Families of Wendell Allen and Trayvon Martin find that justice can be slow for some victims: Jarvis DeBerry

You lose a loved one to violence. You know who did it. Not just you. Everybody knows who did it. The police, too. But they haven't made an arrest. There are procedures they're bound to follow, they say. Got to go by the book.

 

New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas has said that Wendell Allen, shown here, was not armed when Officer Joshua Colclough shot him during a March 7 raid. Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard has said he detected no gunpowder on Allen's body, which suggests the shot was fired outside close range.

You hear that. Maybe there's even a tiny part of you that believes it. But your experience has primed you to expect the worst.

The humiliation in having to publicly beg that your loved one's killer be handcuffed! How can you have faith that justice will prevail? You're not even convinced the justice system cares about the loved one you lost -- at least not in comparison with the known assailant.

That is what the family of Trayvon Martin is going through in Florida and what Wendell Allen's family must fear they'll endure here in New Orleans.

Martin was a 17-year-old kid accosted and shot dead by an overly aggressive, self-appointed community watch captain in Sanford, Fla., Feb. 26 as he walked from the store to his father's girlfriend's house in a gated community. Allen was the 20-year-old Gentilly man shot in the chest by a New Orleans police officer during a March 7 raid to rid our streets of weed. Though Allen had a previous conviction related to distributing marijuana, it doesn't appear that he was the police's focus during the fatal raid.

George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old hot head who shot Martin, says he acted in self defense. Martin, the 140-pound teenager he killed, had in his pockets a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea.

Joshua Colclough, the 28-year-old former security guard who shot Allen, didn't give a voluntary statement to police investigators until Thursday afternoon, the details of which, a police spokeswoman said, the department cannot disclose. Colclough's attorney Claude Kelly had said Tuesday, "An honest investigation of the incident will find Officer Colclough justified. And I trust that will happen."

Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas has said that Allen was unarmed. Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard has said there's no evidence that Allen was close to Colclough when the officer fired the fatal shot. Minyard said he found no gunpowder on the victim's skin.

The Louisiana Justice Institute is asking that an investigation into Allen's death be fast-tracked. Tracie Washington, one of the group's attorneys, says theirs "aren't just empty demands" but that she and others are prepared to take action through protests and litigation.

Given Colclough's delayed statement, is it too soon for Allen's family, the LJI and the rest of New Orleans to expect solid answers regarding Allen's death? Too soon to expect an arrest and the involvement of the district attorney? Probably. At the same time, when a young black man is killed like this, it's never too early to fear that his death will wrongly be deemed justified and that it will eventually go unpunished.

Apologists will bring out the heavy artillery: crime statistics, the victim's past arrests, racist stereotypes, anything and everything to avoid blaming the cop (or the pretend cop) who pulled the trigger.

According to 911 records, Zimmerman deemed Martin was suspicious because he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and walking slowly in the rain. Zimmerman vowed to stop him, against the advice of the dispatcher who told him to stay in his car and wait for the police. "These assholes always get away," Zimmerman said before giving chase.

"What's your problem?" According to Zimmerman, those were among Martin's last words. He spoke them to Zimmerman when he realized he was being followed. Soon Zimmerman -- 11 years older and more than 100 pounds heavier -- found himself on the ground and losing a fist fight. Witnesses said the boy was on top of him. Zimmerman shot him with a 9 mm. He says he killed Martin in self-defense.

Sanford Police say they haven't arrested Zimmerman because they can't prove he wasn't acting in self defense. Zimmerman chasing down an innocent boy, they say, wasn't itself a crime.

If it's not a crime, it certainly is a message: Black boys, you enjoy no protection. You can be stopped for nothing, killed for nothing and then be blamed for your demise.

By your very nature, you're a threat. The ordinary rules of engagement don't apply. Don't be surprised if you're shot when your hands are empty. Or if in carrying a bag of Skittles, you're deemed more dangerous than a zealot with a gun.

Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him athttp://connect.nola.com/user/jdeberry/index.html and at twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.

Related topics: new orleans police department

White Shock Jocks: Scary, Fat, Black TSA Agents (Audio)

http://www.eurweb.com 

White shock jocks have obvious issue with black women   

The Watcher

*Los Angeles talk radio station KFI 640 AM has an issue with black people.  It seems that the Whitney Houston “crack ho” comment from show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou of the “John and Ken Show,” was the tip of the iceberg.

Earlier we detailed how KFI morning show host Bill Handel told his listeners the Congressional Black Caucus, thanks to automaker GM likes to serve grape soda at their receptions, now there’s audio of Handeland John and Ken disrespecting the black women who work as TSA agents at LAX.

