Think Those Cops Will Be Indicted For Killing Groom-To-Be Sean Bell? Don’t Hold Your Breath
By Gregory Kane 

So this time it was 50 shots.

Sean Bell, 23 years old and celebrating his bachelor party on the night before of his wedding, figured his impending nuptials were precisely the reason he didn’t need any beef at a Queens strip club.

“Let’s be out. I’m getting married. I don’t need this,” Bell told a few of his friends, according to New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly.

Bell and his friends left the Kalua club around 4 a.m. last Saturday morning and wound up in a hail of bullets. Those rounds weren’t fired by some thugs with a beef. Those shots — 50 in all when the fusillade ended — came from the guns of five New York police officers.

Bell was killed. Two of his friends were wounded. Many New Yorkers are outraged, the Rev. Al Sharpton among them. And on this one, I’m inclined to agree with Rev. Al.

No one in the car Bell drove was armed. Cops shot after Bell backed up his vehicle near an undercover — as in “not in uniform” — police officer and then went forward and crashed into an unmarked police car. If news accounts in the New York Daily News and New York Post are to be believed, police officials have much explaining to do.

For the rest of the article, click here. 

Today’s video of the day comes from one of the greatest movies of all time. This scene is one of the great ones!

The Wind Beneath Him: Remembering Gerald Levert
By Mark Anthony Neal

When Gerald Levert died of cardiac arrest on November 10th, mainstream media
was well behind the curve in reporting the story. Instead it was left up to
so-called second-tier media outlets like BET.com, BlackAmericaWeb.com and
Electronic Urban Report (EUR) to deliver the shocking news to many of
Levert’s fans. I imagine that for much of mainstream America, Gerald Levert
was simply an “R&B” singer in a world where “R&B” singers rate little
interest (unless they are charged with sexually molesting underage girls).

In contrast, seminal New York urban stations such WBLS and WRKS and many
others throughout the country devoted hours of programming to Levert’s
memory, as part tribute and recognition of the fact that Levert always
valued their presence and willingness to support his artistry. In reality,
had Levert waited on mainstream recognition of his work, his music might
have never been heard. As so many of his younger peers craved mainstream
visibility and the celebrity driven surveillance that came with it, Gerald
Levert was seemingly content with simply being a “R&B” singer.

Gerald Levert had little choice but to be simply a “R&B” singer. Levert’s
father Eddie Levert Sr., a founding member of The O’Jays, is a mythic
reminder of an era when the “Soul Man” was the peer to the “Race Man”.
Indeed in the mid-1970s when The O’Jays were at their artistic and
commercial peak with recordings such as “For the Love of Money”, “Living for
the Weekend” and “I Love Music,” one could argue that the voices of Eddie
Levert, Sr. and his longtime partner Walter Williams were more relevant in
many households across Black America than some of the popular political
agitators of the time. This was the context in which a young Gerald Levert
was introduced to Soul music and its more corporatized offspring, R&B.
Understandably when Gerald Levert and his brother Sean decided to pursue
careers in the recording industry, as part of the trio Levert which they
formed with Marc Gordon, they did so within the musical conventions of their
peers. Tracks like “Casanova”, “(Pop, Pop, Pop, Pop) Goes My Love” and “Just
Coolin’” (with Heavy D), were firmly within the New Jack Swing tradition
that linked the urbane R&B of the early 1980s, which the sample-based
hip-hop inflected R&B of the mid-1990s.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

When 14 year old Martin Lee Anderson arrived at Bay County juvenile Boot camp for a joyriding offense, he had no idea that he’d soon receive the death penalty. Unfortunately, seven prison guards and a nurse had other plans for him. After beating, torturing, and ultimately killing the young man, the group organized a sophisticated cover-up tat extends to the highest level of the criminal (in)justice system.

Anderson was in his first day at the camp where had had been sent as punishment for a probation violation Jan. 5 when he complained of breathing  difficulties during exercises as part of the entry process into the facility. He collapsed and died after being hospitalized. The guards said in an incident report that they had used the ammonia capsules to keep Anderson conscious. The guards’ story was supported by an autopsy that determined that Anderson, 14, had died from complications from sickle cell trait, a blood disorder.

Fortunately, Anderson’s family was smart enough to know that something was rotten in the State of Florida.

Instead of accepting the idea that their son died of natural causes, the family insisted that a conspiracy was taking place. Of course, such suspicions, when uttered by poor Black and Brown people, would normally be ridiculed, dismissed, or altogether ignored. This time, however, a videotape emerged that brought the truth to the surface.

Footage from the tape substantiated the family’s claims of foul play. On the tape, the guards were shown beating Anderson as they held him down. After the tape emerged, an exhumation of the body was ordered. A second autopsy conducted by a different doctor –the first still sticks by his initial finding—showed that Anderson died by suffocation at the hands of sheriff’s officials who had shoved ammonia capsules up the boy’s nose, blocked the boy’s mouth, and forced him to inhale ammonia that caused his vocal cords to spasm, blocking his airway.

Last night, formal charges were finally filed against the guards and nurse.

The N-Word. Is It Ever OK To Say?
By Derek Jennings 

Nigger.

Without question, this is the most loaded word in the English language. Six letters. Say it three times and you’ve got the number of the beast. Forged white-hot in the fires of hell, that word has, for half a millennia, been seared into the collective psyche of black people in America. N-I-G-G-E-R. Though buried under layers of keloidal scars, those letters still ache and throb like a recent burn, a painful, disfiguring memento of our past — an unhealed wound on the souls of black folk.

This is “hate speech” — an entirely different category from your garden-variety cuss words. When you get down to it, there’s very little inherent rationale for the taboo status of words like “shit” and “fuck.” They’re just combinations of letters, rarely used literally, that we’ve learned to be offended by. Nonetheless, I try not to piss people off without a good reason, and so, heretical linguistic leanings aside, I tailor my speech to the sensibilities of the reader/listener.

What makes me really uncomfortable, though, is “nigger” and its cousin, “nigga.” I generally don’t F wit’ the N-word(s). I’m quick to playfully deride those who euphemize regular curse words (saying “Darn” when we and they know damn well they meant “Damn”). But I’m so self-conscious about ni**er that even when writing it, I generally self-censor, adding asterisks. As if that makes a bit of darned difference.

The reason for my discomfort? Words like nigger, and hate speech, in general, have an added dimension of meaning, a historical intent to cause harm, communicate a threat or symbolize a power dynamic. There’s a saying that goes, “It ain’t what you call me, it’s what I answer to.” In the not-too-distant past, black folks had no control over what others called us, and reflexively, we co-opted the N-word, fashioning myriad alternative meanings and usages of it in an attempt to take the sting out of it. That’s why the N-word is so unique among hate speech — it’s now used most frequently by the very people it was meant to oppress.

The word now simultaneously connotes a subhuman, inferior species worthy of scorn and death, and yet it is also used synonymously with friend, or, depending on inflection, best friend. Which is problematic.

“Nigger,” I can talk about easily enough — it’s a mirror held up against the sins of white folk, a case study of pathology and human deprivation.

“Nigga,” on the other hand, is like chitlins. I understand where it came from and why it exists, but damn, can’t we do better by now? “Nigga” is dirty laundry. “Nigga” is a window on the conflictedness of our people. Not that we don’t have a right to be conflicted. Shit. We reserve that right.

For the rest of the story, click here.