters!\'\'
A grand jury convened to consider charges of menacing but it cleared Livingston, who said he now regrets the remark.
A 32-year-old former neighborhood activist, Livingston said the recent riots are a symptom of much deeper racial problems -- problems the city has refused to address in 30 years.
There are the 15 black men killed at the hands of police, of course, but there\'s also routine racial profiling.
When white kids skip school to attend Cincinnati Reds Opening Day, he said, police look the other way. When black kids stayed out past curfew to attend a jazz festival last year, they were arrested.
``They wouldn\'t have dreamed of bringing out the paddy wagons and handcuffing white kids for truancy,\'\' Livingston said.
As whites have fled the city, so too have police officers. Cincinnati abolished its residency rule for city employees a decade ago. And while the city is 44 percent black, the percentage of blacks on the police force is about half that.
As a result, Livingston contends, police don\'t understand the neighborhoods they patrol. And rookie cops are sent to the worst neighborhoods.
``Some people say the issue is, a guy was running from the police, and the police are scared,\'\' Livingston said. ``If you\'re a police officer and you say you\'re scared, you\'re in the wrong line of work.\'\'
Livingston welcomes the national media spotlight. But he, too, said reporters don\'t tell the whole story. For instance, he said, they failed to note that Police Chief Thomas Streicher Jr. himself shot and killed an unarmed man during an undercover drug bust gone bad in 1980.
``Cunningham asks where the black leadership is,\'\' he said. ``The question I have is, where are the white leaders when black people are getting shot by the police?\'\'
Blaming show hosts.
Judge Nathaniel Jones, a Youngstown native who moved to Cincinnati in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, blames talk radio -- more than any other single factor -- for the increasing racial tensions.
``If you listen to those stations, you get the full measure of the gap that faces our two communities,\'\' he said, referring to ``The Big One\'\' and ``The Buzz.\'\'
In a speech two months ago, he called Cunningham\'s show ``trash, profanity and filth.\'\'
And the judge, who is black, doesn\'t give Livingston a pass, either. ``Let me give you a word of warning about Nate Livingston. He\'s been a very divisive factor in this community. Only in the last few days has he begun to moderate his remarks.\'\'
Jones said there are many reasons for Cincinnatians to be hopeful. The police department, while still not as diverse as the population, has improved from 20 years ago when 4 percent of officers were black.
He sees more black-white interaction in the city than 20 years ago, and he said, ``Blacks have never had more influence in shaping the agenda of the city than they have now.\'\'
``Unfortunately the impact of talk radio drowns out the positive elements of the community that are working daily to solve these problems,\'\' he said. ``They don\'t have the megaphones and the mass media.\'\'
Mayor blamed
One thing the two radio hosts agree on -- albeit for different reasons -- is that the mayor has mishandled the situation.
Cincinnati\'s charter has a city manager form of government. It\'s a purposefully conservative structure in which the top vote-getter for City Council becomes the mayor -- a title that conveys little power.
While some Council members have called for the resignation of the city manager, there\'s no one elected official who can take charge of the situation -- as can the mayor in a strong-mayor form of government.
That structure will change next year, when voters will elect the first-ever strong mayor, who will have veto power over City Council and the ability to hire and fire the city manager.
So far, Luken is the only candidate. He is the 49-year-old son of a congressman, a former congressman himself and a former news anchor on WLWT-TV. (He succeeded Jerry Springer, who was mayor of Cincinnati himself in the 1970s.)
Luken is ``trying to curry favor with black radical liberals, who see police as an occupying force, and with the corporate Procter & Gamble types,\'\' Cunningham said.
``He\'s on this teeter-totter trying to do a balancing act, and he\'s not doing a very good job of it. And I consider Charlie Luken a friend.\'\'
Cunningham criticized Luken for allowing out-of-control black radicals to hijack a City Council meeting this week.
``I could imagine what would happen in Akron if 1,000 militia types went to City Council, jumped up on the desk, and said, `We\'re not leaving until you change the gun laws,\' \'\' Cunningham said. ``Would the mayor say, `They have a viewpoint that needs to be heard?\' I don\'t think so.\'\'
Still, Livingston said Luken is talking about police brutality, but not doing anything about it.
