Rokhaya Diallo Speaks Truth to Power in France

Outraged parent Ana Marie Cox protesting the killing
of school cafeteria manager Philando Castile in 2016

For many Americans, the terms "Stop and Frisk" and "Driving While Black" have become synonymous with the systematic abuse of police power.

Terms that have become symbolic of the overreach of some law enforcement organizations who intentionally and disproportionately target, and stop, people of color - too often for no discernible reason other than the color of one's skin.

African-American Minnesota cafeteria manager Philando Castile is a sad, but prime example.

As I blogged about back on June 10th, the former St. Anthony, Minnesota PD officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile over for a broken taillight back on July 6, 2016.

Before that fateful stop, remarkably, Castile had been pulled over by various local Minnesota police officers between 49 and 52 times over a 13-year period for mostly minor infractions like failure to use a turn signal.

Within 74 seconds of pulling Castile over, an unhinged Yanez fired seven shots into the car at point blank range, (with Castile's girlfriend sitting in the passenger seat and her four-year-old daughter in the backseat) killing an innocent man who'd committed no crime, and had done nothing to threaten Yanez aside from comply with a verbal order to produce his identification from his wallet.

While unjustified traffic stops based on racial bias continue to be an issue in many parts of America, the positive news is that stop-and-risks in the city most notorious for their use, New York, have plummeted since being phased out in 2104 under current 2nd-term Democratic NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.

And as James Cullen reported in an article for the Brennan Center For Justice in 2016, the elimination of stop-and-frisk did NOT lead to an increase in crime as some conservative politicians (including former Mayor Mike Bloomberg), right-wing media pundits like Rudy Giuliani, and some members of the NYPD insisted that it would.

In fact, in total contrast to the dystopian crime-ravaged wasteland Trump described in his demented inauguration address back in January, as Ashely Southall reported for the New York Times last Wednesday, crime levels in New York City are as low as they've been since the 1950's.

But as recent international headlines indicate, stop-and-frisks and the use of the law to unfairly target, and disproportionately stop racial and ethnic minorities have been generating controversy, and police-related deaths, in France.

French journalist Rokhaya Diallo 

Last Thursday, the editorial board of the New York Times published an op-ed taking the French government to task for removing French journalist Rokhaya Diallo (pictured left) from the advisory board of the French Digital Council - which the Times described as "an independent board dealing with digital technologies and their impact on society".

She wasn't removed from the FDC advisory board because of some embarrassing personal scandal, or because she wasn't qualified to serve.

Ms. Diallo was apparently removed by the government of French President Emmanuel Macron because of a conservative backlash that might be seen in America as a kind of knee-jerk, reverse political-correctness run amok.

Over the past couple years, she has emerged as a leading vocal critic of some of the stunning displays of authoritarian overreach by French police that have resulted in the injuries and deaths of a number of young men of color - most of them Muslims of African or Arab descent.

According to the Times, her public accusations that such conduct is reflective of institutional racism within France have rankled conservatives, including French education minster Jean Michel Blanquer, who threatened to sue a French teachers union last month "for using the words 'institutional racism' during educational workshops in ethnically diverse Seine-St. Denis northeast of Paris. Mr. Blanquer has also threatened to sue Ms. Diallo." 

Back in May, President Macron famously beat his far-right extremist candidate opponent Marine Le Pen in a widely-watched national election (in part) with a promise to "fight the divisions which undermine France".

But the excitement of those elections seven months ago has faded.

French President Emmanuel Macron

And the 39-year-old Macron had no prior experience governing as an elected leader and ran as an independent without the support of a traditional French political party.

Now facing the political reality that he needs the support of conservatives to enact the kinds of policies that got him elected, he yielded to pressure from French conservatives and Ms. Diallo was removed from the FDC advisory board. 


The president of the board, venture capitalist Marie Ekeland, resigned in protest over the widely-condemned decision along with most of the other board members she'd tapped.

It's a pretty sad reflection of a European nation with such a proud tradition of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and free speech to remove a young progressive voice from a (supposedly) independent advisory board because some people are uncomfortable with what she thinks and says.

Particularly a young journalist of color who speaks up for the rights of a group that is increasingly marginalized from mainstream French society in the economic, political and social sense - alienation which is a huge factor in some French Muslims self-radicalizing and identifying with (or being recruited by) ISIS in the first place.

As the Times op-ed notes, in 2016 Diallo produced and directed a documentary titled From Ferguson to Paris: Guilty of Being Black - an analysis of the growing problem of French police using excessive physical, and deadly force in the wake of confrontations arising from the huge spike in stop-and-frisk identity checks that overwhelmingly target Muslims and people of color.

These kinds of identity checks grew exponentially in France in the wake of the horrifying wave of  terrorist attacks that took place in multiple venues across Paris on Friday November 13, 2015.

Far-right French supporters of the National Front
rallying in honor of Joan of Arc in 2015 [Photo - Alamy]

Attacks coordinated and committed by Islamic extremists which left 130 innocent people from multiple countries dead, and hundreds more wounded and traumatized.

Those attacks unfolded at a time when many Europeans, including some French citizens, were already expressing a simmering resentment over the thousands of illegal immigrants fleeing war-ravaged nations in the Mid-East and Africa who were desperately seeking refuge in towns and cities across Western Europe.


That anti-immigrant resentment also found an outlet of expression in a resurgent nationalist / populist political movement that has seen once-marginalized right-wing extremist political parties capture seats in parliaments across Europe - including the National Front in France.

For many French citizens, that resentment was further fueled by a string of terrorist attacks starting in 2012 that rocked the country - including the mass shooting at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January, 2015 that left 17 people dead and 22 wounded.

And the beheading of Herve Cornara in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier in southeastern France by a radicalized Islamic French Muslim of North African descent named Yassin Salhi who also attempted to blow up a factory by ramming a vehicle into a bunch of gas cylinders on June 26, 2015.

