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.

Christians walling themselves off

In his article “The Great Secession” (The Atlantic, July/August), Jonathan Rauch relates a news story from St. Louis about a Christian-owned dog-walking business that refused to serve a customer who supported legalizing marijuana.

We’ve seen such discrimination in the name of religion often in the news. A Christian photographer refused to provide services for gay weddings. Hobby Lobby and others refused to offer insurance that covers certain kinds of contraception. And in April, Mississippi passed legislation allowing businesses to claim a religious defense if sued for discrimination.

Religious liberty: Such actions are taken in the name of religious liberty, but they may have unintended consequences. By separating themselves from the secular world (or whatever term you want to use), these Christians are also cutting off their chances of engaging such people (customers, employees) about their faith.

This raises the question, Are Christians more afraid of being influenced by unbelievers than they are confident in their faith to influence them?

Rauch states up front that as a “homosexual atheist” he doesn’t expect religious conservatives to take his advice. But he offers it anyway. He writes, “When religion isolates itself from secular society, both sides lose, but religion loses more.”

With the increasing acceptance of gay marriage, many religious conservatives feel battered and want to be left alone. Rauch asked some people why they felt the need to hunker down. One reason is “the fear that traditional religious views, especially about marriage, will soon be condemned as no better than racism, and that religious dissenters will be driven from respectable society, denied government contracts and passed over for jobs.”

Fearful: He tells about an encounter he had after a talk he gave on free speech. A woman approached him and claimed that the school system where she works harasses and fires anyone who questions gay marriage. “I wanted to point out that in most states it’s perfectly legal to fire people just for being gay,” Rauch writes, “whereas Christians enjoy robust federal and state antidiscrimination protections, but the look in her eyes was too fearful for convincing.”

Around the turn of the millennium there was some hope of a new partnership between our elected and religious leaders, but eventually trust eroded, then collapsed. “Now it’s the ‘war on religion’ versus the ‘war on women,’ and court dockets are full of religious liberty cases,” Rauch writes.

Decades ago, during the divorce revolution, writes Rauch, it likely never occurred to Catholic bakers to tell remarrying customers, “Your so-called second marriage is a lie, so take your business elsewhere.”

Line-drawing: Now we live in a time of drawing lines. Rauch acknowledges that “there is an absolutist streak among some secular civil-rights advocates” as well and that “they are too quick to overlook the unique role religion plays in American life and the unique protections it enjoys under the First Amendment.”

However, associating Christianity with a determination to discriminate “puts the faithful in open conflict with the value that young Americans hold most sacred,” he writes.

There is an alternative, Rauch points out, “a missionary tradition of engagement and education, of resolutely and even cheerfully going out into an often uncomprehending world.”

He warns that “the First Church of Discrimination will find few adherents in 21st-century America,” according to polls. Social secession is “a step toward isolation” that is “bad for society but even worse for the religion.”

Instead Christians can act out of faith rather than fear.

Will the Internet remain free?

Thus far, those of us who use the Internet have enjoyed free access, as long as we have a phone line, cable line or Wi-Fi connection. We can communicate what we want without it having to pass the muster of the government or some corporation. But that could change.

What we have enjoyed is called “net neutrality,” which is “the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment and modes of communication,” according to Wikipedia.

Net neutrality: There has been much debate about whether net neutrality should be required by law. The Federal Trade Commission (FCC) has been considering a rule that would allow ISPs, such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, to offer content providers a faster track to send content. This would end net neutrality.

In her article “Can We Keep the Internet Free?” (Yes! Magazine), Candace Clement expresses alarm about this possibility. If the FCC rules in favor of the ISPs, she writes, it would give them “the freedom to favor their own offerings over those of their competitors.”

She quotes from a New York Times editorial: “In this new world, smaller content providers and startups that could not pay for preferential treatment might not be able to compete because their delivery speeds would be much slower. And consumers would have to pay more because any company that agrees to strike deals with phone and cable companies would undoubtedly pass on those costs to their users.”

The rich get richer: This follows a pattern observable throughout history: The rich get richer, the big get bigger. The smaller and those without get poorer and smaller.

Many have seen the Internet as a democratization of communication. The previous, one-way media—broadcasting, print and cable—were supplanted by the two-way, networked communication style fostered by the World Wide Web. As Clement writes: “It’s not about one company or one wire or one tower sending us information. It’s about all of us communicating directly with each other.”

Fast lane: The basic idea of net neutrality is this: When you visit a website, the phone or cable company that provides Internet access shouldn’t get in the way. Information should be delivered to you quickly and without discriminating about the content. With changes, ISPs could split the flow of traffic into tiers, offering priority treatment to big corporations who would pay higher fees. That would mean a fast lane for the rich and a dirt road for others, harming small businesses and other users.

Net neutrality does not necessarily mean complete freedom. The adoption of net neutrality law usually includes allowance for discrimination in limited conditions, such as preventing spam, malware or illegal content.

Chile became the first country in the world to pass net neutrality legislation in 2010. But that law allows exceptions for ensuring privacy and security.

Public comment: Once the FCC releases its official proposal, there will be much public comment. “If the initial reaction is any indicator,” Clement writes, “millions of people will weigh in.”

The solution, says Brian Knappenberger in the New York Times, is simple: “We should classify broadband access as a utility. Internet providers should be considered common carriers, just as cellphone companies are for voice access, which they are not allowed to block or degrade. The Internet should be a level playing field.”

