The terror African-American men face in America

In less than a month, from July 17 to Aug. 11, in separate incidents—in Staten Island, N.Y., Beavercreek, Ohio, Ferguson, Mo., and Los Angeles—four unarmed African-American men were killed by police (www.motherjones.com).

In his blog at sojo.net, Ryan Herring writes, “To be young and black in the United States means to live under constant pressure, something most non-black American citizens know nothing about” (“When Terror Wears a Badge,” Aug. 14).

War on terrorism: While our government fights a war on terrorism, many African Americans experience terror everyday. As Cornel West has said, “To be black in America for 400 years is to be unsafe, unprotected, subject to random violence and hated.”

Herring notes that “more Americans have lost their lives at the hands of police since 9/11 than in acts officially classified as terrorism. A recent study showed that one black man was killed every 28 hours by police, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes in 2012.”

Beyond the threat of lethal violence is the daily grind of being constantly watched by police, suspected of wrongdoing simply because of the color of one’s skin.

Falsely accused: A further threat from police is being arrested and falsely accused. In The New Yorker (Aug. 4), Nicholas Schmidle writes about Tyrone Hood, who has been in prison for 21 years for a murder he likely did not commit. The article goes into great detail, with many interviews, to trace the course of events that led to Hood’s arrest and conviction.

Those events included witnesses who told the reporter that Chicago police threatened them with a gun until they said they saw Hood kill Marshal Morgan, a 20-year-old basketball star. Turns out, they didn’t witness that.

A series of articles ran in 2001 in the Chicago Tribune titled “Cops and Confessions.” The reporters described how Chicago police had relied on “coercive and illegal tactics” to solicit dubious confessions. Among the articles was a profile of Kenneth Boudreau, one of the officers in Hood’s case who had obtained incriminating statements from several witnesses.

The article pointed out that Boudreau “had targeted suspects especially vulnerable to intimidation, including teenagers and the mentally retarded, and stood accused of ‘punching, slapping or kicking’ them.” He had helped elicit at least five confessions from suspects who were later acquitted.

Schmidle interviews him, and Boudreau doesn’t budge from his belief that Hood is guilty, despite much evidence to the contrary.

The man who most likely did the murder later murdered several other people. Meanwhile, Hood remains in prison.

On the run: In the Aug. 11 and 18 New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman, who for six years lived in a low-income neighborhood of Philadelphia and documented the lives of two young African-American men.

“They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted,” Gladwell writes. “Selling crack was a business they entered only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them.”

Gladwell compares the climb of Italian crime families in the 1950s and ’60s into legitimacy with that of African Americans today. Back then, cops were paid to overlook crime and focused more on hunting Communists.

Today’s law enforcement is different. “Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost 70 percent,” Gladwell writes.

A black man in America faces many systemic barriers. Whatever we can do to help change those barriers will help make God’s justice for all more visible.

A lesson on the Civil Rights Movement

Whenever a film says it is “inspired by a true story,” you can bet there isn’t much in it that’s true.

Such is the case for The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels, a highly fictionalized account of Eugene Allen, who served as a butler in the White House during the administrations of eight presidents, from Truman to Reagan.

In the movie, Allen is named Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) and begins working in the White House during the Eisenhower administration. Daniels uses this framework to juxtapose this man’s faithful service with the racial turmoil going on in the country over these years.

The film wants to show us and help us feel the pain of African Americans during the years of this man’s life (he died in 2010). So we witness Cecil’s father being shot to death in the cotton fields by the white owner, who has just raped Cecil’s mother. While this didn’t happen to Eugene Allen’s parents, it likely happened to many others.

And the movie has Cecil’s older son, Louis (David Oyelowo), conveniently take part in just about every important event of the civil rights era, from the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides and even being present in the motel room with Dr. King just before he is shot. Then, of course, he joins the Black Panthers.

While such coincidence is beyond belief, it nevertheless introduces audiences who don’t know to these important events and the impact they had on the country. We also witness the various presidents as they try to decide how to respond to this movement. Meanwhile, Cecil continues his service without voicing any political opinions on the job.

Home is a different story. There he quarrels with his son, opposing his actions and worried for his safety. And his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), left alone while Cecil works long hours, turns to drink for solace.

Daniels has made a dramatic yet didactic film that serves well those who haven’t taken the time to watch such documentaries as Eyes on the Prize or Freedom Riders. He has assembled an impressive cast of actors, including the wonderful Whitaker in the title role, plus Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. The actors who play presidents are well-known (Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Nixon, for example) and, because of that, distracting. I had to laugh when seeing Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan.

The Butler also serves to give us a glimpse of African-American domestic life in a middle-class home during these years. We also get a glimpse of Cecil’s Christian faith. The real butler, Eugene, was a long-time, active member of his church.

Daniels’ film has been number one at the box office for the past few weeks. It’s good that audiences are being exposed to stories of African Americans and their struggle to find freedom and dignity in a country that too often denies them that, especially since many of these viewers will not take time to watch documentaries that tell a fuller, truer story.