From a domestic security standpoint, given the sharp increase in the number of home-grown "self-radicalized" French Muslims who've been engaged or connected to the slew of terrorist attacks that have struck France since 2012, it's understandable that French authorities would try and target areas with high concentrations of Muslims in an effort to try and prevent such attacks from happening. 

The uncomfortable truth about stop-and-frisk
in NYC; stats from NY Civil Liberties Union 

But it's also fair to say that some overzealous French police officers were engaged in taking out their frustrations on innocent people of color in an effort to "hit back" at an elusive target.

Unfortunately, just like stop-and-frisk in New York City, the overwhelming majority of people being stopped repeatedly were innocent French people of color who had nothing to do with terrorism or any other kind of illegal activity.

As The Guardian reported back in 2015 these kinds of random stop-and-frisks have also been successfully challenged in a French appeals court, as in the case of 13 men, all of whom were either of African or Arab descent, none of whom had a criminal record, who'd all been stopped multiple times by French police for humiliating ID checks.

The French court awarded all of the men modest financial compensation.

Now I'm no security expert, but are spot ID checks and stop-and-frisks of mostly people of color really the best way to stop some person who's sitting in a room alone watching ISIS propaganda online getting motivated to commit some kind of heinous terrorist attack on an innocent person or people?

Or are such actions only further stirring up the kind of anti-government resentment that already exists in already-marginalized communities? Thus serving the recruitment efforts of terrorists trying to target those alienated populations as they do in other countries like the U.S.?

There's no easy answer to those questions, but if you want to get a better sense of the repercussions of French police using undocumented stop-and-frisk against young French men of color, take a few minutes to read an op-ed Rokhaya Diallo wrote for Essence Magazine last August titled, "Police and Racism Kill In France Too". 

Just under a month after a slim majority of the 30 million-plus British citizens voted for the UK to "Brexit" the European Union on June 23, 2016, driven in part by the same kind of anti-immigrant hysteria being peddled by Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential race, a 24-year-old black Muslim Frenchman named Adama Traorie´ got into a confrontation with French police who were trying to arrest his older brother Bagui.

Adama Traorie´'s sister Assa (2nd from right) joins
thousands of protesters July, 2016 [Photo - AFP/ Getty]

As Ms. Diallo noted in her Essence op-ed, on or about July 20, 2016, Traorie´ died of asphyxiation while in police custody on the day of his 24th birthday.

For perspective, this incident took place just about fifteen days after former Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez fired seven shots into Philando Castile's car, killing him.

The death of Traorie´, subsequent protests, and disturbing allegations of an attempted police coverup, forced the issue of French police brutality into the mainstream spotlight in France.

Frankly, Americans who wish to see the implementation of meaningful reforms in policing to prevent this kind of abuse of police authority can't just get angry when it happens here in the United States.

Those who care have a responsibility to use peaceful dissent and political activism to channel outrage and concern over the same kinds of incidents that happen in other countries into substantive change that can take root globally.

Because this ongoing issue is reflective of a deeper systematic racism that's not bound by borders.

Rokhaya Diallo's passion and commitment to end unjustified police brutality in France and beyond isn't just going to get swept under the rug as a result of conservative French authorities pressuring the Macron government to boot her off of an independent advisory board.

Aided by social media, the ability of more people to see her documentary and a growing global presence thanks to attention from mainstream French, British and American media, Ms. Diallo's voice and influence is growing.

French police conducting a stop-and-frisk on a
young French citizen in 2011 

Many Americans (including myself) really weren't aware of Adama Traorie´'s death at the hands of French police in July, 2016 in part because our national news media was so consumed with the unjustified fatal shooting of Alton Sterling at the hands of two Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers in the early morning hours of July 5, 2016 - then Philando Castile's death just a day later in Minnesota.

But Rokhaya Diallo's (and other activist's) efforts are important.

They've helped people around the world learn the name, and story, of Adama Traorie´.

As well as young men of color like Hakim Ajimi, who died after French police used an illegal choke hold on him that crushed his thorax in 2004, or Lamine Dieng who was in police custody when he died of asphyxiation inside a French police van in 2007.

French authorities have every right to take proactive steps to protect their citizens from the kinds of violent terrorist attacks that have seized the world's attention.

But killing innocent people is an unacceptable way to achieve that goal - and as the editorial board of the New York Times observed, French President Emmanuel Macron is going to have to decide if the time-honored French concepts of "liberty, equality, fraternity" are just words, or an important part of his long-term vision for the country who elected him into office, in part, to reject the divisive politics of the far right and bring the country back together.

That's an important question as we head into 2018, not just in France or the United States but everywhere where injustice has become a part of government policy.

Well that's it for now, I'm off to join some friends in Princeton to ring in the new year.

2017 has certainly been one heckuva ride.

Here's to better things in 2018, thanks again for checking out the blog and I hope to see you back here next year.  -CG

Buckwheat's Sweat & Magical Negroes

William "Billie" Thomas, Jr. as the popular Our
Gang (The Little Rascals) character Buckwheat

Having read through and reflected back on, "A Dangerous Distortion of Our Families", the report co-produced by Color Of Change and Family Story that was the subject of my previous blog, I wanted to pivot back to the same topic and share some personal observations about the distortion of the black family by American media.

As a child, long before I developed the ability to use writing as a vehicle to articulate my thoughts and perceptions, it was apparent to me that there was something wrong with the way that the media portrayed my family.

In the 1970's the popular series of short films known as Our Gang (later re-released as The Little Rascals when it went into syndication on television in 1955), was still being shown on kids' TV.

Created back in 1922 by producer Hal Roach, the Our Gang series revolved around a group of (racially-integrated) kids who basically got into all kinds of mischief - they were originally short films that ran in movie theaters in the 20's, 30's and 40's alongside cartoons or newsreels before or after the feature film.

Last produced in 1944, the series survived in syndication on TV for decades, which is where my younger brother and I used to watch them together in the 70's.

One day, there was this episode in which one of the African-American characters on the series, I think it was Buckwheat played by actor William "Billie" Thomas, Jr. (pictured above), but it may have been the character Farina played by actor Allen Hoskins, was standing near a stove.

