I been watching and rewatching this video over and over since it dropped. I forgot I had a blog and that you could embed Youtube videos on it and stuff. So …yeah..the homie Bambu doesn’t have a single weakness as an emcee:

I was going to post tonight about the Celtics-Bulls series that concluded a few hours ago, but then I saw the headline on CNN that the kids who beat Luis Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant, to death got off.

Friends and relatives of two teens accused in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant struggled to contain their relief as not-guilty verdicts were announced on the most serious charges against the former high school football stars Friday.
Luis Ramirez died of blunt force injuries after a confrontation with a group of Pennsylania teens.

Gasps filled the courtroom and some had to be restrained by sheriff’s deputies as they tried to rush the defense table after Derrick Donchak, 19, and Brandon Piekarsky, 17, were acquitted of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and ethnic intimidation for the death of Luis Ramirez.

Piekarsky was also found not guilty of third-degree murder for the death of Ramirez, who died of blunt force injuries after an encounter with the teens last summer.

However, the all-white jury of six men and six women from Schuylkill County jury found Piekarsky and Donchak guilty of simple assault.

(from CNN.com)

I was planning to have a good night geeked out about the Celtics. But the depressing news of the real world beckons.

Some of yall have made me sick these past few weeks fam.

I can’t judge, you know, one of my favorite pastimes is disparaging famous people and things – but there are certain things that are appropriate and certain things that are not.

I tried my best to avoid seeing pictures of a battered Rihanna, because I don’t need a reminder of the kind of hurt – physical, mental, emotional – partner abuse can cause. We all know what happens, and most of us would never dream of making fun of it if it was our own family who was involved. Alas, it was everywhere and I saw it tons of times, and I was both shocked and not shocked at all. We all know this happens every single day everywhere around us.

But because it’s two pop stars, people feel like their lives are public enough that they can crack a little joke here and there. And they think because they apparently are a couple again, that it must not have been that bad in the first place, and we can all chuckle about it now that it’s over. And they think she probably did something to provoke him, and that it’s her fault if she gets beat up again or worse, and she gave him an STD, and I even hear little kids saying “Chris Brown beat Rihanna with an umbrella-ella-ella” and yo, I’m just shocked fam, really?

Lost in all this is this simple fact: partner abuse is the leading cause of death for African-American women aged 15-34. Leading cause of death – not simply “more common than we’d like to imagine.”

There’s no joke in there. And regardless if you like Chris Brown’s music better than you like Rihanna’s, there’s no excuse either.

And some folks are like “man, she took him back, you’re overreacting, it couldn’t have been a big deal if she took him back.” But you don’t need me to tell you that it always seems like she takes him back, no matter who “she” and “him” is. Whether it’s celebrities or your neighbors, it’s easier to think of times when they get back together than it is to think of examples when they didn’t. Maybe that’s just me, but no I don’t think it is.

Our society loves to blame the victim. Especially when that victim is a woman, and more so when it is a woman of color. I know celebrities are easy targets for snark and disses, but honestly, I been disgusted by some of yall recently, and I hope we can get to a point in society where nobody feels alright about making light of this kind of situation.

Peace

People have been talking about the world being crazy nowadays as though there was nothing we could do to change it.

The world is crazy because we’ve encouraged it and allowed it to become crazy.

I was put on to this video by my friend Sham. Please be warned that many of these images are extremely disturbing. For more about the artist Humble the Poet, visit him here.

Big ups to:

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D), Ohio
Rep. Gwen Moore (D), Wisconsin
Rep. Ronald Paul (R), Texas
Rep. Nick Rahall (D), West Virginia
Rep. Maxine Waters (D), California

Use your Google-fu skills if you aren’t knowing.

Found out about this over at Hyphen Blog and it’s very upsetting. An elderly Chinese woman in Oakland was viciously beaten by three men in their 20s.

