New America Media, Senay Ozdemir

Before Tuesday, pop singer Rihanna’s millions of fans probably had never heard of a Dutch fashion magazine called Jackie. But a lot changed in 24 hours.

The fashion magazine, with a circulation of about 60,000, published a 100-word feature on page 45 about the singer’s good-girl-gone-bad style. The title? “De Niggabitch.” Within hours several things happened: Rihanna’s angry response went out publicly via Twitter, the magazine editor resigned, and the world got a good look at the Netherlands’ deterioration.

The incident stirred millions to ask, “Are the Dutch that racist?” Jackie’s editor Eva Hoeke, for her part, said it was a bad joke and apologized on Facebook. “It was naïve to think that this was an acceptable form of slang,” she wrote. “You hear it all the time on TV and radio, then your idea of what is normal apparently shifts—but it was especially misguided: there was no malice behind it.”

Malice? No. Ignorance? Undoubtedly. Dutch journalism in general is in a poor state. (In addition to the slurs in the title and text, the writer also called the Barbados-born singer Jamaican.) But it is also increasingly out of touch, a bastion of white Europeans covering a multicultural country. The large cities in the Netherlands are already more than half non-native Dutch, but you’d never know it from the media.

A journalist of Turkish decent who grew up in the Netherlands, I started researching the lack of diversity among the Dutch media 20 years ago, and even today many consulting firms make lots of money telling media companies how homogenous they are.

Eventually I founded a glossy magazine for young Mediterranean women, because they went completely ignored otherwise. At the same time, there is a certain arrogance to Dutch journalists; they just write any article as they see fit, taking little care toward their representation of other cultures.

The truth is that if the staff of Jackie included just one person of color, the editor would probably still have a job. Working in a multicultural environment—the real world, in other words—would have taught her not to use, let along publish, that type of language.

When the fast-and-furious reactions came flying at the magazine through social media, Hoeke claimed to be glad to be “engaging in a dialogue.” It’s a tired phrase. She might have gotten away with it if the brouhaha had stayed within Holland’s borders, where journalists successfully wrap their ignorance in the cloak of “free speech.”

But it was Rihanna who truly made this moment into a dialogue.

While much of the news coverage has focused on the singer’s F— YOU!!! sign off, they skipped her compelling point: “Your magazine is a poor representation of the evolution of human rights! I find you disrespectful, and rather desperate!! ….There are 1000′s of Dutch girls who would love to be recognized for their contributions to your country, you could have given them an article. Instead, u paid to print one degrading an entire race!”

I find her words deeply gratifying, all the more so because, in the age of Twitter, she could broadcast them so publicly. This way the whole world can assess what has happened to the Netherlands, once a cradle of tolerance, liberty and enlightenment. Imagine what the media looks like to the ethnically non-Dutch living in the Netherlands. There are nothing but blue-eyed blonds on the covers of magazines and catalogues. Same with the cast of the popular local version of ‘Jersey Shore,’ called ‘Oh Oh Cherso’. On the game show “I Love Holland,” host Linda de Mol quizzes guests about Dutch history and cultural trivia. Meanwhile, if there were elections now, Geert Wilders’ right-wing blatantly anti-immigrant party would be the second biggest party of the Netherlands.

Aided and abetted by its TV producers and magazine editors, the nation is retreating into a bubble that is offensive and outdated. And, as Rihanna proved, destined to blow up in their face.

By Kevin Weston, Contributor

HARTFORD —  Herman Cain’s ability to remain a viable candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the face of sexual misconduct accusations by at least two white women is the clearest sign ever that — at the level of power politics — America may indeed be a post-racial society. That — to his Tea Party and conservative supporters — gender/politics trumps race.

When Cain was asked a question about the allegations at the most recent Republican debate, the conservative audience booed — as if it was an illegitimate question for a presidential candidate. More boos filled the hall when Mitt Romney — Cain’s closest rival in the 2012 race — was asked a question referring to the scandal.

America, I thought, wasn’t necessarily post-racial because it had elected the biracial Obama in 2008. But for Cain’s Tea Party supporters to dismiss these women goes against 400 years of racial and gender politics in these United States. And it is more of a post-racial phenomenon than a bunch of college students voting for the son of a white woman and African immigrant almost four years ago.

Cain supporters are folks who only a few decades ago might have attended a picnic and watched a Cain look-alike get lynched for the mere allegation of disrespect towards a white woman, let alone grabbing the back of her head and pulling it to his crotch.

