Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman Are Black Heroes, Jaleesa Jones, Huffington Post, January 30, 2015
The systematic iteration of the word “thug” in reference to black bodies is problematic because it perpetuates white supremacist ideologies about black people, namely that we are pathological, violent and lawless.
I’ve grown particularly weary of the phrase recently as the media have lampooned Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman and running back Marshawn Lynch with it.
The duo presents an interesting case study as both have been labelled “thugs” for polar reasons.
Sherman has been criticized for his “arrogance,” from his assertion that he’s “the best corner in the game” to his refusal to entertain inane questions. Conversely, Lynch has been attacked for his ostensible unwillingness to speak to the press. Of note, media have tended to practice selective attention — effectively ignoring friends’ speculation that Lynch has a fear of public speaking and is wary of sharing his intimate thoughts and disadvantaged past with strangers — and write Lynch off as stony and impersonal, even inhospitable.
Death of a Boogeyman: Why We Must Dispel the Black Fatherhood Myth, Goldie Taylor, Blue Nation Review, January 30, 2015
“If only there were more black fathers…”
In recent months, as the American public turned its attention to black men and boys who were killed during interactions with law enforcement, that all too familiar, open-ended refrain echoed in the discourse. Almost without exception, the specter of black-on-black crime characterized the cacophony of voices—voices that believe an African-American culture of fatherlessness is the root cause of criminality.
Those same rebutting voices, most often conservative, refuse a conversation about effective policing and rigorous examination when there are instances of police violence.
Left-wingers are not immune, though. Then too, African-Americans have–by and large– embraced the notion that rates of lawlessness in their own communities are intrinsically tied to absentee fathers. Spend more than ten minutes in a local barbershop or rest yourself in the pews of a black church on any given Sunday and you’ll hear the politics of respectability mixed in with the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John.
“If only there were more fathers…”
Gaza in Arizona: The secret militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, Tom Miller and Gabriel M. Schivone, TomDispatch via Salon, February 1, 2015
It was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was explaining his country’s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint presentation, a photo of the enclosure wall that isolates the Gaza Strip from Israel clicked onscreen. “We have learned lots from Gaza,” he told the audience. “It’s a great laboratory.”
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Swimming in a sea of border security, the brigadier general was, however, not surrounded by the Mediterranean but by a parched West Texas landscape. He was in El Paso, a 10-minute walk from the wall that separates the United States from Mexico.
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Like the Gaza Strip for the Israelis, the U.S. borderlands, dubbed a “constitution-free zone” by the ACLU, are becoming a vast open-air laboratory for tech companies. There, almost any form of surveillance and “security” can be developed, tested, and showcased, as if in a militarized shopping mall, for other nations across the planet to consider. In this fashion, border security is becoming a global industry and few corporate complexes can be more pleased by this than the one that has developed in Elkabetz’s Israel.