Every Thursday for the past three years the 4-foot-8-inch, 103-pound widow would walk through the neighborhood removing cans and other recyclable items from plastic bins residents would put out for regular collection on Friday.

…

Hamilton said some residents heard a commotion and when they went to look they saw the woman lying helpless on the sidewalk with two men punching and kicking her and another beating her with what turned out to be the broomstick she used to carry her bags on her shoulders. During the attack the broomstick broke and the man started kicking her, Hamilton said.

(from San Jose Mercury News)

To do something like that to anyone – but especially to a defenseless great-grandmother who weighs 100 pounds – you have to not view the victim as a person, or even as a living being.

I have seen young and not that young non-Asian people mock or harass elderly Asian people my whole life here in racist-ass Boston. And as much as I hate that, it seemed those situations turning into actual cases of violence were more than rare. The only one I can remember immediately was the beating death of 70 year-old Sheng Hao Teng in 2003 by a severely mentally ill homeless man. That tragic case is the only one of its kind I can think of, until now I guess.

There are a lot of things I want to write here, but they are somehow just too painful.

I guess all I can say is I hope she recovers fully – physically, mentally, and emotionally. I also hope her assailants go through a process by which they confront and conquer their demons that spurred them to do something like this, and by which they are able to contribute positively again to society, and specifically contribute positively to the lives of the victim and her family. I also hope the people in the community where this happened are able to adequately express their sadness, anger, and concerns about safety, and work together to create an environment where something like this could never happen again.

Peace all.

Gary Glitter is best known for being the man behind the hit song “Rock and Roll (Part 2),” which is used extensively at sporting events, in plenty of movie soundtracks, and just generally among big crowds to get them excited for something. You know the one I’m talking about, it goes “dadada da-dah HEY! da-da dadada da-dah dadada da-dah HEY!” On and on and on ad nauseum.

But what he should probably be best known for is being a pedophile. Not just a pedophile, but one who used his riches to travel the globe after serving 2 months in a British prison for possessing child pornography in 1997. He has likely been raping young children everywhere he went after permanently leaving England and settling down in Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, and maybe some other places we don’t know about.

He was released from a Vietnamese prison yesterday, and was supposed to return to London, where – from my understanding – they would prevent him from traveling abroad again. He had spent about two years in that prison for repeatedly raping two Vietnamese girls – ages 9 and 11. These are just two of his victims; nobody except the rapist himself knows how many more there have been.

Apparently on the connecting flight from Thailand, he refused to board the plane to Europe. But since Thai authorities refused to allow him in the country, he spent a full day trying to wrangle some other arrangement, eventually ending up in Hong Kong.

How does this happen like this? I mean, I know how. You can draw a line from the differences in nationality, race, gender, social status, wealth, and a million other factors, and the answer is very clear. It’s not how. But just. Why?

By the time help arrived, Luis Ramirez lay convulsing in the middle of the street, foam running from his mouth.

Blows had struck the 25-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant with such force that they left a clotted, bruised impression of Jesus Christ on the skin of his chest from the religious medal he wore.

His attackers were white teenagers, including star students and football players, witnesses told police.

After a night of drinking, the teens taunted the undocumented worker with racial epithets, pummeled him to the ground and then kicked him in the head, court documents charge. He died in a hospital two days later.

from this article on CNN.com

If you were to read the first four sentences of this article only, you would know that Luis Ramirez was an “illegal Mexican immigrant,” an “undocumented worker,” who was beaten to death. And that’s pretty much all you would know.

If you continued to read the first half of this article, you would find out that before being attacked, he “responded to the name-calling with his own insults, which escalated the confrontation.” That the white teenagers who started the fight, and ultimately ended it, were not actually responsible for “escalating” it – apparently that was his own fault.

You’d also know that upon reaching a “a dusty park on Vine Street…Ramirez asked the couple to drop [him and a 15 year-old girl] off so they could walk. What happened next depends on the narrator.” And you might think he was already up to something shady. At this point, the writer has tried to make it clear that Ramirez is not faultless in his own death, after having already come to the country illegally, set out to walk a teenage girl home alone at night, and “escalated the confrontation.”