Something was frying in a pan and the stove was hot, and the character used his arm to wipe the sweat off his brow, and the shot quickly cut to a white kitchen wall where drops of black ink splashed across in a pattern - as if to suggest that Buckwheat's sweat was black.

Some of the most popular of the 41 different child
actors who were characters on The Little Rascals

Now a lot of weird, goofy shit took place on The Little Rascals, and to his credit Hal Roach was one of the first Hollywood producers to include black characters alongside white characters in film - but I distinctly recall feeling very strange about that particular scene.

I'd watched dozens of the 220 short films that were made, and even though I was young and knew that scene was intended as comedy, it wasn't funny to me.

I distinctly recall feeling very uncomfortable about it.

Long before I could articulate what racism was in the intellectual or vocal sense, I instinctively understood that the black droplets of sweat played on demeaning racist stereotypes - even though that particular "cut" lasted less than five seconds.

I never felt the same way about "The Little Rascals" after that - and that was the very first memory I have of seeing the African-American image intentionally distorted on TV.

Over the course of the hundreds of essays I've written on this blog, I've often reflected upon the fact that as a child of color coming of age in the mostly-white suburban landscape of the northeastern United States in the 1970's and 1980's, I rarely saw "myself" in the print, television and film media that I consumed and watched.

Too often the images of black males I did see on TV, (television being the first real "mass media" medium I watched) were distorted in cartoonish, demeaning, or sometimes even grotesque ways.

From an early age, my parents, both well-read college-graduates, insisted that my siblings and I read in order to inform, educate, and entertain, ourselves.

Sesame Street circa 1973 - 1974 when I was watching it

For example, they always made sure that in addition to subscribing to mainstream news magazines like Newsweek and Forbes, they also subscribed to magazines like Black Enterprise and Ebony - magazines owned and published by African-Americans which focused on topical issues from the contemporary black perspective.

My mother in particular, always made sure to bring home books from the public library for us to read, and she'd take me to the local public library, and let me take my time and browse for books that interested me.

Aside from Sesame Street, which (to public television's credit) had a racially diverse cast, many of the popular cartoons and children's shows that I watched on television as a young child rarely included characters who looked, sounded, or acted like me.

Even most of the popular, long-running "family" prime-time shows that we'd watch together as a family, like Little House on the Prairie, or The Waltons, tended to feature storylines that revolved around white characters.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with that, or that I didn't enjoy those shows.

On the contrary, I watched them religiously; and I loved some of those characters.

When the older sister Mary Ingalls went blind on Little House on the Prairie I almost cried.

I'm just re-emphasizing the point that I didn't see a whole lot of myself on those network shows in the mid-to-late 70's.

Diahann Carroll and Mark Copage on
NBC's Julia (1968 - 1971)

70's network comedies like Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man and Welcome Back Kotter all featured diverse casts with characters of color, but the gritty urban settings in which they took place were unfamiliar to me as a kid from the suburbs - I was drawn to more escapist fare.

On Saturday mornings, when my younger brother and I would sit in our PJ's in the family room watching cartoons until about 11:30am, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, (which was based on creator Bill Cosby's childhood in North Philadelphia and was named for his real childhood friend Albert Robinson) a cartoon that ran on CBS from 1972 - 1984, was really the only animated series that featured African-American characters.

Ground-breaking 60's shows that featured black characters like I Spy and Julia were well before my time, but there were definitely some interesting black characters on mainstream television when I grew up.


The original Star Trek, which was still running regularly in syndication in the 1970's and 80's, had actress Nichelle Nichols playing Lieutenant Uhuru on the bridge as a main character.

And thanks to creator / producer Gene Roddenberry, the occasional recurring African-American Enterprise crewmen and crew-women as well.

Including, for example, actor Booker Bradshaw who played the amiable Dr. M'Benga on a couple episodes, or the  actress Janet MacLachlan who played Lt. Charlene Masters in one episode.

Science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an interesting blog post back in 2014 about the black actors cast in the first season of Star Trek which includes some pretty interesting script notes too.

It is of interest to note that in March of 1968, just a month before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Star Trek also featured African-American actor actor William Marshall as the lead guest star on the episode "The Ultimate Computer".

Capt. Kirk & Lt. Uhuru watch in horror as Dr. Dystrom's
M-5 computer destroys the starship USS Excalibur

A distinguished actor with a long career, Marshall appeared in Broadway shows like Carmen Jones, six different stage productions of Othello, and even the title character in the 1972 blaxploitation film Blacula.

But Trek fans will remember him fondly as Dr. Richard Dystrom, the brilliant Star Fleet computer scientist who installed his revolutionary  "M-5 Multitronic System" on the Enterprise to test its ability to run a starship using artificial intelligence.

Let's just say that Dr. Dystrom's little experiment didn't end very well.

(We see you Hal-9000).

Now obviously Star Trek wasn't the only popular American television series to feature black actors in supporting and feature roles in the 1970's.

Ground-breaking series like CBS' Good Times and The Jeffersons (both spinoffs of All in the Family and all executive-produced by Norman Lear) brought "complete" black families (including fathers) to primetime television audiences for the first time.

While the aforementioned NBC series Julia is considered the first network prime-time series with a black family, it's important to note that her character played a nurse whose husband had been a U.S. (Air Force?) artillery spotter who'd been shot down over Vietnam.

Was that to "justify" her being single?

The series obviously deserves credit for portraying the first black family on network television, but it's interesting that the NBC executives who green-lit the show decided that a single black mother raising a son would be the main characters, rather than having a strong black male role model as the father.

I honestly don't know enough about the show to get into what the creators were thinking.

But while I can admire the casting of a black female lead, given the litany of painfully-average prime-time network TV shows in the 1960's that featured white married couples (Bewitched? I Dream of Jeanie?) I can't help but wonder about the reluctance of showing a "normal" black nuclear family on network TV.

1968, the year Julia premiered was a tense time for America, and not just because of race relations - it was the height of the Vietnam War, a growing counterculture was challenging traditional norms, the passing of civil rights legislation was upending the boundaries of a segregated American society.