This son of the segregated South likely grew up getting instructed by his elders on how to deal with white woman in public. Even in Atlanta Ga. — where Cain was raised in the 40s and 50s — the mere allegation of reckless eyeballing, staring at a white woman too long, could earn you visit from avenging night riders in white sheets, ready and eager to defend their women’s unquestioned honor with rope and steel. Whole towns of black people were razzed and demolished on the word of a white women against a black man.

Where are these white people now? Those old school knights of white supremacy who would not have stood pat while this negro was accused of fondling, talking dirty to, or disrespecting a blond in anyway. Cain’s defense is: Sharon Bialek and the other women hollering harassment are lying.

At least at this point in the scandal, Cain has been able to raise more money, is being defended by conservative radio and is still breathing, literally and politically. He is still in the lead.

Meanwhile Anita Hill — the African American woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1990 – has released a new book,retelling some of the stories hundreds of women relayed to her in the aftermath of the hearings and Thomas’s subsequent confirmation and installment on the nations highest court.

Immediately after the allegations surfaced about Cain, the comparisons to Hill and her battle were offered by columnists and pundits. The real difference between the cases is that Hill is black. The old assumption, even back then, was that Thomas would have never been confirmed had Hill been white. In 2011, Hill might not even make it to the confirmation hearings to testify.

What the Hill case did was solidify the idea that liberals will use sexual misconduct/harassment to derail conservatives, a sentiment that Cain followers seem to be buying into, again. That they can look past Bialek’s race to come to this conclusion is stunning for those that believe America is still — in it’s soul — a country governed by white supremacy and inhabited by bigots, who would do anything to uphold that race-based power dynamic, 146 years after the end of the Civil War.

In 1994 O.J. Simpson miraculously walked out of a Los Angeles court room a free man after — many believe — slicing his blond wife and a male friend to death. Something changed in America when O.J. beat the rap. The new reality became that rich — O.J. was able to buy some of the best lawyers walking around, including the incomparable trial lawyer Johnnie Cochran — trumps race when it comes to the justice system. And that was progress in the context of America’s awful racial history.

Anita Hill was another time and I tend to agree that had she been white it would have been a wrap for Thomas in 1990 — he wouldn’t have been confirmed. In 2011, this black man Cain, this grandson of slaves and son of Jim Crow, is getting the same sexist benefit of the doubt (despite his accusers’ white skin) that any white man would from his mostly white and conservative supporters. That’s progress. That is post-racial.

Kevin Weston is a writer at New America Media. Find him on Facebook or Twitter. Emailkweston@newamericamedia.org

By Pamela A. MacLean, News Report

As the U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term on Monday, immigration is likely to be one of the most significant issues it tackles, with Arizona’s draconian SB 1070 front and center.

The law’s supporters have asked the justices to review the legislation, which went into partial effect last year after an Arizona federal judge ruled that major parts of it were unconstitutional.

Raising the stakes for the high court is a Sept. 28 decision by an Alabama judge upholding much of that state’s new immigration law, which is even more restrictive than SB 1070.

With the ruling, key provisions of the Alabama law—including the requirement that police check the status of people who might be undocumented immigrants, even during routine stops, and that businesses and schools verify the status of workers and students—that took effect Sept. 29.

At issue in these and other recent cases is the extent to which states and local governments will be allowed to determine how to restrict immigrants within their jurisdiction. The Supreme Court hinted strongly last term that it is open to local experiments regulating immigration, once considered the sole realm of the federal government.

This gives hope to supporters of laws like SB1070 and Alabama’s HB56 that seek to drastically curtail the rights of undocumented immigrants to live, work, go to school, and received other public services in their jurisdictions.

But this expansion of state and local authority could also give immigrant-friendly areas leeway to continue providing benefits to undocumented residents, as happened in a California case on in-state college tuition.

Major Arizona Ruling on E-Verify

The Supreme Court’s renewed focus on immigration began with three cases last term—a major Arizona ruling in May and two orders affecting the city of Hazelton, Penn., and California public colleges and universities.

In the Arizona decision, the high court upheld a law that punishes employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. The state law would revoke business licenses for repeat offenders. It also mandates employers check an applicant’s status on a federal database known as E-verify. The federal government, by contrast, has considered use of E-verify voluntary for employers.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, representing businesses, joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, National Immigration Law Center and other civil rights groups in unsuccessfully challenging the Arizona law. Chamber Sr. Vice President on Immigration Randal Johnson said businesses feared “we could wind up with 50 different state laws without knowing how to verify employees.”