In the clip below, Bill Handel discusses how “South Central” is the “fat capitol” of Southern California and home to the “fat, black ladies who used to be screeners at the airport .”  Ouch.

Bill Handel Show – Fat, Black, TSA Airport ScreenerBut it gets worse.

In this clip, controversial shock jocks John and Ken, specifically John, details how he has “profiled” the TSA agents at LAX.

John and Ken – Profiling TSA Agents – 101807

Like we said, Whitney Houston and that “crack ho” comment was just another jab at black people, in particular black women, from the good ole’ folks at KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.

We think someone needs to call those “fat black TSA ladies” labor union reps, the American Federation of Government Employees, and tell them that they might want to take a listen to te clips above.  We know they’re not paying them all of that money to let some white men talk trash about them on the radio.

It’s just a thought.

How much longer will it be before Clear Channel decides that John and Ken have to go?

Clearly (no pun intended) KFI hosts have some serious issues with black people.

What makes all of these stories coming out so bad is that KFI is the most listened to radio station in Los Angeles–with a majority white audience.

More on the campaign to DiversifyFKI here: http://www.facebook.com/DiversifyKFI

For Better or for Worse: What to Make of Black Support for Obama

Erica Williams

Cultural critic and activist

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Socioeconomically speaking, black America is in a rut -- a very long-lasting rut. At 13.6%, black unemployment remains nearly double that of their white counterparts and higher than it was in 2008. Despite national trends which bally-hooed an inexplicable drop in January from a 2011 average of 15.8%, the economic situation for African Americans remains as comparatively low to that of whites as it has been for the past 50 years. According to Rashad Robinson, the executive director of ColorofChange.org, the nation's largest online black political organization: "There is a lot of work that still needs to be done to ensure that the harsh economic realities Black people are faced with changed in the next 4 years."

Yet despite this, President Obama's national approval ratings among African Americans remain consistently high, with some polls placing it as high as 91%.

This apparent paradox has intrigued and even perturbed much of the political establishment for the past four years. Republicans, liberal thought leaders, and the black intellectual class have bandied about questions since it first became apparent that President Obama, despite the moving tributes and mashup videos, was no Martin Luther King.

They ask: Do black folks support him simply because he's black? If things are so bad in black communities, how can they keep standing behind the President? If he's not pushing a "black agenda" why does he get such a high approval rating? Are they under the mistaken impression like many Americans were during the Clinton years that things are better than they really are? Why aren't African Americans more angry and blaming Obama for things not being dramatically better in their communities than they were 4 years ago? 

While there are many valid and complicated answers, there is one possible explanation that truly honors the political maturity and intelligence of the African- American electorate and provides a critical alternative to the problematic Samuel L. Jackson "blacks blindly support blacks" narrative: African Americans knew better.

The scale to which and rate by which most black voters expect to see immediately measurable economic and social change, particularly after decades of harmful policy, is grounded in the reality of a long political history. Simply put: African Americans may have had a more nuanced and realistic understanding of this Presidency to begin with. Their expectation of what would or could occur in four years, particularly in a targeted race-based way, was tempered from the beginning. And this expectation remains largely disconnected from Obama's popularity, the latter of which is based on a host of other factors. Why?

"By any empirical, historical measurements of black affluence, black people haven't ever done as well as other groups," says Sam Fulwood, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "Health, income, education, wealth accumulation, etc. When you've lived that experience for generation after generation you don't believe that one change in the White House is going to change your life."

African Americans have historically had less trust in government than other demographic groups (although that changed for a brief moment in 2010). Within that troubled relationship, the heroes and villains of most African American political folklore are often mayors, governors, judges, city councilmen, and a host of other actors that often have more of an impact on the day-to-day lives of black folks than the President. So it could be said that African Americans were happy and hopeful about the potential impact of the Obama Administration -- but not overly expectant.

Black people aren't stupid. Fulwood says that the irrationality of the high approval/low economic outcomes dichotomy isn't on the part of African Americans for supporting the President over the past four years but "on the part of observers who look at black political behavior and think it should be something other than what it is."

Unlike during the Clinton Administration when nearly 30% of African Americans held the false perception that their economic situation was better off than that of whites, blacks are aware that despite some clear victories, a wealth of dire economic woes persists.

In fact, according to Pew, although "upbeat," black assessment of the economy remained steady pre-Obama in December 2006 to post-Obama in December 2009. To put it another way, even though African Americans are increasingly optimistic about the future (even more so than whites) they have remained consistent in their reality-based perception of the current economy. And African American leaders, like Robinson are deeply troubled by that reality. So now what?