Given all that, was the presence of an average well-adjusted black family a threat?

Was it really too controversial for Julia to have a husband in 1968 considering America landed a man on the moon in 1969?

The cast of ABC's Barney Miller in 1975

Perhaps if a black man had been written as what is jokingly called a "Magical Negro" endowed with some kind of magical powers NBC would've cast someone to play Julia's husband.

Don't laugh, see the aforementioned Bewitched or I Dream of Jeanie which featured a perky suburban witch and, yes - a mischievous genie from a bottle.

I'd mention The Flying Nun starring a young Sally Field but this blog is already way too long.

But alas, I digress. Let's move on.


In 1975 ABC introduced the comedy Barney Miller which featured a diverse slate of series regulars including African-American actor Ron Glass as NYPD Detective Sgt. Ron Harris, actor Jack Soo as Japanese-American Detective Nick Yemana, and actor Gregory Sierra as Puerto Rican Detective Sgt. "Chano" Amanguale.

Two years later, ABC brought the popular series The Love Boat to television with the African-American actor Ted Lange cast as series regular Issac the bartender - Lange would be one of only three actors to be in every episode of the series (and several made-for-TV movies) which ran from 1977 until 1986.

Yaphet Kotto being cast as one of the crewmen of the Nostromo on director Ridley Scott's visionary 1979  sci-fi classic Alien, and Billy Dee Williams being cast as Han Solo's friend Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, were both pretty big moments for me as a kid.

Maybe it sounds strange, but as a kid sitting in a darkened movie theater watching both of those films seeing that people of color existed in the fictional Hollywood sci-fi universe made me feel better about myself.

Mainstream network television, especially NBC, was finally taking strides to make more diverse casts with multi-dimensional characters of color a part of popular prime-time programming by the late 1970's and early 1980's.

With ground-breaking series like the critically-acclaimed cop-drama Hill Street Blues (1981 - 1987) and hospital drama St. Elsewhere - series regulars included Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon, Norman Lloyd, Ed Begley, Jr., Howie Mandel and David Morse.

(St. Elsewhere, which centered around the fictional Boston hospital St. Eligius, unquestionably had one of the strangest final episodes in television history.)

The cast of NBC's Different Strokes (1978 - 1986)

My brother and I both watched the half-hour NBC comedy Different Strokes, with actors Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges, pretty religiously too.

But even at that age we understood that those characters, two Harlem brothers adopted by a wealthy white man who go live in his 5th Avenue penthouse, fell more into what African-American film audiences and critics jokingly call "Magical Negroes"

Characters who exhibit almost (or literal) magic qualities, and who exist in a sort of fictional fantasy outside of the real black American experience.

Or as critic Christopher John Farley described:

"Black film characters who exist primarily to help troubled white folks, and who generally have few meaningful characteristics of their own."

While I watched all of those shows to some degree, for me, a young African-American coming of age in the suburbs, it really wasn't until The Cosby Show premiered on NBC in 1984 when I was just starting high school at Walt Whitman Senior HS in Bethesda, Maryland in the 9th grade that I first saw what I considered to be a reflection of myself and my family on primetime television.

Here was a black family headed by two college-educated professionals, Dr. Cliff Huxtable, a doctor played by Bill Cosby, and his wife Claire, a lawyer played by Phylicia Rashad, raising their children in a comfortable upper-middle class home.

In the Huxtable's only son Theo, I finally saw a character that, to some degree, mirrored my own existence - a somewhat shy, at times painfully-awkward black boy trying his best to live up to the expectations set by his professionally-successful parents.

Like millions of other Americans I watched almost every episode, The Cosby Show was the number-one series on network television for five seasons and the most successful show of the 1980's - one that helped define the decade in a cultural sense.

But at that age, as I was becoming much more conscious about the world around me, I was also beginning to wonder why the media didn't show more positive imagery of people of color on television.

UC Berkley data showing the percentage of some American
workers who receive some type of government assistance 

For example, in the early 1980's when I was in middle school, I clearly recall the efforts by the Reagan administration to stigmatize and marginalize poor and working class Americans as part of a broader strategy to cut federal spending on social programs to pay for tax cuts in order to nudge the American economy out of the recession.

Reagan actively promoted the myth of "Welfare Queens".

A racist term popularized by Republican politicians that was meant to intentionally propagate an image of a lazy urban African-American woman "getting rich" on welfare to justify gutting social spending to finance tax cuts - sound familiar?

It wasn't accurate then, and it isn't now - as Maria Godoy and Allison Aubrey reported for NPR earlier this spring, when Trump's cartoonishly-right wing budget director Mick Mulvaney piously declared, "If you're on food stamps and you're able-bodied, we need you to go to work.", he was apparently unaware that statistics from the Department of Agriculture - which operates the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) - showed that 55% of families with children who receive SNAP are bringing home employment income.

Despite statistics that show otherwise, conservatives continue to peddle the myth of a lazy population of poor non-whites who don't work and want to "live off the government" again, that's not reality.

That's just one example of the myriad ways in which social conservatives and Republican politicians intentionally distort the image of people of color and the poor and working class in America to alter public policy.

In 1995 I saw African-American writer and professor Ishmael Reed speak at a black writer's conference in Brooklyn, and I went out and bought his 1994 book "Airing Dirty Laundry" - a collection of his essays and articles reflecting on how the mainstream media covers the black community.

In particular, his essay "Beyond Los Angeles" examined the media's massive distortion of the 1992 LA riots that broke out after the Rodney King verdict.

I remember the footage of truck driver Reginald Denny being beaten by a group of black rioters being played over and over again in addition to the footage of rioting by blacks.

But as Reed observed in his analysis of the media coverage of the riots, the mainstream television coverage never showed images of the white Yuppies in Santa Monica rioting or looting stores - he also quotes former LA Mayor Tom Bradley as noting that there was almost no television coverage of the young whites rioting in downtown LA either.


