Racial Bias by the Boys in Blue?

When I read about cops like NYPD officer Juan Nunez (pictured left) being busted for joining 3 other men in beating a 52 year-old homeless black man with their fists and a bat in front of a deli on Long Island while yelling racial epithets at him, it bothers me on a number of levels.

It doesn't make think that every one of the thousands of NYPD officers is a racist, but it does make me aware that many of them harbor internalized bias against people because of the color of their skin, and that's a big problem in New York City.

Forget that those charged with enforcing the law are held to a higher standard, or that officer Nunez should have been the one helping someone who was being attacked, not taking part as a group of men are beating one man.

Is he able to enforce the law objectively without bias when he obviously harbors bias against African-Americans?

According to an article in the New York Daily News, Freeport, Long Island resident Officer Nunez was at the deli at 8am when a black homeless man named Daryl Jackson tried to use the pay phone outside and was asked to leave by the property owners.

Not all the facts are clear but three members of the deli owner's family, Jose Miguel Vargas, 35, of Freeport, and Bronx residents Persio Vargas, 53 and Kelvin Vargas,24 along with Nunez, surrounded Jackson and confronted him and began beating him after some kind of scuffle ensued - no doubt all FOUR men will testify that Jackson threw the first punch.

What's sad is that this kind of hostile attitude is a by-product of the Rudy Giuliani era New York when violence against the homeless and African-Americans by members of the NYPD skyrocketed after "America's Mayor" declared war on the homeless in the city including the infamous "Squeegee Men".

No one is going to argue that it wasn't annoying when homeless guys with dirty rag would begin washing the windows of drivers stuck in traffic then aggressively demand money for it; but no one deserves to be beaten up or physically assaulted for pan handling - especially by the police.

Just today, the New York Times reported that the City of New York agreed to pay $1.15 million to settle a law suit that accused two NYPD detectives, Patrick J. Brosnan and James Crowe, both former body guards for Mayor Rudy Giuliani, of execution-style killings of two robbery suspects in the Bronx.

In 1995 Anthony Rosario, 18, was hit by 14 bullets, 6 of them hit him in the back. His cousin Hilton Vega, 21 was struck with eight shots, 1 in the head, 1 in his butt, 1 in his arm and 5 in the back. This was 4 years before the murder of Amadou Diallo, an innocent man of color shot 41 times.

If officer Nunez, himself Puerto Rican, treated a homeless black man this way when he was off duty, how is he going treat a black suspect he encounters when he has his gun and badge?

Is it realistic to assume that someone like officer Nunez can just "turn off" the bias he has against people of color when he's on duty? Why are the NYPD allowed to routinely use excessive physical force against African-American males, even when they are innocent and unarmed?

Remember Sean Bell?

Austrian Scientist: Cleopatra Was Likely Part African

To this day Cleopatra remains one of the most enduring figures in ancient history, albeit a misunderstood one.

But a recent BBC News article about a recent archaeological discovery about her genes shatter some of the long-accepted myths about her race.

For years she has been assumed to be European in her looks, partly because so many fictional works created by European and American artists simply portrayed her that way.

Many archaeologists have long asserted that she was Greek or Macedonian as many of the Egyptian monarchs were actually Macedonian in origin.

Some African-Americans and Afro-centric scholars have long claimed she was in fact, a dark-skinned Egyptian African queen, but the truth is a merger of all these claims.

The inaccuracies that surround this fascinating Egyptian monarch are compounded by the numerous fictional works based on her life.

Most famously Elizabeth Taylor's portrayal of her in the 1963 film Cleopatra solidified the pop-culture myth of Cleopatra as a light-skinned, blue-eyed Caucasian. With Elizabeth Taylor's stunning blue eyes and simmering on-screen sexuality, it's not too hard to understand how THAT happened.

The film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and co-starring Richard Burton is known notoriously as one of the most expensive box-office flops in history, because of the enormous costs of it's elaborate sets and costumes and a series of delays and on-set accidents. Originally budgeted at $2 million it eventually cost $44 million and nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox studios.

There are no less than eight films (the first produced in 1917 and the most recent, in 2005) about her life and she has also been written about by playwrights (including Shakespeare), novelists, poets and was also characterized in the recent BBC-HBO cable television series Rome; usually cast as a white Caucasian female.