While this history and lived experience may in fact be a reason to expect less from a President - and therefore have fewer disappointment-induced lows in approval ratings - it shouldn't necessarily cause African Americans to demand less. For black voters who choose to remain married to Barack Obama, for reasons not that different from the way other demographic groups select a candidate, the question of why the "love" remains becomes increasingly irrelevant. The more powerful question to a leader with such high approval ratings then becomes "What kind of marriage do we want?"

"This is not just a story of what happens on 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, but its also about the work that every day people can do to raise their voices and push for change on the local and national level," Robinson says. This is where it becomes important for voters to have a contextualized analysis of the socio economic state of black America, in all of its ugly, discouraging glory; not to shift public opinion and support from where it organically falls but to lay out a concrete, metrics driven policy agenda. Voters should continue to challenge the President and all other candidates and elected officials who claim to represent them and their interests, to a deeper, more radical, demonstrable commitment to the relationship and the plight of African Americans. Whether or not that agenda is connected to the President's approval ratings and popularity is inconsequential. What black folks demand in return for their love is not.

Follow Erica Williams on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ericawilliamsdc

Wilt Chamberlain: The Babe Ruth of Pro Basketball

http://www.theatlantic.co

He electrified the sport at a time when few people were paying attention.

AP Images

The celebration of Wilt Chamberlain's career that accompanied the 50^th anniversary of his 100-point game last weekend was too short and passed too quickly.

Wilt Chamberlain was the Babe Ruth of pro basketball. Like Ruth, he was by far the most dominant force in his time, and quite possibly of all time. Like the Babe, Wilt was the lightning rod for interest in the sport in a time when it was badly needed. In Chamberlain's case, he was more important to basketball than Ruth was to baseball.

Contrary to popular opinion, baseball was doing quite well at the turnstiles when Ruth came along and would have survived the stink of the Black Sox gambling scandal with or without him (though the recovery certainly would have taken longer). But without Wilt, who knows if the NBA would have made it from the 1960s—when it was scarcely one of the big three pro sports behind baseball and football—to the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird boom of the late 1970s and the Michael Jordan tidal wave a few years later?

If you doubt this, consider one extraordinary fact: Wilt played his 100-point game not in New York or even in the Warriors' home city of Philadelphia but in an odd-looking, plain concrete barn-like structure with an arched roof in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the Warriors played several games a year in order to increase a fan base that wasn't showing them overwhelming support in Philly.

Try and imagine the equivalent in baseball: Babe Ruth hitting his 60^th home run in, say, Newark, New Jersey, at a Yankees "secondary" park in front of a handful of fans. If not for an unknown student listening to a late night rebroadcast of the game who thought to tape the fourth quarter on a reel-to-reel, we'd have no live coverage of the game at all.

Chamberlain's triumph came at the Hershey Sports Arena. Today the HersheyPark Arena looks virtually the same, a practice facility for the AHL's Hershey Bears and home ice for a local college that is also open for public skating. It's easy to miss the notices that here Chamberlain played his landmark game: a small sign on a pole outside the main gates and a copy of the photo of Wilt holding up the handmade "100" in the back side of the lobby.

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There is one primary difference between the careers of Babe Ruth and Wilt Chamberlain: Ruth was—and is—regarded by most baseball analysts as the greatest player in his game. But basketball people have never quite been able to make up their minds about Wilt.

Back in the '60s, it was common to hear sports fans say things like "Well, yeah, he scores a lot of points, but it's just because he's so big." Yes, at 7'-1", he was big all right. The reply to everyone who said that should have been, "Yes, and how many clumsy, slow, seven-foot guys are superstars in pro basketball?"

The truly amazing thing about Chamberlain was not his size, but the agility and savvy that propelled him. There are great scorers in the game, and there are great rebounders. Seven times Wilt Chamberlain led his league in scoring and 11 times he led it in rebounding. LeBron James is having the greatest season of any player in basketball s history. And, indeed, LBJ has been dazzling, averaging, after 38 games, 27.7points. 8.4 rebounds, and 0.8 blocked shots per game.

Over 16 seasons, Wilt Chamberlain's averaged 31.1 point s and 22.9 rebounds per game. Blocked shots? We don't know—they didn't keep that stat for most of Chamberlain's career. The reason they started counting block shots was because Chamberlain blocked so many.