Reed notes that the former San Francisco "Mayor Frank Jordan said that few blacks participated in the San Francisco disorders" but media coverage of the LA riots disproportionately showed images of blacks looting - much of the media riot coverage that Americans saw on television was not factually representative of who was rioting and looting.

I'm sure there are some people reading this who had no idea, or don't believe that large numbers of white people were looting stores in California during the Rodney King Riots in 1992. 

Skeptics should check out the CityLab article citing some interesting facts of the '92 LA riots - including the fact of the 12,111 people arrested during those riots, only 36% were black.

Ishmael Reed's analysis of the distorted media coverage of the LA riots is pretty eye-opening, and just one example of the many writers, activists and scholars who've been bringing the media's distortion of the African-American community to the public's attention years before the Color of Change study.

If you're interested you can pick up a copy of "Airing Dirty Laundry" on Amazon pretty cheap - it's an enlightening read, although a disturbing one in the intellectual sense.

In conclusion, I cite all of these examples to make the point that it wasn't until years later that I began to explore how the distortion of the African-American identity affected my own sense of self.

I spent a lot of years absorbing a lot of media content without critically examining how it shaped my sense of self - writing in this blog helps me do that.

Sometimes it's hard to discern that kind of distortion within popular entertainment or news media, it can be cleverly buried deep within a narrative that's familiar and comforting.

But like those drops of Buckwheat's black sweat on a white kitchen wall I saw so many years ago, there are times when it's just too obvious to ignore.

The Continued Distortion of the Black American Family

Why does American media continue to distort
the reality of the black family?

From my perspective, the recent ground-breaking report that was co-produced by the progressive non-profit organizations Color of Change and Family Story is a must-read.

"A Dangerous Distortion Of Our Families", represents one of the most important pieces of research to reveal detailed insight into an issue that has plagued the United States in one form or another since the 18th century:

The ongoing distortion of the broader perception of the African-American family by the media, whether intentional (which the study indicates it often is), or not.

The actual research of the study was conducted by Dr. Travis L. Dixon, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.



Dr. Dixon was interviewed about the study on a segment of The Brian Lehrer Show last Tuesday morning along with the chief marketing officer of Color of Change Rashad Shabazz - definitely worth a listen if you want to click on that link above and hear their thoughts and observations.

The research confirmed concerns and complaints that writers, activists, academicians, clergy, politicians and concerned citizens have voiced for years - the continued widespread distortions of the black family in popular media and news coverage in America.

The study dives into the degree to which provably-false narratives about issues like black poverty, parenting and criminality by both news media and entertainment (film and television), are still embedded within popular American culture.

To the extent that many Americans who don't actually know, work with or socialize with African-Americans on any kind of regular or meaningful basis, do not "see" a true representation of the black family in the news media and entertainment they consume on a daily basis.

During their interview with Brian Lehrer on Tuesday, Dixon and Shabazz detailed how the kinds of perpetuated racial stereotypes identified in the study impact the implementation of public policy on the local, state and national level - including the recent Republican tax bill.

Obviously I'm not an academic, but I've read through parts of the report and the research seems quite  comprehensive.

University of Illinois Professor Dr. Travis L. Dixon

As part of the study, Dixon analyzed over 800 different news stories and op-eds that were published in print or online, or that aired on television or radio, between January 2015 and December 2016.

When the divisive, racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump campaign was at a fever pitch - and the toxic "otherism" that was (and continues to be) the defining plank of his overall message was being continually circulated in the inordinate news coverage that Trump received.

The news stories and op-eds were examined for the context in which they portrayed the African-American family.

And it wasn't just conservative media outlets that were analyzed either.

Dixon analyzed stories from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, national and local newspapers (including the New York Times and Washington Post) from all parts of the country - as well as ideologically-conservative Websites like Brietbart and Christian-themed media outlets that promote conservative policies.

While the focus of the study is on how African-Americans are portrayed in the media, it offers valuable perspective on the 21st century definition of the American family,  a subject that is the overall mission of Family Story, the co-producer of the study - an organization which seeks to enlighten the public on the diverse definitions of what "family" means in American society today.

And it also offers insight into the growing economic divide in America that was further widened by the recent passing of the Republican's tax bill - a shameful, overreaching and irresponsible piece of legislation that was passed, in part, by conservatives who utilized rhetoric laced with some of the very same flagrant distortions of Black Americans highlighted in the study. 

With Christmas falling on a Monday this year, my guess is that some of you (hopefully) reading this will have some spare time over the next few days, I'd recommend that you to take some time to read through it - you can click here to go to the Color of Change Website to download a PDF copy of the full report, or read a digital copy on the Website.

For those unfamiliar with their emails, Color of Change was founded back in 2005 by social justice advocate Van Jones and former MoveOn.org volunteer James Rucker following the national outcry over the botched federal response to the devastation in New Orleans and surrounding areas caused by Hurricane Katrina.

It was established based on the progressive online activism model of MoveOn.org, utilizing email and social media to coordinate massive targeted responses to specific issues related to racism, injustice, poverty, voter disenfranchisement and the distortion of African-Americans by media outlets.

Right-wing nutjob Glenn Beck with his chainsaw gun

Over the years Color of Change has leveraged Web-based activism to tackle a range of issues.

From the NRA-supported "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida which enabled racist psychopath George Zimmerman to walk after stalking and murdering unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

To targeting the corporate advertisers of former Fox News host Glenn Beck after his deranged public comments accusing President Obama of being a racist who hated white people.

While I've signed a number of online petitions from Color of Change in support of their grassroots activist efforts, and donated a few dollars to them in the past, I first heard about their joint study on The Brian Lehrer Show last Tuesday morning.

Some of the highlights of the study were things I'd seen, known of and written about - but I'd never seen the distortion of the African-American family verified with research before.

For example as the study highlights, 59% of the families depicted in news media stories about the poor were black - when in fact only 27% of families living below the poverty line in America are black.

Or think about this one, if you see a news media piece on television about welfare recipients or welfare reform, chances are that the "b-roll" footage you see in the background as a reporter does a voice-over will show black people standing in lines at a government office.