And he said blacks and whites are talking to themselves about the racial issues dividing the city, but not to each other.
``It\'s like we\'re on two different planets in Cincinnati,\'\' Livingston said.
``Talk radio can be used as a force for good, or a force for bad,\'\' he said. ``Personally, I like Bill Cunningham. He\'s a smart guy. He\'s an attorney. He\'s witty. He\'s funny at times, and he\'s persuasive.
``But I think what that guy does is to constantly beat into white Cincinnatians this idea that they\'re losing their rights, that they\'re slowly losing their way of life,\'\' he said. ``Bill, under the cloak of diversity of opinion, tells white Cincinnatians that it\'s OK to be racist.\'\'
Gregory Korte, who grew up in Cincinnati, has been in the Queen City this week covering the racial tension. He is the City Hall reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal.
Gregory Korte can be reached at 330-996-3542 or gkorte [at] thebeaconjournal.com
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Here is the clickable copy of this at Ohio Valley IndyMedia:
http://ohiovalleyimc.org/cgi-bin/imc.pl?where=display&article=209
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More synchronicity (Is this a word? It ought to be.) Found this below also at Global IndyMedia today.
I especially like the racist history of the police outlined here. And also the discussion of the many white riots in the last few years. Also the discussion of Cincinnati\'s FOP, Keith Fangman, the Klan cross on Fountain Square, and much more Cincinnati lore. Racism on the message boards, etc.. Good stuff.
================
================
15 Dead in Ohio: The Black and the Blue in Cincinnati (english)
by Tim Wise 6:58am Tue Apr 17 \'01
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=34910&group=webcast
In seeking to justify the deaths of the 15 black males, Cincinnati Police Sergeant Harry Roberts noted that those killed were all \"criminals who resisted arrest,\" leading one to wonder just what is the allowable punishment for \"resisting arrest\" in Ohio nowadays? I mean damn, I knew the death penalty was still popular with most folks, but execution for running away from a cop?
Sometimes, folks don\'t even bother hiding their racism. Take Keith Fangman, President of the Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police. In the wake of this past week\'s uprising to protest the killing of Tim Thomas and fourteen other black men by his colleagues since 1995, Fangman said:
\"If we give one inch to these terrorists in the form of negotiations, then we\'ve got no one to blame but ourselves when we turn into another Detroit or Washington D.C.\"
Now, he could have said that negotiating with the \"rioters\" would turn Cincinnati into another Boulder, Colorado, or Carbondale, Illinois, or East Lansing, Michigan, or Eugene, Oregon, or State College, Pennsylvania, or Storrs, Connecticut, or Pullman, Washington, or Tucson, Arizona--all sites of major riots by drunken white college students in recent years. But he didn\'t. He picked Detroit and D.C.--two places that haven\'t had any riots lately, but which both have a lot of black people. And that, after all was his point.
Now frankly, for any representative of the official Police Corruption and Brutality Protection Union (commonly known as the FOP) to refer to those who rebel against cop violence as terrorists, is, well, precious to say the least. I think the old saying \"takes one to know one,\" probably applies here. Oddly enough the only \"terrorists\" in evidence in Fangman\'s town are the Klansmen he and his pals protect every Christmas season when they erect their lit cross in Fountain Square. The rights of a 135-year old paramilitary hate group apparently count for more to Cincinnati authorities than the lives of young black men.
To hear police representatives tell it, blacks in Cincinnati still have no rights that a member of the FOP is bound to respect. In seeking to justify the deaths of the 15 black males, Cincinnati Police Sergeant Harry Roberts noted that those killed were all \"criminals who resisted arrest,\" leading one to wonder just what is the allowable punishment for \"resisting arrest\" in Ohio nowadays? I mean damn, I knew the death penalty was still popular with most folks, but execution for running away from a cop?