Shortly after the ruling, the U.S. Chamber reached a compromise with Texas Republican Congressman Lamar Smith to support a controversial bill to make employer use of E-verify mandatory in all 50 states. A battle over mandatory E-verify is likely this fall in Congress, as the “Legal Workforce Act” (H.R. 2885)

The Arizona law does not intrude on federal control of immigration because it is strictly limited to state licensing power, the Supreme Court majority said.

Cecillia Wang, director of the Immigration Project of the ACLU in San Francisco, called the Arizona decision “very limited” and directed at Arizona’s licensing law. “It is not carte blanche to regulate the employment of immigrants,” she said.

Daniel Pochoda, the legal director of the ACLU of Arizona, said they have been living with the job verification law for a few years and so far it has not been widely enforced.

“Most counties don’t enforce it, so it has not impacted employers much,” he said. And he believes the Supreme Court’s decision was specific to business licensing and may not be used to save SB 1070.

Hazelton Rent Law Gets Another Look

But the ruling’s potential to increase restrictions on immigrants was quickly underscored when the high court told a federal appeals court to reconsider its ban on a Hazelton, Penn., law that fines landlords for renting to undocumented aliens. The justices said to apply the Arizona ruling.

“The troubling thing about the Hazelton case is that it extends regulation beyond employment and takes it into landlord-tenant relations,” said Angelo A. Paparelli, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer with Seyfarth Shaw. “This is really bad from a civil rights perspective,” he said, because “people could be thrown on the street and many have American children.”

Hazelton, a town of 25,000 in northeast Pennsylvania, can’t enforce the law yet. It still faces added challenges that it is unconstitutional.

The third case before the high court last term provided benefits to immigrants. The justices allowed California to provide lower in-state college tuition rates for undocumented alien students living in California, despite a federal restriction on price breaks for the undocumented. Nine other states have also decided to circumvent the federal restriction.

Arizona Copycats

SB1070—which orders police to stop individuals who may be in the country illegally and verify their legal status— has been largely blocked from taking effect, most recently by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Civil rights groups have argued the law not only intrudes on federal authority over immigration law but also encourages racial profiling.

But that hasn’t stopped a handful of states from imposing homegrown versions of Arizona’s law and in some cases going further.

“The SB1070 copycats have mostly been blocked,” said Elena Lacayo, Immigration Field Coordinator of the National Council of La Raza in Washington, D.C. “But it shows what we are heading toward,” she said of the growing state regulation of immigrants.

Perhaps the harshest state law thus far is in Alabama. It would prohibit undocumented immigrants from attending public colleges, receiving state benefits and renting homes. Police must try to verify the citizenship of anyone they stop, detain or arrest.

In addition, it asks students to disclose if they or their parents are undocumented. Civil libertarians complain it will prompt parents to pull children out of school rather than risk disclosing their status and face arrest. One cause for hope among the law’s challenges comes from a 1982 Texas law that attempted to block school enrollment of illegal immigrants. Thirty years ago the high court said children living I the U.S., legally or not, have a right to free public education.

Another provision of the Alabama law, prohibiting people from giving rides to undocumented immigrants, has been thrown out.

So far, legal challenges have successfully blocked the laws in Utah, Indiana and Georgia, with a new challenge expected soon against recent restrictions in South Carolina.

In Utah a package of laws require police to check immigration status of anyone arrested for a felony and creates a guest worker program in 2013 that allows undocumented workers to live and work legally in the state.

New Indiana legislation made it illegal to use identification cards issued by foreign consulates and imposed fines on employers who accept them as ID. In addition, the state gives police authority to arrest anyone who has received a notice of a removal order from a federal immigration court.

And in Georgia, the state imposed tough penalties for use of fake work documents and gave police authority to check people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

The latest state to enter the fray is South Carolina. In June it approved a law that not only requires employers to use the federal E-verify system to check job applicants’ citizenship status but also establishes a team of immigration police to enforce the new law.

Paparelli sees all these laws as having very damaging consequences for federal authority. “I don’t think you can have 50 state versions of immigration law without havoc,” he said.

The ACLU’s Wang said state and local officials “will continue to press the boundaries” of the Supreme Court’s decision and civil rights groups will continue to challenge those that overreach.

By David Slagle, Contributor

SAN FRANCISO — After the London riots in August, the theorist Paul Gilroy made a rousing yet frighteningly honest speech to a crowd of community leaders and activists in Tottenham, North London.

In his speech, Gilroy argued that Black and poor youth had been subjected to what he called “processes of criminalization,” re-creating them in an image they did not choose.

This carefully molded portrayal of the “feral street thug,” the “violent monster,” emerges only through a close alliance between information – from newspaper articles to public relations statements – and power.