But as the study highlights, 60% of the families shown in news media stories about welfare were black, when 42% of welfare recipients in America are black.

Americans in a bread line in The Bowery in the 30's

The reality is that over 60% of people who receive welfare assistance in the United States are white, but it's unlikely you will see images of white people standing in line at a government office in a news report about welfare.

As Dr. Dixon observed in his interview last Tuesday, when millions of white Americans were receiving some form of public assistance during the Great Depression in the 1930's under the New Deal, politicians never stigmatized welfare recipients by characterizing them as "lazy".

The mainstream news media continually present a distorted image of what poverty looks like in America, painting a picture that equates being black with poverty - when in fact poverty in America is far more diverse than how the news media and popular entertainment typically present it.

Quick example: when I lived in Brooklyn, it was common knowledge that large segments of the Hasidic Jewish population in certain areas were on welfare - as someone who considers himself a news junkie I can tell you with absolute certainty that I've never once seen a Hasidic man or woman in a television news report about welfare in the United States.

Interestingly, last Wednesday I was listening to a segment on Fresh Air, host Terri Gross was interviewing filmmaker Jonathan Olshefski and North Philadelphia music producer Christopher Rainey about Olshefski's documentary about Rainey's family.

Filmmaker Jonathan Olshefski  & the Rainey family

The documentary, Quest, chronicles Rainey and his wife's lives from 2006 when President Obama was first elected, until Trump's election in 2016.

It's actually a really fascinating story if you have some time to listen to the interview with Terri Gross.

Some aspects of the challenges Rainey's family faced living in North Philly reflect the issues outlined in Dr. Dixon's study.

For example, after Terri Gross asked Rainey to describe the North Philly neighborhood where he lives and has his music studio, Rainey mentioned the close-knit nature of the community populated with many long-time residents.

He noted that many of the local buildings were constructed in the late 1800's and some of the streets still have cobblestones.

But he also quickly noted the distorted perception most people have of North Philly from the way the neighborhood is so often portrayed in a negative light by the local television news media.

So again, the study is definitely worth a read, as part of its examination of the distortion of the black family it also delves into the perpetuated myth of the absent black father - a topic I last blogged about back in January of 2014 after the release of a CDC study on the role of fathers in family health and child development.

Trump's racist appeal to black voters in 2016

The distortion of African-Americans by the media and major institutions is a theme I've revisited on this blog, one that's obviously personal to me.

The study co-produced by Color of Change and Family Story is especially important in the age of Donald Trump.

A man who regularly dispenses uninformed wildly-distorted stereotypes of "others", particularly African-Americans.

Remember the eye-opening comments Trump gave back on Friday August 19, 2016 as he was polling at historic lows with people of color?  When he made a desperate hail-Mary pass to try and woo African-American voters to support his candidacy?

During an appearance in the mostly-white Michigan suburb of Dimondale, after trashing his opponent Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party for taking the votes of African-Americans for granted, he famously went off-script and asked black voters for their support with this asinine statement / question:

"You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed - what the hell do you have to lose?" 

If you look past the flagrant ignorance of a statement like that, it's a prime example of someone whose perceptions of black Americans are so distorted, that he literally has no understanding of the actual reality of the African-American family.

"Liberal media"? A snapshot of MSNBC political
coverage during a month in the 2016 presidential race 

Most African-Americans do not live in poverty, but that the fact that Trump believes they do reflects the kind of distorted inaccuracies that are continually re-circulated on Fox News, Alex Jones' InfoWars, or Brietbart - where Trump gets most of his "information".

When he sees people of color, he sees a myth.

The steady diet of "other-ism" based on the continued denigration of basically anyone who doesn't look or worship like him would be his own business save for the fact that he's the president.

And as Dr. Dixon's study notes, that kind of alarming ignorance informs his (and other Republican's) public policy positions - the result is a government enacting laws and legislation based on myths and distorted truths.

The end result is a dangerous cycle that ends up feeding itself, with policies like the Republican tax bill that only end up reinforcing the false narratives the legislation is partly based on in the first place.

Sound crazy? It is.

A sick feedback loop that leaves many Americans, not just African-Americans either, obscured and stigmatized - reduced to a simplistic one-dimensional stereotype that empowers the political, ideological and financial needs of those who would use it to leverage their own needs.

Anyway here's to organizations like Color of Change and Family Story for engaging in the hard work of helping people to understand and change this false narrative - let's hope Dr. Dixon's study can be a tool to awaken people to the realities of 21st century America.

As we approach the 2018 mid-term elections, let's hope an undistorted view of American society can help serve the truth rather than the narrow self interests the recent Republican tax bill aims to appease.

Dr. Dixon's study isn't a magic cure, but it's a pretty good start.

The Great Republican Memory Lapse

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz & Sarah Palin join angry Tea Party
protesters to rally against deficit spending in 2013 

Smug Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan are preening with gooey self-satisfaction after the House passed what may well be the single most absurd piece of legislation in American history.

One that's more like a con job.

It's remarkable to watch Republicans literally tripping over themselves to pass what they're laughingly calling a "tax reform bill" that's going to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the federal deficit.

Remember back in fall of 2013 when Republicans and their perpetually-riled-up Tea Party base were literally raging against the federal deficit as if it was the manifestation of evil and a harbinger of the Apocalypse that would end life as we know it?

Who can forget the epic theatrical hypocrisy of Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee joining the bubble-headed right-wing political has-been Sarah Palin at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. on a chilly October Sunday four years ago (pictured above).

Just days after taking to the Senate floor to deliver one of the longest filibuster's in American history to rail against the Affordable Care Act (during which he famously read Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs & Ham"), Cruz joined a group of angry Tea Partiers and anti-Obama veterans at the World War II Memorial to rail against the fact the U.S. Park Service closed it because of the government shutdown.

Never mind that it was Cruz himself who'd intentionally helped to engineer the 17-day partial shutdown of the federal government by working with an obstructionist do-nothing Republican-majority House of Representatives (led by former Speaker John Boehner), and conservative political groups like the Heritage Foundation.