And as for the \"criminals\" whose lives have been snuffed by the Cincinnati police, they include not only Tim Thomas--whose rap sheet was filled with traffic offenses like not wearing a seatbelt (the savage!)--but also Roger Owensby Jr., who had no criminal record, but whose \"attitude\" convinced police to arrest him for \"disorderly conduct\" and apply a deadly chokehold in the process. And then there was Lorenzo Collins, a mentally handicapped and emotionally disturbed young man whose shooting was explained as necessary since he was wielding a solitary brick and threatening to throw it at police--fifteen of them who surrounded him before dropping him in a hail of bullets. Sounds like a fair fight. Or Michael Carpenter, who was shot in the back of the head during a traffic stop. Or Courtney Mathis, a \"menace to society\" all of twelve years old who borrowed a relative\'s car and who was shot to death for trying to flee after being pulled over.
Apparently the Cincinnati police have a hard time distinguishing between children and hardened criminals. Following the funeral for Thomas on Saturday, cops opened fire with rubber bullets and beanbag ammunition, shooting a seven year old black female during a demonstration and march.
But hey, as the FOP\'s official slogan boasts, they\'re just \"building on a proud tradition.\" A tradition that reaches all the way back to 1915, to a time when many a proud member of this proud organization proudly and rather openly engaged in the murder of African Americans by joining in anti-black riots and lynchings. In the first forty years of the twentieth century, about half of all blacks who were killed, were killed by law enforcement, including, one can be sure, many a dues-paying member of the FOP\'s Aryan brotherhood in blue.
In recent years the Cincinnati police in particular have been building on a proud tradition of racism that has finally resulted in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and a local coalition of African American leaders. Among the dozens of racist actions prompting the suit, perhaps the most egregious involves a pregnant mother of two and her husband who were detained and handcuffed at gunpoint in front of their children, even as the officers involved explained to them that they were looking for two adult males driving a similar kind of car.
But rather than focus their attention on weeding out those officers who engage in racist and brutal practices, the FOP prefers to concentrate on such important tasks as boycotting movies whose stars are supportive of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Seeing Mumia killed and picketing Rage Against the Machine concerts have been among the group\'s top priorities in recent years. And even though the FOP rejected racial profiling at their September 2000 National Board Meeting, they insisted on the legitimacy of \"criminal profiling,\" the definition of which apparently still includes race as a factor of suspicion.
And of course there are those who think this is just fine. On many a chatroom bulletin board one can find any number of angry whites, defending the actions of the police and chastising the black community in Cincinnati in only the most thinly concealed racist terms.
\"Most cop killers are black,\" comes the cry from some--an argument that is both historically false and irrelevant. Even if true, who but the most racist, unfeeling soul could use such a \"fact\" to justify killing someone whose skin color happened to match that of the offending group? In fact, by this logic of \"rational\" discrimination or rational murder, blacks would have far greater reason to kill white police officers than these officers would have to kill black people. After all, most of the cops who have killed blacks have been white. But somehow I doubt that those who think statistical models should be used to justify unequal treatment would appreciate the use of the one to which I\'m alluding here.
\"Police put their lives on the line every day,\' say others, \'and we shouldn\'t second-guess them when they have to use deadly force.\" But police are actually half as likely to die on the job as farmers, fishermen, truckers, construction workers or miners. And a lot less likely to die from being police officers than black folks are, just from being black. Whether from police violence itself, or inadequate health care services, the excess mortality rate for African Americans is far higher than that of police, yet rarely is there much sympathy for how often black people \"put their lives on the line every day\" just trying to survive in this country.
\"Notice that we whites don\'t go riot every time something bad happens to us,\' comes the mantra from still others, followed by the predictable, \'and look at what animals those blacks are--they burn down their own neighborhood!\" True enough, whites don\'t riot over things like police brutality, mostly because we aren\'t often the victims of it; but also because we are too busy rioting over other things--like the outcomes of sporting events or crackdowns on underage drinking. Yep, at over twenty college campuses since 1995, white co-eds have taken to the streets in their own neighborhoods and gone absolutely ape-shit: burning furniture and cars in giant bonfires, hurling bottles and rocks at police, and smashing glass in business windows. 1500 people at Colorado University, 1500 at Penn State, 500 at the University of New Hampshire, 300 at the University of Oregon, and over 10,000 at Michigan State in 1999.