This relationship between information and power is shown in its stark nakedness by the failure of the American media to cover stories relating to police murders. The Raymond Hérissé murder in Miami on May 31 is a case study in this regard: Out of the thousands of media outlets which can be searched through Google News, only five have dared to print the slain man’s name and only the San Francisco Bay View gave the story a face by printing a photo of Hérissé.

It is as if, in a bizarre kind of instant amnesia, Hérissé’s identity itself, the fact that he had a name and a face, is an act of treason, a threat to the power of the state. One is reminded of the days immediately following the emancipation of the slaves, who were told that they didn’t need their 40 acres – their freedom was enough.

In a similar way, the media seems to be saying, especially to young Black men, “Don’t try to find out more about this Hérissé case, because you should be thanking God that it wasn’t you,” as if educating oneself would be a way of cursing one’s own life. Whereas the supposed job of the mainstream media would be to cover stories, we find in this case that they are prime agents of cover-ups, not only relating to the circumstances of police terror but, equally, to the names, identities and livelihoods of the people themselves.

People like Hérissé, Oscar Grant — murdered in January, 2009 by BART police in Oakland — Mark Duggan, whose murder in London on Aug. 4 touched off the rebellion in England, and Raheim Brown Jr. are, after the fact, “criminalized,” made into the criminals that the media-police information alliance wants to convince us that they always were.

This posthumous act of “criminalizing” the person who is pulled under the fiery storm of police bullets is an act of desperation on the part of a state and an elite, which is struggling to reconcile its idea of the world with the ugly truth of the world.

The newly-promoted Barhim Bhatt and his accomplice, Jonathan Bellusa, are experiencing this same conflict: On some level they know, just as well as Lori Davis and Raheim Brown Sr., that their son, Raheim Brown Jr., was not a murderer. But this knowledge is drowned in the myth that forms an unfortunately vast part of the “American Dream” – the myth that justice lives in the hands of the white man, the police, the cowboy who raped and murdered American Indian children.

The other side of this myth, and the crucial part here, is the idea that if Brown, Hérissé, Grant, Duggan and thousands of others met their deaths this way, at the hands of the “enforcers of justice,” then they must have done something wrong. This is why the only information the Oakland police seem to have released, in the scant few news stories about Brown’s death, is that one of their officers was “stabbed with a screwdriver,” that Brown’s car “smelled of marijuana” and that it was stolen. Their stoicism is evidence of both their power and their fear that such power will be challenged by any real information about the incident.

In this case, we have the word of the Oakland Police Department, the same department which – only a little more than 40 years ago – unwillingly served as the worldwide emblem of the ongoing war between the police and the people via the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. On the other side, we have the word of Tamisha Stewart, the only civilian witness, who was beaten and jailed after the crime on Skyline Boulevard. Stewart claims that the screwdriver never left the ignition.

One thing that should worry us, and perhaps gestures toward the years to come, is the question: How do the average Oakland Hills residents, the people whose mansions stand within a mile of Skyline, justify this murder and cover-up? When they opened the paper and saw the news story, did their eyes focus on the words “marijuana,” “theft” and “screwdriver,” rather than “20-year-old,” “student” and “excessive force”? And, if so, is there any hope for them? Is there any hope that they might, one day, be able to devote their time to understanding the way in which the American republic punishes people for the fact of their own birth, twists and pushes and moulds people into criminal mentalities and behaviors?

I write these words with a tearful hope that some understanding may be reached between the people in the community who know Raheim Brown’s situation and the people who devote their every waking minute to ignoring the fact that he was born, that his parents and siblings and fiancée loved him, that he made mistakes, in part, due to his country’s disavowal of his human rights, of his humanity and his dignity.

The media criminalization of the young Black male victim of a police murder was blatantly apparent in the case of Kenneth Harding, killed by San Francisco police in broad daylight at the main intersection in Hunters Point on July 16 for having no proof he’d paid his $2 train fare.

I write because I know that not all of the former group are Black and not all of the latter group are white, but that, nevertheless, it is still an issue of white supremacy, because – as James Baldwin and Malcolm X always said – whiteness is a matter of worldview, a worldview which has trapped and condemned not only Hérissé, Brown, Grant and Duggan but, in a terrible death embrace, their executioners as well.

David “Shoshone” Slagle is a researcher and journalist born and raised in Oakland. He has studied in Los Angeles and London, U.K.

HARTFORD — Wander into any Hartford Superior Court room on any given week day and you’ll see the monstrosity: pro se defendants before disinterested Judges, especially in foreclosure cases.