The Republican House famously included "poison-pill" provisions in their appropriations resolution bill to fund the government for fiscal 2014 that would have defunded or delayed implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Ex-Speaker John Boehner takes heat from the media
during the 2013 government shutdown

That essentially (and purposefully) made it impossible to pass an appropriations bill since the Senate at the time was controlled by Democrats.

As we've all been reminded of in the past few days, the House and Senate must reconcile their differences on a piece of legislation in order to get a bill passed by both chambers and sent to the desk of the president to be signed into law.

Remember, Republicans could have simply passed a clean appropriations bill to keep the government running in back in the fall of 2013.

But Boehner chose ideology over the best interests of the American people and famously caved in to pressure from the extremist right-wing "Freedom Caucus" and Tea Party zealots of his own party.

He even sank to taking to the floor of the House to peddle the ludicrous fiction that the Affordable Care Act was "killing American jobs"; it actually wasn't, that was a lie.

So instead of doing their jobs and passing a spending resolution, Republicans basically held the government hostage by refusing to remove the ACA repeal so it could pass in the Senate.

As the editorial board of the New York Times observed back on October 1, 2013 as the shutdown began, locking thousands of federal workers out of their jobs and closing essential government services for millions of Americans, it was a moment that defined John Boehner's failure as the Speaker of the most unproductive House of Representatives in American history.

Mostly because conservatives, unsettled by the presence of an intelligent, two-term African-American in the White House, simply despised President Obama.

Remember the $1.7 trillion added to the U.S. deficit
because of the 2nd Iraq War? Republicans don't

Amidst the turmoil of their 2013 deficit hysteria, Republicans conveniently seemed to forget that their own president, George W. Bush, was responsible for at least $1.7 trillion of that debt because his failed war in Iraq was never paid for in the federal budget.

So not only did hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens and thousands of U.S. and coalition service men and women loose their lives, "Dubya" put the whole thing on the American credit card.

Conservative's self-serving situational outrage over the federal deficit should serve as a warning sign to the American people - a reminder of the Republican Party's willingness to use deficit spending like some kind of prop to suit their ideological needs and financial desires.

As we've seen this week, the Republican Party has a giant memory lapse, and they've shown a willingness to bounce back and forth on the deficit like a ping-pong ball.

Four years ago they were railing against President Obama for his call for over a $1 trillion in infrastructure spending because of their concerns about what it would do to the federal deficit.

And they refused to do anything about it.

(Incidents like the Flint Water Crisis and the horrific Amtrak train derailment in Pierre County, Washington on an overpass on Monday that killed three and injured at least 100, serve as chilling reminders that Republican refusal to act on much-needed infrastructure repair has had deadly consequences.)

A collapsed section of I-10 between California and
Arizona in 2015

So when when President Obama was in office, they opposed authorizing $ 1trillion of the taxpayer's money to conduct long-overdue repairs on the nation's infrastructure (roads, bridges, tunnels, airports etc.) that affect the lives of all Americans.

Just a few years before that they allowed Bush to spend almost $2 trillion on an ill-advised war in one of the most destabilized countries in the world.

The one NOT responsible for the 911 attacks by the way.

But as we've seen recently under Trump, Republicans rushed to pass a bloated, confusing 500-page legislative behemoth that will enrich already-cash-loaded American corporations and the small fraction of the nation who count themselves among the 1% (and of course the Trump and Kushner families) with no public hearings and no meaningful studies of how it will impact the U.S. economy.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) didn't even get to score the much-talked-about tax bill properly, and most Republicans gleefully passed it without even bothering to read what's in it - even though it raises taxes on the middle class and poorest taxpayers.

Tennessee Republican Senator Bob Corker, the 4th wealthiest U.S. Senator who owns vast holdings in real estate, admitted not having read it as he tried to deflect criticism over the fact that he magically reversed his opposition to the bill after a provision was inserted at the last-minute last Friday.

A provision that will allow folks like him and Trump to save millions in taxes on "pass-through" income they receive from the s-corporations where they keep their real estate holdings.

What, me worry? "Corker Kickback" namesake
Tennessee Senator Bob Corker

Corker's lame assertion that he had no idea the provision was added to the tax bill is laughable considering that just a couple months ago Corker was one of Trump's biggest critics, famously telling CNN reporter Manu Raju:

"The president has great difficulty with the truth. On many issues."

Evidently the president isn't the only one...

Remarkably, the Republican tax bill doesn't do anything Trump promised it would do when he was running for office in 2015 and 2016.

You can't fill out your taxes on a form the size of a post card, it didn't cut the tax brackets down to three, it doesn't eliminate sketchy loopholes for corporations and the 1% - and it raises taxes on the same working class white voters who filled Trump rallies and bought "Make America Great Again" hats.

As columnist and author Charles Blow observed in the opening sentence of his latest op-ed published in this morning's New York Times:

"With their tax bill, Donald Trump and the Republicans are raiding the treasury in plain sight, throwing crumbs to the masses as the millionaires and billionaires make off with the cake." 

Amazingly, many mainstream media news outlets (including NPR) keep referring to this as a "win" for Trump.

Just wait, once he signs this mockery of American principles into law and Republicans, their 1%-er billionaire donor base and corporations have all had a chance to cash in on their flagrant looting of the U.S. Treasury, there'll be another collective Republican memory lapse.

And when the automatic spending cuts their legislation mandates begin to kick in, phony deficit hysteria will return just in time for Republicans to set their sights on cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - gutting bedrock social safety net programs to further enrich a small privileged few.

Throwing crumbs to the masses - just in time for Christmas.

More Republican Authoritarian Creep

Authoritarian Cabal? Russian President Vladimir Putin,
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange & Donald Trump 

It certainly wasn't necessary to go see Star Wars: The Last Jedi over the weekend in order to be frightened by the Dark Side of the Force.

Recent efforts by some Republican members of Congress to try and discredit special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections represent a step towards a 21st century authoritarianism in America that is genuinely frightening to behold.

Especially considering some of the conservative characters leading the calls to fire Mueller.