Actually, there was one more big difference in the careers of Babe Ruth and Wilt Chamberlain: Ruth didn't face the baseball equivalent of a Bill Russell. There are a great many basketball fans and analysts who will argue that Russell was greater than Chamberlain. There is much to support this argument, but here's the point that matters the most: During the span of Russell's career, Chamberlain's teams won a single championship while Russell's Boston Celtics won nine. Of course, there is the question of the supporting cast, and a fair person must concede that the Celtics, man-for-man, were much better than Chamberlain's teams.

But is there another way to compare them? First off, it needs to be remembered that Chamberlain and Russell were universally bigger than the game. In fact, to a large portion of the sports public in the 1960s that only paid attention to professional basketball when the championships came around, they were the game. It wasn't Boston vs. Philly, or, later, Boston vs. LA; it was Wilt vs. Russell.

Chamberlain was the master—for all intents and purposes, the creator of the most crowd-pleasing power play, the slam dunk, and the shot-blocking specialist. And one of the greatest in the game, along with Wilt himself, was Bill Russell. They brought out the best in each other.

Russell is regarded by many as the greatest rebounder to ever play (or at least to play before Dennis Rodman). And he was an octopus under the boards, averaging 22.5 a game for his career. But Wilt averaged more rebounds in eight of the ten seasons they both played in the league, and against Chamberlain, Russell averaged just 14.8 rebounds per game. Wilt's career rebounding average was 22.9 per game, but against Russell he averaged 28.7, 4.5 more than he pulled down against the rest of the league.

As for scoring, not only did Chamberlain outscore Russell by a wide margin (which would probably be expected given the dependence of Wilt's teams on him) but his shooting percentage is 100 points higher than Russell's (.540 to .440).

But Wilt's superiority wasn't simply a question of more scoring opportunities. During the Russell years, Chamberlain averaged 34.5 points per game against the league; against Russell, he scored 28.7 points per game - 5.8 points below his league-leading average. That, of course, proves how much better defensively Russell was than the other centers around the league. Still, Wilt did average 28.7 points against perhaps the greatest defensive center who ever played and—and this really shouldn't be overlooked in any comparison of Chamberlain and Russell—poured 40 points or more against Russell 26 times. Russell, on the other hand, averaged a modest 14.8 points per game during the 10-year span against the rest of the league (he averaged 15.1 points per game during his 13-year career). Against Wilt, he averaged 23.7 points per game, 8.9 points higher than his regular season average. That shows you how adaptable and talented Russell was; it's also an indication that Russell could have scored more points if the Celtics had needed him to. He scored more against Wilt because he felt he had to. Against the rest of the league he didn't need to score as much for the Celtics to win.

Still, Wilt averaged five points per game more than Russell during their head-to-head meetings. And he had a higher field goal percentage in mano-a-mano matchups.

Nothing, of course, is going to shake the faith of those who regard Russell as the better player or that his championship rings outweigh any of Wilt's statistics. Okay, then, let's leave it at this. Together they were the two most dominant players ever to play basketball, and the greatest rivals in American sports history.

http://www.theatlantic.com

Half of UK's young black males are unemployed

Unemployment rate for black 16 to 24-year-olds available for work now double that for white counterparts, ONS data shows

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The Office for National Statistics says unemployment for young black male jobseekers has risen from 28.8% in 2008 to 55.9% in the last three months of 2011, twice the rate for young white people. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

More than half of young black men available for work in Britain are now unemployed, according to unpublished government statistics obtained by the Guardian which show the recession is hitting young black people disproportionately hard.

The new figures, which do not include students, also reveal that the youth unemployment rate for black people has increased at almost twice the rate for white 16- to 24-year-olds since the start of the recession in 2008. Young black men are the worst affected of all, according to a gender breakdown contained within the data supplied by the Office for National Statistics.

Unemployment among young black men has doubled in three years, rising from 28.8% in 2008 to 55.9% in the last three months of 2011.

Although the ONS said the gender breakdown should be treated with caution due to a relatively small sample size, the figures brought calls for further government action from business and community figures in the UK.

Iqbal Wahhab, owner of the Roast restaurant in London and chair of the ethnic minority advisory group at the Department for Work and Pensions, said the figures had exposed an issue that has been "like the elephant in the room". Wahhab, who runs his own mentoring scheme for young black youths, urged the government to join businesses in tackling the problem. "Now that the figures are out in the public domain, what are we going to do about it?"

He added: "I would love to see ministers doing more. If it is businesses doing it, that's great, because we are more in tune with how to make programmes run efficiently, but we need to see how the government is going to reverse that tide."

Black unemployment rate

According to the ONS, in the last three months of 2008 the unemployment rate for black people aged 16 to 24 was 28.8%. In the most recent quarter in 2011, this had risen to 47.4% – an increase of 70% in three years. This is more than double the unemployment rate for young white people, which increased from 15% in 2008 to 20.8% in 2011. Unemployment among young black women, while still higher than any other ethnic group, is lower than the black male percentage, at 39.1%.