The African-American male as a human being

In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African-American man, was shot in the back while being held by police at Fruitvale Station in Oakland, Calif. He later died. In the days and weeks following, Grant was alternately labeled a saint or a villain, a loving father or a drug dealer. Ryan Coogler’s extraordinary debut film shows that he was actually a complicated human being. 

What makes the film Fruitvale Station important is that it avoids the polarizing, simplistic notion that a person is only either a saint or a villain. Coogler shows Grant’s humanity: He is a loving father and a convicted felon; he loves his girlfriend but cheated on her; he loves his mother but lies to her.

The film opens with a cellphone video taken by a bystander of the actual Oscar Grant being shot. Then we switch to Dec. 31, 2008, the last day of his life, and watch Michael B. Jordan’s remarkable portrayal of Grant.

On the verge of a new year and only three months out of prison, Oscar is looking to change his life, to begin anew. He tells his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz), that he is committed to her and their daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal).

After dropping off Tatiana at preschool and Sophina at work, he goes to a grocery to try to get his job back. He’s been fired for showing up late, though he hasn’t told Sophina or his mother (Octavia Spencer) this. He says to his former boss, “You want me to sell drugs?”

Oscar has an easygoing nature, and Coogler uses the device of showing his cellphone texts to portray his quick navigation of relationships as he moves from one difficulty to another. We witness his struggle to be a better person in the face of systemic forces that try to hold him back. Finding legal work to support him and his family poses a huge problem.

All the while, as he seeks to change, as he expresses his delight in Tatiana and his affection for Sophina, our gut wrenches because we know what’s coming.

Oscar and his friends are on the train after celebrating the New Year, when a white thug he encountered while in prison baits him into a fight. Later, the police are called and hold Oscar and several of his friends on the platform, and a white officer, struggling to handcuff Oscar, shoots him. (He later claimed he thought he was grabbing his taser instead of his gun, and he served 11 months in prison.)

Coogler has created not only an important film but an excellent film. He shows the complicated humanity behind the stereotype of the young African-American male. The film’s pace, editing, acting and writing are superb, and we come away sad and angry about one more wasted life because we’ve come to know this man—his aspirations, his struggles, his potential.

That the film was released around the time of the Trayvon Martin trial was unintentional yet raises many parallels. A young African-American male, killed by someone overreacting with a gun. Still, Coogler steers clear of racial polarizing. Oscar has several positive interactions with whites.

Fruitvale Station succeeds in portraying a specific human in his realistic complexity, and that story resonates with us viewers who see Oscar’s tragic death as something that affects us all.

War on the poor

The 2012 documentary The House I Live In by Eugene Jarecki finally came up in my Netflix queue, and I watched it, spellbound. Afterward, I thought, had I seen it in 2012, it would have made the top five of my year’s top 10 films. And not because of its technical expertise, though it’s fine. No, because it is so important.

Some people hear that and think, I don’t want to be preached to; I don’t want to feel guilty; I don’t want to have to think about hard subjects. Your reaction is up to you, but for what it’s worth, this film offers good insights into a larger reality that may change or enhance your perspective.

House addresses the war on drugs. It looks at its beginnings during the Nixon administration, when drug abuse was not particularly a problem in terms of crime, but it drew voters. So there you go.(Interestingly, Nixon stipulated that two-thirds of the funds go toward treatment. That's far from the case today.)

The film uses historical footage and many interviews. The most engaging interviewee, in my mind, is David Simon, creator of The Wire, an outstanding series that first played on HBO. He is articulate, knowledgeable and passionate. He speaks not only from his head knowledge but from his experience as a reporter working with police in Baltimore.

The film also gets personal. Jarecki narrates it and notes that it began as an exploration of what happened to the son of the African-American woman, named Nannie, who worked as his parents’ housekeeper and helped raise him. Partly because of her being gone while working for the Jareckis, she intimates, she wasn’t around her adult son as much, and he got into drugs and eventually died of AIDS from a contaminated needle.

The film goes on to explore the judicial system that has filled our prisons with nonviolent offenders whose crime is often selling drugs. Because of harsh sentencing requirements established by Congress during the Reagan and Clinton administrations (and carried on by others), judges are handicapped in handing out sentences to those found guilty of drug offenses. Jarecki interviews a judge in Iowa who eventually resigns out of frustration about the harsh mandatory sentences.

He also interviews a prison guard in Oklahoma who loves his job but comes to see that the judicial system is broken and that most of the prisoners he oversees should not be there.

Who benefits by putting nonviolent drug offenders in prison for five to 20 years at a time? Politicians who win votes from a fickle and ignorant populace. Private prisons who rake in billions of dollars housing nonviolent prisoners at a huge cost to taxpayers (more than $20,000 per year per prisoner). Corporations who get all these poor people off the streets.

Simon says at one point, “They might as well say, Let’s get rid of the bottom 15 percent of the population.” That’s the effect of this so-called war on drugs. It destroys individual lives; it destroys communities. It costs all of us.