As Ken Dilanian reported for NBC News last Wednesday, the inspector general of the Justice Department provided transcripts of private text messages shared between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page in which the romantically-involved couple referred to Donald Trump as both an "idiot" and a "enormous douche" - Strzok and Page also expressed dislike for Bernie Sanders and former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder but don't hold your breath waiting for Republicans to express outrage at that.

Republicans quickly seized on the selected text messages that disparaged Trump as "evidence" that the entire special counsel investigation is tainted by some kind of anti-Trump bias - but how did they get a hold of them?

Earlier today Business Insider reporter Natasha Bertrand told MSNBC's Joy Reid that it's still not clear how the text messages got in the hands of Republican Congressman David Nunes as the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General said it did not authorize the release of the text messages.

Frankly if there's anyone responsible for anti-Trump bias, it's Trump's own big mouth, his chaotic White House, political inexperience and the seemingly endless stream of meaningless pycho-babble that he issues from his own Twitter account at all hours of the day and night.

According to an AP-NORC poll released on Saturday, 45's approval rate stands at around 32% - even though his approval numbers have ticked up a few points because of the healthy state of the economy, his approval numbers are still the lowest ever for a first-year president. Ever.

So it's pretty fair to say that a majority of the American people, Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, DO think that Trump is an idiot and a douche.

And it's not a violation of Department of Justice policy for members of the FBI to be romantically involved, or to express personal political opinions if they want to - they're not monks.

Republican Virginia Congressman Bob Goodlatte

Regardless, Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte led the partisan saber-rattling on Capitol Hill last Wednesday during an oversight hearing of the committee.

He and other Republicans, including Jim Jordan of Ohio, leveled baseless accusations that the Mueller investigation, as well as senior FBI officials were politically motivated.

Goodlatte's name should be familiar.

His righteous indignation is actually kind of funny considering that the feisty representative of Virginia's 6th Congressional District is the same guy who made headlines back in January when he kicked off the 115th Congress by proposing to put the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) under the oversight of the Republican-majority House Ethics Committee.

A jaw-dropping proposal so absurd that it quickly drew widespread criticism from members of both sides of the House, long-time political observers, members of the public and even Trump himself.

Embarrassed Republicans held an emergency meeting in which they agreed to ditch Goodlatte's proposal, after which Congressman Mike Simpson, a Republican from Idaho, sheepishly admitted to reporters, "We shot ourselves in the foot."

That's also a pretty good way to characterize Republican efforts to try and discredit special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia intentionally interfering with an American election.

Especially considering that Mueller is a decorated Vietnam veteran, a Republican who served during the Reagan administration, and a highly-respected former head of the FBI with an impeccable professional reputation - he was chosen as special counsel by current deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.

And Rosenstein was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as deputy AG on January 31, 2017 - when he was then the longest-serving U.S. Attorney in the Justice Department.

Intelligence & terrorism expert Malcom Nance

So Republican efforts to paint the special counsel investigation as some kind of biased political witch hunt are totally ludicrous.

And worse, they swerve dangerously close to the kind of repressive authoritarian creep that define the governments of Russia, China and North Korea.

This Republican authoritarian creep was on display over the weekend too.

As David Edwards reported in an article for Raw Story on Sunday, former Naval intelligence veteran, career intelligence officer, terrorism expert and author Malcom Nance made appearances on MSNBC on both Saturday and Sunday to offer troubling insight into the specific ways in which the Trump administration is taking actions that are straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

Nance wrote the 2016 book "The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election" 

On Saturday MSNBC's Chris Hayes interviewed Nance about a Washington Post report that U.S. intelligence agencies posses proof that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered and oversaw the massive operation to slander Hillary Clinton using illegally hacked emails, documents and voice-mails in order to assist Donald Trump's campaign.

Because Putin realized that he can more easily manipulate Trump and use him to advance Russian foreign interests; including undermining the NATO alliance, dissolving the European Union, strengthening Russia's control over eastern Europe - and undermining American's faith in the democratic process in order to enhance Russia's global standing and influence.

Earlier today on CNN former director of national intelligence James Clapper said he felt Putin was using Trump like an intelligence "asset".

Sadly, the assorted conservative talking heads who now essentially shape the political message of the White House are parroting this shift towards authoritarianism by echoing the baseless criticism of the special counsel investigation and the Justice Department by Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Mueller-hating Fox host & Trump shill Jeanine Pirro

As was widely reported two weeks ago, unnamed sources within the White House who are close to Trump told New York Times reporters that Trump allegedly watches 6 to 8 hours of TV a day, mostly Fox News - not surprising given that most of his domestic and foreign policy talking points seem to come word-for-word from what he sees on Fox.

Want an example of just how absurd conservative media's criticism of Mueller has gotten?

Check out Allegra Kirkland's Talking Points Memo article from last Friday about Trump supporter and Fox host Jeanine Pirro.

As Kirkland reports, Pirro, a former judge who became Westchester County, NY's first female district attorney, opened her Fox show last weekend by giving her viewers a list of officials at the Department of Justice, including Robert Mueller, that she thinks "should not just be fired but who need to be taken out in handcuffs."

Yes, she's talking about career Justice Department officials trying to determine the degree to which a foreign adversary interfered in the American electoral process.

Kirkland notes that Pirro earned a reputation for being a rigorous public prosecutor for Westchester County, one who gained a reputation for her knowledge of the law and being an advocate of victim's rights.

So her willingness to bury her head in the sand and pretend that the overwhelming evidence gathered by the CIA, NSA, FBI and other U.S. intelligence entities showing that Russia did indeed conspire to interfere with U.S. elections in 2016 demonstrates the scope of the ideological bubble into which the current Republican Party has immersed itself.

A bubble in which authoritarianism replaces the democratic values on which the country was founded, and vilifying dedicated public servants who seek the truth on behalf of the American people is a substitute for leadership and accountability.

The Dark Side isn't just found in a fictional world that existed "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."

It's here, creeping up on the political institutions the Constitution considers sacred - like an unwanted vine that thrives on greed, fear and ignorance.