And yet, when whites riot (and don\'t even get me started on Woodstock \'99 again), not only do we not call them \"terrorists,\" cops rarely if ever shoot them with rubber bullets or spray them at point-blank range with mace. Although many arrests were made and harsh sentences handed out in the wake of the Michigan State riot two years ago, coverage was still largely sympathetic, with media asking \"what made good kids do bad things?\" and focusing on the otherwise \"straight arrows\" who got caught up in the moment. Hell, in that particular riot, white students were caught actually trying to pry a loaded shotgun from a police car (before trying to push the vehicle into the fire)--an act that surely would result in death number sixteen were a black Cincinnatian to try it, but which, in East Lansing, only prompted a brief volley of tear gas, in order to disperse the crowd.
And most telling of all, in the wake of the two most serious white college riots--Colorado and Michigan State--police and residents in the riot zone actually reached out to students in an attempt to \"understand their frustrations\" more fully. According to Boulder officials, the riots led to a greater attempt by police to improve their relations with students; and in East Lansing, local residents launched a campaign to \"adopt\" entire dorm floors, invite students to backyard barbecues and let the kids know \"that we appreciate them in the community,\" according to one neighbor. I will swallow my keyboard if anything like that happens in Cincinnati.
After all, in Cincinnati there\'s plenty of room for Klan crosses in public parks, racist baseball team owners like Marge Schott, and blowhards like Keith Fangman and the FOP, but no room apparently for civilian review of the police, accountability for cop violence, or a real challenge to institutional racism at the highest levels. It will be up to the folks in the streets to change that.
http://www.zmag.org/15dead.htm
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Tue Apr 17 11:37:56 2001 -- As Rush Windbag might say, \"Great Minds Think Alike\" or \"Excellence in Broadcasting.\" Global Indymedia article on Hate Speech.
-
This seems to have been posted at Global IndyMedia the same day. I like the synchronicity.
===========================
The Power of Hate Speech (english)
by Par Tridge 8:12am Tue Apr 17 \'01
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=34918&group=webcast
The power of hate speech and the capacity for evil in humanity.
What if Eminem didn\'t say he wanted to kill \"fags\". Let\'s say he used the words \"Jews\" or \"N***s\"? What if he started wearing swastikas and such? What if he played arenas dressed in full Nazi regalia? Would you be so sanctimonious about the first amendment and the right to say/express whatever we wanted?
The reason we need to pay attention to the prevalence of hate speech in music and ALL MEDIA is the fact that most people are little better than mindless followers. They do not condemn evil because it is evil, they condemn it because some leader told them to condemn it. People are profoundly SOCIAL creatures, easily led and eager to conform. They can do great good, i.e. building bridges or they can do great evil, i.e. killing/ torturing millions.
Media outlets have done a masterful job of absolving themselves of any responsibility for any social ills historic or current. The fact is that they have played a major role, sometimes as the primary instigator, of most major horrors of the modern day.
I urge everyone to read \"Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America\" James Allen (Editor). Tens of thousands of black men were tortured and killed in the deep south after the civil war (when their physical well being was no longer a financial interest of whites). Most lynchings were orchestrated by newspapers in the south. Public sentiment was inflamed with vicious hate speech and wild accusations against the lynching victim whose real crime was a matter of skin color. People came from all over the south to attend what was often termed \"n** barbeques\". The brutality of the mobs was horrifying and mutilation often involved cutting off fingers, ears, and other body parts. The newspapers would print detailed accounts of the lynching, obviously unafraid of legal consequences. Often, the whites involved in the mob were so proud of their handiwork, postcards were made of the lynched mans picture for all to take home and send to friends.
For most newspapers, lynchings were a guaranteed money maker. They could sell a lot of papers this way. Why not revive this tradition, if we so treasure free speech? I guarantee you that you could jail every member of a mob after one lynching and the newspaper could whip up another mob in a day. When would we decide to hold the correct parties responsible?
Remember, millions died not due to Hitler\'s direct order, but to the atmosphere and encouragement of his speech.
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