Later, the writer also makes it a point to tell us about the assailants – bear in mind, there’s no debate about whether these teenagers actually killed Ramirez, nobody is questioning that fact. Their lawyer says “you would be proud to have any of these kids…as your children” We learn about their high grades, their athletic achievements. If you’ve ingested the news in this country for enough years, you know this, the white guy(s) always has a story. The other guy(s) – to put it shortly – don’t. (See here and here for just a couple of examples.)

It isn’t until much later in the article that we learn more details that help paint a better picture of the deceased. He had a fiance, who was in fact local and white herself, so he wasn’t a stereotypical “making money here, sending it to Mexico” you hear so many people talk about. The 15 year-old girl he was walking home at night was his future sister-in-law. The first threats from the drunk white boys were directed toward her, so it’s pretty understandable that he would have been nervous and tried his best to stand up to them.

But the point of it is that they put all those details way down in the story. If you only read the first half of the article, which is what I usually do, you would have seen the description of immigrant men that CNN is comfortable with. Faceless. Family-less. That’s the image we start with. The details that come later – they can only do so much to change the perception.

It’s almost as though CNN wants the reader to believe there were 4 or 5 things Ramirez could have done to avoid being killed. Whereas the kids who killed him, well, this was their first mistake ever.

London recently saw the world premiere of the musical adaptation of the novel (and subsequent film) Gone with the Wind. Seventy-nine shows later, it’s been canceled.

Various reviews online pan it, saying it aims to condense too much into a play. As many of you probably know, the story focuses on a love story between some rich bratty Southern Belle, and a suave pro-slavery capitalist. The backdrop is the Civil War, and tied up in the setting of everything is the historical understanding of race and slavery, war, economic development and exploitation, and…well, isn’t that a lot already? We all know it’s risky business to set a love story against such ominous historical events, unless you can convey the gravity the situation and its effect on the people who lived it.

So the musical tried to do that by having actors playing slaves singing a happy jaunty song entitled “Negroes for Sale.” And that is astounding. That someone thought it would be acceptable to portray slaves as jazz-handsing their way into a lifetime of brutal torture and rape is beyond me.

Or it was at first, but then I realized that there’s a long history of playing up pain and suffering for ticket sales. It’s more than a little appalling to think an interpersonal love story could be so compelling as to turn slavery – slavery! – into just another fact of the day. A musical certainly could convey the dire conditions of an historical era and harsh realities of life in that time, but it appears that “Gone with the Wind” didn’t, so good riddance.

But it has to make you really wonder about the continued popularity of “Miss Saigon,” doesn’t it? (more…)

This entry can be read in its entirety at BPRLive.org.

The photo you see here is pretty well-known: it’s of an anti-busing demonstration in Boston in 1977. Essentially, a white dude is using an American flag to attack a Black dude. It’s so deliciously perfectly ironic that it seems like a scene from a play.

Boston has a long history of violence, specifically as it relates to youth. The busing demonstration was made by people who didn’t want to see young Black children – we’re talking school-age children – going to school in white neighborhoods. Boston – both the city and the mindstate – are known to be racially and ethnically segregated. There is a lot of, I guess you could call them misunderstandings between youth from different neighborhoods.

I came of age in what is considered by a lot of folks as the Golden Era for Boston youth: the late 1990s. The dip in the youth homicide rate was so profound that it received national attention: the media dubbed it “The Boston Miracle” and President Clinton even swooped through the city’s roughest spots and congratulated community after community for keeping kids alive.

But as most folks in this region surely know by now, the miracle didn’t last. Youth violence has been – and continues to be – on the rise. The people who are in charge of discouraging this kind of thing have made references to how much it’s starting to feel like the early 90s again.

Read the rest of this entry here.