But the truth, according to the BBC News article is that she was in fact, most likely the daughter of an African mother based on a study of her sister Arsinoe's skeleton first unearthed in the late 1920's.

Cleopatra was born in January 69 BC and her parents were brother and sister. Her mother, Cleopatra V was an Egyptian queen and her father Ptolemy XII, was a direct descendant of Ptolemy I Soter, a general of Alexander the Great.

Austrian Hilke Thuer of the Austrian Academy of Sciences completed a study of the skull of Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe found in a tomb in Ephesus, Turkey; he asserts that a close study of the skull clearly demonstrates that Arsinoe's mother was African and hence, Cleopatra was likely of mixed race as well.

To eliminate her younger sister as a potential rival for the Egyptian throne (they were both daughters of Ptolemy XII with different mothers), Cleopatra ordered her lover/husband Marc Antony to kill Arsinoe in 41 BC after the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar in 44 BC (with whom Cleopatra had 3 sons...)

So after years of assumptions, science now makes clear that Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh, was in fact of mixed race and most likely had African, Egyptian and Macedonian (Greek) features.

A truth that has taken 2,000 years to come to light.

Conservative Media & Their Vision of an America Divided by Hate and Extremism

With the world's leading nations trying to weather the worst recession in memory, the Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center released it's annual report on hate crime activity in the United States showing the number of extremist groups in the US rose 4% in 2008 to 926.

Elements of the mainstream media are partially responsible. Media pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have been promoting the myth of the "Obama Recession" on TV and radio for months in an attempt to lay the blame for the financial meltdown at the door of a president who has been in office less than 100 days.

The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, is still making headlines after the recent cartoon depicting two police officers gunning down a monkey serving as a crass caricature of President Barack Obama.

Hysterical fears over the rise in Latino immigration have led to a 40% rise in hate crimes against immigrants.

The conservative media promote bogus data and propaganda that misinterprets HUD information in an effort to falsely blame immigrant and minority home owners for the mortgage meltdown rather than the banks and Wall Street firms that spent years bundling up mortgages into complex packages and them selling them off before the real estate bubble burst.

It's not a new phenomenon, hate is almost like a part of a cycle

In the aftermath of the Civil War the first phase of the Ku Klux Klan arose in opposition to Federal Reconstruction efforts to direct the rebuilding of the devastated Southern infrastructure and secure rights for millions of recently-freed slaves.

During the global economic malaise that followed the first World War, Klan membership in the United States reached an all-time high of at least 4,000,000 members, numbers that included judges, members of law enforcement, members of the press, business leaders and even members of Congress.

The question is when do we begin stepping up to the plate and looking at the challenges we face in the eye as a nation rather than wasting time and effort trying to look for scapegoats to a collective responsibility.

The petty, divisive political agendas of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, the News Corporation, Michelle Malkin and others only seek to tap fear and anger and distract us from the broader responsibilities and opportunities that are before us.

It's the politics of unity, truth and responsibility that are needed now; not the politics of hate and ignorance.

Rush Limbaugh's Demented "Movement" Theory - people actually take this kind of opinionated racist fiction as fact:

Monkey Book Display at Barnes & Noble: Snopes Says It's Fake

This photo was sent to me recently by a friend who claims that the Barnes & Noble store in the Miracle Mile Mall in Coral Gables, Florida had this display in the front display of the store.

Notice the various Obama books and in the center is a book about Monkeys. If you'll notice, this display is not in a place where a customer could have placed the monkey book.

I sent this to my cousin Pam who said she'd received the e-mail as well and that Snopes.com claims that according to a statement from Barnes & Noble, the monkey book was placed there by a customer as a prank and not by an employee of Barnes & Noble.

I was in a rush and blogged about the picture, but had no time to stop and check it's authenticity.

Lazy blogging on my part and I chalk it up as a lesson learned. I pledge to refrain from printing photos I receive from people second-hand in the future and will, as has been the focus of my blog, focus on issues covered by the media.

Given the number of stores and the range of employees Barnes & Noble has, I cannot in all fairness just accuse the entire corporation as a whole of being racist.

As I stated in my original blog I worked part-time for Barnes & Noble in New York (the original store on 5th avenue) and I know they had a diverse range of employees and managers working there during my brief tenure and I never had any problems or saw any such nonsense.

I'll be more careful in the future.