Simon points out that it also hurts police and fighting violent crime. He says that when police go out and arrest people for possessing drugs, they make money. First, they confiscate whatever drugs or money is on the people they arrest (and get to keep it). They get paid extra for overtime, since it takes time to do the paper work. And at the end of the month, they can say they made 60 arrests, which looks impressive to the public and their superiors. Meanwhile, a detective may work hard on a murder case and make one arrest in a month. He gets no overtime pay and little credit from his superiors because he hasn’t brought in money to the department.

In other words, the war on drugs is a moneymaker for those in power. But for most of us, it’s not. Instead it takes our resources and invests them in prisons and police rather than in education or health care. It ties up the courts with cases that need not even come to the courts.

Jarecki interviews offenders and family members. He notes that for years the war on drugs was a war primarily on young African-American men, who were filling the prisons and unable to get jobs when they got out, since they were felons.

Simon points out that when an economy fails a community, when the people there cannot find jobs that allow them to live, an alternative economy emerges. This happens all over the world and throughout history. We should not be surprised. People will try to survive. Fix the economy, create jobs that provide a living wage, and the drug trade will diminish rapidly.

Since the late 1990s, many more poor whites have entered prison because of the emergence of meth. Again, the use and sale of this drug comes out people’s desperate circumstances. Blue collar jobs have been disappearing, and people can’t find work.

If you watch House, be sure to check out the extras. In one, called “Jury Nullification,” Simon points out that juries are not required to go by the judge’s instruction or the letter of the law. They can rule as they see fit. Simon says that if he’s on a jury, he will never convict anyone charged with a nonviolent crime.

I’ll stop. This is an informative and heartbreaking film. I highly recommend it.

A place called home

Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison is one our greatest living writers. Her novels combine lyrical prose with haunting stories of African-American life in different historical periods. She reveals both the horrors and the joys people experience at the frayed edges of life and death.

Home, her 10^th novel, is short, really a novella. Its use of symbols make it seem almost an allegory as it explores the meaning of “home.” Yet it retains the bite of realism with its detail about life for blacks in 1950s America.

Frank Money is a veteran of the Korean War suffering from what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder, “the free-floating rage, the self-loathing disguised as somebody else’s fault.” He has frequent flashbacks of the deaths of two army buddies from his hometown of Lotus, Georgia. The book opens with Frank in a psych hospital after being arrested by police. He escapes and stops at AME Zion Church, where Reverend Locke takes him in and helps him on his way to Chicago through a series of contacts, like the Underground Railroad.

Money, Lotus, Zion, Locke all carry multiple meanings and tell us to look beneath the surface of the story as it explores the meaning of home. That word often carries a cozy, safe resonance for people, but for Frank, Lotus was not such a place. His family moved there after being forced under threat of death by men “both hooded and not” to leave their home in Texas on foot, along with 14 other families. In Lotus, “the worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield,” Frank tries to protect his younger sister Cee from their mean grandmother, while their parents work themselves to death.

Now Frank is back in his homeland, America, where he faces racist attacks and must be on constant alert, much like on the battlefields of Korea. He receives a letter telling him Cee is in trouble. “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry,” it says.

Morrison intersperses her chapters, which offer not only Frank’s but Cee’s and even the grandmother’s points of view, with short asides, almost like hallucinations, of Frank addressing the omniscient author.

We learn that Cee, who fled Lotus at 14 with a man who married her, then left her in Atlanta, survives, moving from job to job. She ends up working for a wealthy white doctor who does experiments related to eugenics. His experiments on Cee’s womb leave her near death, and the house’s black housekeeper writes Frank.

He arrives and takes Cee back to Lotus. Though filled with dramatic tension, the story has the feel of a Greek myth. In Lotus, a place of lethargy (a la the lotus eaters in Homer), he takes her to a woman known for healing. She takes in Cee and calls on other women in the community to help. They use natural remedies to help her body and their wisdom to heal her spirit.

Morrison is a master of capturing a community’s folk wisdom (see her early novel Sula). She writes: “The women handled sickness as though it were an affront, an illegal, invading braggart who needed whipping.” The women tell Cee, whose grandmother treated her like dirt: “You good enough for Jesus. That’s all you need to know.”

These women practice what their mothers taught them “during that period that rich people called the Depression and they called life.” They’ve learned that “mourning was helpful but God was better and they did not want to meet their Maker and have to explain a wasteful life.”

Cee returns to Frank, who takes her to a place where as a child he had seen horses. Later, a horrible incident took place there, one that parallels an experience of his from Korea. Up to now, the novel has sometimes bordered on cliché, and parts have felt didactic, but at the end, Morrison draws together her themes with some powerful images that bring some redemption to the meaning of home, which up to then had been anything but safe or peaceful for Frank and Cee.

And this story set long ago resonates in powerful ways with readers in a different era and helps us all explore what can make our homeland a true home.