From the street to the stage

Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Jersey Boys into a movie broadens the story of the four friends from New Jersey who became the Four Seasons and rose to stardom in the early 1960s. While it includes many of their popular hits, it delves into their background and shows the conflicts that developed as their popularity grew. 

Eastwood is one of our finest directors, creating such masterpieces as Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby and Letters from Iwo Jima. But those films had a focus, a sustained theme that the director explored in depth. His new film feels scattered as it moves from one theme to another without developing any of them with much depth.

This musical biography begins in 1951 in Belleville, N.J., where we meet Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza) and Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young). Tommy and his friend Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda) enlist Frankie’s help in stealing a safe. When they’re caught, Tommy takes the blame so that Frankie isn’t charged.

Frankie has a wonderful singing voice that can rise into a falsetto. A local mob boss, Gym DeCarlo (Christopher Walken), takes Frankie under his protection because he loves his singing.

The three friends eventually form a musical group and later add songwriter Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) over the objections of Tommy, who sees himself as the autocratic manager of the group. Bob wants them to make demos and get discovered. He writes “Sherry,” which they sing over the phone to their producer, Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle), convincing him to record it. It becomes a hit, and their next two songs, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like a Man,” go to number one.

They go on the road, and after a while the troubles grow. Frankie’s marriage suffers from his being gone. Tommy gambles away all their earnings and lands them in a half-million dollars of debt. That’s when the group splits, and Bob and Frankie keeps things going, with Frankie Valli (he changed his last name early on) performing with backup musicians.

Years later, in 1990, the group is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Frankie says that the best time ever was “just four guys under a street light,” singing. That joy of making music comes out at times, but it’s overshadowed by all the conflict.

Certainly creating music and performing is not all glamorous, and that mixture of the joy of their art and the grind of making money at it is a worthy theme to explore. But everything feels half-done. Many side stories are thrown in without much development.

Frankie’s wife, Mary (Renee Marino), gives a nice performance in her opening scene when she first meets Frankie. But later she becomes a clichéd alcoholic wife forced to raise their three daughters on her own because her husband is gone 200 days of the year.

The film’s tone varies from serious to lighthearted. Throughout, a few of the characters talk directly to the audience.

Those of my generation will enjoy the many songs in the film, and the performances are great. And I loved the West Side Story ending with the entire cast dancing in the street to “December, 1963” before the credits roll. But that joy is missing in much of the film.

Eastwood is a jazz musician himself and often writes music for his films. Jersey Boys is enjoyable for the most part, but it failed to grab me emotionally the way, for example, Eastwood’s film Bird, about jazz musician Charlie Parker, did.

An Evangelical case against alcohol

Magazines like to publish articles that present something in a different light. So when Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical periodical, published its June issue with these words on the cover: “The Case for an Alcohol-Free Life,” the underlying assumption was that most evangelicals use alcohol. Or at least a significant enough number of them do to make being alcohol-free new and different. Times have changed.

The writer of the article, called “Why I Gave Up Alcohol,” is D.L. Mayfield, a 30-year-old Evangelical woman who with her family serves with InnerCHANGE, a Christian order among the poor.

She grew up in a pastor’s home where alcohol was a nonissue. As a young adult, she became “an occasional drinker, a social imbiber, free to live my life in a way that glorifies God.”

Then she and her husband joined a Christian order among the poor. “Our first shock when we moved into our low-income apartment in a Midwestern inner city,” she writes, “was the amount of substance abuse that surrounded us.” She describes the abuse in detail.

Spiritual discipline: After a year of living there, she writes, “I gradually just … stopped. I dreaded going to the liquor store, imagining the faces I would see there.” Eventually she realized she could abstain from alcohol entirely, and this became a spiritual discipline for her.

Mayfield goes on to reflect on Christians of previous centuries who stood against alcohol’s effects. “Temperance movements,” she writes, “often founded and organized by women, were a direct reaction to the perceived social evils of alcohol in the 1800s and 1900s.”

In the 19th century, alcohol was tied to spouse and child abuse, and women had little to no rights in regard to property and possession. Thus women, especially Christian women, writes Mayfield, “started to organize and lobby against alcohol, starting from within their homes and gradually moving into the political sphere.” The temperance movement, while focusing on alcohol, became associated with women’s rights, including suffrage.

Mayfield sees that movement as a model for us today. She writes: “Just as we currently have no problem denouncing slavery, prostitution and, to a lesser extent, gambling—all for the ways they harm persons and communities—we’d be wise to reconsider the valid and pressing reasons why so many Christians before us chose to give up alcohol completely.”

Clearly, she is providing a different reason for giving up alcohol than was used in previous decades for Evangelicals, to be unstained by the sin of the world. She notes that many Christians view drinking as a rite of passage out of “the perceived fundamentalism of our past.”

She sees young people and women in particular embracing alcohol as a sign of liberation. And many of her peers celebrate drinking. She wonders, “Isn’t anyone friends with alcoholics?”

Given that about 1 in 6 Americans has a drinking problem (defined as excessive drinking or alcoholism), they probably do know someone who has a drinking problem.

Evils of the world: Mayfield’s argument is less about purity than about justice. “I didn’t give up alcohol because I wanted to flee the evils of the world,” she writes. “I gave up alcohol as a way of engaging the evils of the world.”

Who we relate to affects our perspective on this issue, Mayfield writes. She has been changed by her neighborhood.

“I am not calling on everyone to become teetotalers,” she writes. “But I am asking us to consider temperance as a valid and thoughtful option.”

Echoing the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 8, she says we are free not to drink because of our relationships with those who struggle, when “love tempers our actions.”