Connecticut Superior Court Judge Julia Aurigemma’s court room will give you plenty to ponder.

But before you go, check out The New York Times‘ Op-Ed on the justice gap that pervades our society today.

It reads:

By Donny Lumpkins, Contributor

SAN FRANCISCO — Last night, I went to see the movie The Help and walked out about an hour into it, not long after a fried chicken joke between a black maid and her white boss.

I walked out of the movie half way through it because I’ve made a pact with myself that as soon as the fried chicken and the N-word start to get thrown around, I will remove myself from the situation.

As a young black man, I tend to cringe when white people try and address the complexity of race relations and the plight of black folks in America. They almost always get it wrong. I don’t even think Hollywood should try.

The Help is a movie set in the 1960s South and it’s about a young white reporter who gets some black maids to talk to her about their lives working in the households of white families. I wasn’t really sure what to expect — I didn’t read the bestselling book and I try to stay away from movies where race is a theme. Any kind of movie where white people are “helping” black folks succeed puts a thorn in my paw. It seems a little self-serving to me.

But I like January Jones from Mad Men and the girl with the swoopy bangs in Superbad, Emma Stone, so I kept an open mind.

I saw the movie in downtown San Francisco, at the Westfield at 8:30 PM. I see movies there fairly often and the crowds tend to be diverse, but when I took a look around in the dark theatre, I realized I was the only black person in sight. I didn’t expect it to be packed with black folks like a Spike Lee movie, but still…

This is a movie about black people for white people, I thought, and already began to get very offended.
It’s been my experience in the city with some white folks that they think they understand more about black people then they really do and it can get uncomfortable.

The script was scoff-worthy and I felt particularly uncomfortable every time the crowd laughed at anything the black characters did, even if it was supposed to be comic relief. I wasn’t sure if the crowd was laughing at or with them. At some points, I would even find the crowd laughing when there was no joke at all – just some homely-looking black folks on screen.

The way the black characters were portrayed was definitely a sore point for me. I hate the shuck and jive way the black ladies spoke and I just get furious any time I see a black woman in a maid outfit. It makes me think of my mother and sisters, who are all strong, successful black women, and who would have had to be maids to endure those times.

The white characters weren’t much better. The main character, played by Emma Stone, spent most of the film being pursued by a WASPy-looking, pig-headed white guy who she kisses as the sun sets in the backdrop, just a few scenes after a race riot broke out where the lead black character, played by Viola Davis, had to run home in fear of being murdered by a blood-thirsty mob, as her son had been.

And I must say I really didn’t enjoy hearing January Jones use the N-word. She’s such a sweetheart and to hear it come out of her mouth with such force might have been intended as good acting, but I don’t think she’s that good.

I knew it was close to my time to leave as soon as one of the black maids sat down to eat some fried chicken with one of the housewives she worked for proclaiming in some slave-type English “I never burn my fried chicken!” and the crowd erupted in laughter.

The scene that broke the camel’s back for me was when one of the maids was arrested for stealing a ring from a house she worked at and is put in handcuffs and hit across the face with a Billy club by a portly, Southern-drawled policeman.

At that point, I had seen enough to know that even though there were fantastic black actresses in the film, black folks like me who cringe when they hear anyone say nigger or nervously laugh when white people do black impressions or say “Fiddy” Cent instead of Fifty Cent, would not find it amusing.

I find that Hollywood is way too bone-headed and self-absorbed to tackle any subject as convoluted and complex as racism. Instead, The Help just throws every stereotype at you at once about black people and white people. Whenever black people have to “act like black people” in movies, there seems to be a disconnect between the reality of the culture and the movie version of black lives.

And it’s not just white filmmakers that have this problem. It’s the same issue I have with Tyler Perry movies: they are just stereotype after stereotype and I think they do more harm for the perception of black people than good. Whenever one of my white friends talks about Tyler Perry movies and what they found funny in the movie, I realize a disconnect between me and them that is only there when race comes into play. It seems to me, sometimes white folks are laughing at us rather than with us.

From what I could tell, the impact of a film like The Help is that white folks get to go in a theater and feel all warm and fuzzy about a time that was horrid for black people. I think it’s way too simple to think all the help back then were scared black women who lived under the oppression of racist self-absorbed desperate housewives, as the movie made them out to be.

It upsets me that people so freely travel back to those times and some even miss them. Trying to find nostalgia in those ugly days is dangerous and potentially harmful for the future. That was a time where people like me could not live in peace and I’m happy that we as a country have moved past it. I would hope most whites have, too.