While some people are overly invested in the trial of former BART transit cop Johannes Mehserle who was convicted Thursday of involuntary manslaughter for shooting Oscar Grant, life will go on. It seems much of the outrage stems from those who have focused primarily on the race of the cop in question, making Oscar Grant the poster child for racism conspiracy theories.
What most do not realize is there is little “new” about cases such as these. While historically there has been an established pattern of aggression where innocent men were …

There was quite a dust up on the liberal interwebs yesterday when it was wrongly reported that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had declared he would have dissented in the landmark ‘Brown vs Board of Education’ case. As you may know the ‘Brown vs Board of Education’ decision was unanimous and it ended government sanctioned ’separate but equal’.
In truth, Scalia stated that he would have dissented from the majority in ‘Plessy v Ferguson’. ‘Plessy v Ferguson’ opened the way for Jim Crow and the institutionalization and reinforcement of racist …

I haven’t had anything poetic or particularly insightful to say about the disturbing arrest of esteemed scholar and leading intellectual, Harvard Professor Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates. Nothing surprises me anymore. From the moment I heard the story, all I could think of was Joe Horn, the Texas man who shot two burglary suspects in the back, as they ran away from his neighbor’s home with a bag full of their stuff. Mr. Horn told the operator he was going to go out and kill two people and lo and behold …

I’ve been on the road since last Saturday, so I apologize for the light posting. By the weekend I’ll be back in the saddle, with regular posting starting tomorrow.
But in the meantime, I can’t say I’m surprised by the hard right calling Judge Sotomayor a “racist” for a statement she made regarding “making better decisions than a white male.” Personally, I want to hear her explain more fully what she meant. It is certainly clear that in her judicial rulings she has not been overtly “empathetic” to people of color. …

Perhaps those of us on the outside looking in have it all wrong. Perhaps Mr. Steele is a mole. Maybe Michael Steele is a one man, chocolate colored, fifth column for political progressives. It’s becoming plausible that Mr. Steele’s goal is to burrow in and then ransack the GOP from the inside while other conservatices/Republicans take on that task from the outside. Think I’m wrong? Then you explain Steele’s latest, self-hating suck up:
While hosting Bill Bennett’s radio show Friday morning, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele appeared to agree …

Following an earlier post about the problem of death-by-taser, some commented that extra-judicial execution was an insignificant issue because there should be more concern about black criminals killing black people than police officers killing black people. I argue that we should be concerned about both. And we need to sound alarms because those who stand on the thin blue line take an oath to protect and serve us; we the people. Officers of the law must be held to the highest standards of protocol and at the very least, officers …

One of the primary reasons I voted for Barack Obama, was my hope that any judge President Obama selects for appointment to the Supreme Court would be smart, precise thinking and equipped with a deep knowledge of our Constitution and legal precedent. I am still hopeful that that will happen. But for now, in an ironic twist, it’s unlikely that our Commander-in-Chief, whose self-identified race has certainly raised the volume in discussions of how race is lived in America, will have the opportunity to fill any Supreme slots before the …

It is good to see that law enforcement is finally taking on crystal methamphetamine as seriously as it did crack cocaine. Increased law enforcement crackdowns in conjunction with more effective alternatives to automatic prison sentences for non-violent or first time offenders has led to a shifting racial make up of drug offenders in prison.
According to the Sentencing Project, the number of blacks in prison for drug offenses is declining while the number of whites is increasing.
For the first time since crack cocaine sparked a war on drugs …

Once again race and blood stained tragedy has visited Oakland, California. This time 4 white police officers were shot down by a convicted black man attempting to evade an arrest warrant issued for parole violation. Three of the police officers Mark Dunakin, 40; Ervin Romans, 43; Dan Saki, 35, are dead. Motorcycle officer John Hege, 41, was declared brain dead Sunday morning and remained on life support to preserve his organs for donation. Lovell Mixon, the killer, was killed in an exchange with SWAT team officers.
When police officers are …

Yesterday I put up the following post on AOL and it proved to be much more controversial than I had anticipated:

If you’re searching for an example of what open hearts can achieve, then look no further than the story of Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton.
When Thompson identified Cotton as her rapist in 1984, she was sure she had the right man. But she was wrong. Cotton, then 22, was convicted of raping Thompson and another woman on the same night in Burlington, N.C. He would spend the next 11 …

I would not call us a “nation of cowards” as Eric Holder did. I think it is too harsh and too sweeping of an assessment. But, the truth is that we don’t talk about race in the most productive or honest ways. When we’re face-to-face, Americans don’t generally talk about race in a manner that would lead us toward building bridges instead of exploding them. We either fume silently or bully with accusation. That is why I created this All About Race site two years ago, and why I am …

According to the Associated Press:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A white former transit police officer accused of killing an unarmed black man on an Oakland train platform has been arrested in Nevada on a warrant charging homicide, 12 days after the shooting that sparked violent street protests.
Johannes Mehserle, 27, was being held without bail Wednesday under a fugitive warrant issued from California, law enforcement officials said. Mehserle surrendered Tuesday without incident, according to a statement from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Nevada.
Messages left late Tuesday and early …

As you may know, Oscar Grant had a criminal record.
Grant also had a criminal record; according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Grant served several months in state prison in 2007 and 2008. The Department of Corrections didn’t disclose the offenses for which Grant was sentenced.
Records at the main Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland indicate that Grant had 12 separate cases between April 12, 2004, and May 8, 2008. But the records for all of those cases are at the Hayward Hall of Justice and weren’t immediately available. …

I have read and watched quite a number of stories which detailed how armed and race frightened white people turned on black people during the aftermath of Katrina. At a time when human beings should have been pulling together, some white and other privileged people who could have helped their neighbors instead decided that all black people were criminals, and anyone with black skin in close proximity would be greeted with guns and violence. The latest is the most disturbing. From The Nation – "Katrina’s Hidden Race War" by A.C. …

Is it just me or do you need to see the police car video too?
From AP
JACKSON, Miss. (Dec. 8th) – A George County High School football star died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound early Monday after being pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy, authorities said.
It’s not clear why 17-year-old Billey Joe Johnson was stopped in Lucedale, but authorities say the junior tailback shot himself with a shotgun after the deputy walked back to the patrol car to run a license check.
“The deputy was sitting in his patrol vehicle … …