Data breaking down unemployment by ethnicity used to be routinely published alongside official unemployment figures, but has not been released since February 2011, apparently due to changes in how different ethnic groups are coded by official statisticians. However, the data is still collected as part of the official labour market survey, which is used to generate official unemployment figures, allowing this breakdown to be obtained.

On Monday Labour MP Diane Abbott highlighted some of these hidden statistics in a Guardian comment article revealing that the overall unemployment rate for black people had risen to 44%. This was criticised by Channel 4's factcheck blog which questioned the origin of the data and stressed that the rate did not include students. However, the Guardian has persuaded the ONS to release a detailed breakdown of the figures and found the rate for young black men is even higher than the overall figure used by Abbott.

Asked to respond, the Department for Work and Pensions stressed the overall proportion of young black people who are unemployed was only 22%. This differs because it includes students and others not available for work, whereas the ONS calculates the official unemployment rate as a percentage of the economically active population.

"We have introduced a number of measures designed to give all young people the right skills and experience to match them to vacancies," said a DWP spokesperson. "This includes the Work Programme, which assesses people as individuals to discover what barriers are preventing them from getting a job and will then work with them overcome these problems. We are also spending £1bn over the next three years to help young jobseekers by creating around half a million opportunities through work experience and apprenticeships."

Youth unemployment figures are always considerably higher than the general population. This is partly due to the difficulty of tracking students through this data. Most students are excluded from official figures, as they are classed as "economically inactive" – people who are not currently in work, or looking for work – though any student actively looking for full-time or part-time work but unable to find it would be classed as unemployed. It should be noted, however, that black people are less likely to enter higher education than most other ethnic groups.

The reaction among black youths on the streets of Toxteth, the Liverpool district that saw some of the worst inner-city riots of the Thatcher era, was one of frustration. "I've handed out over 50 CVs since January," said Joel O'Loughlan, 18. "Each day I go to the job centre and look online as well. I've had a two interviews but I didn't get either job. You don't even get a call back most of the time. It makes you feel … I don't know, like what's the point?" He added: "Being black definitely makes it harder. Sometimes if you're going to a job [the employers] look at you like you're not going to work here, they think you're not the right kind of person. That's across the board. I've been handing CVs out to coffee shops, shops, you name it. I need the money and will go to uni to do what I really want next year but right now it feels like more than bad luck."

Nathan Atiko, 24, said: "Sometimes I have in the back of my mind that employers see my surname, see it's African and write my CV off straight away. I think about changing it because I wonder if they immediately think I might be trouble or I might be lying." He added: "I can count on one hand the amount of interviews I've had. I've been to university, I know how to write a CV, do application forms, but my [white] friends from university are getting jobs and I'm not. I've looked at their CVs and it's exactly the same as mine yet they're getting the job."

Google's UK operation is among the companies that have taken a more pragmatic approach to the ethnic employment issue. It makes strong business sense for Google to run a mentoring scheme for black youths, according to the company's head of search advertising in northern and central Europe, Adrian Joseph. "We believe it makes good business sense. Our ambition is to make information universally accessible to all our users. If we don't reflect all of our users in the composition of our workforce, it will be much harder to achieve that," said Joseph. Google's mentoring programme is now in its second year and focuses on undergraduates and postgraduates with an interest in software engineering.

According to an organisation that advises the public and private sector on employing ethnic minorities, a mass of factors from inner-city schools to unwitting bias against graduates are behind the discrepancies in employment figures, with the confusion exacerbated by a lack of consensus and research on the underlying causes. Race For Opportunity, the diversity arm of the Business in the Community organisation, says the government and businesses should "get their heads together" to tackle the problem, while greater use of mentor figures from families and businesses could make a difference.

Sandra Kerr, Race for Opportunity's national director, said: "Why can't everybody have a mentor? There is a whole social mobility dimension that affects you whatever your ethnicity. There are work places that have skilled people who can help with monitoring, reading, being role models. Employers are looking for people who are ready for work and social mobility determines factors such as what school you go to, whether you will get the educational attainment to go to university."

Kerr added that some employers, including the Home Office and consultancy group Ernst & Young, are attempting to eliminate racial bias in graduate recruitment. "If you leave university and you are 'Bame' [black, asian and minority ethnic group], you are still more likely to be unemployed one year on," said Kerr, ascribing the problem to "that subtext of what you don't know". She added: "I think it's unconscious bias. Some employers are being really truthful about it already."