One year, and so...

Now back to regular posting.  Today on the other side of the Sunbelt, a federal judge repealed California's Proposition 8 that banned same-sex unions and such, so congrats to them (for now because you know THEY are going to repeal to the SCOTUS)...

It's another one of those cases where you have to give those in the Democratic establishment in Georgia the side-eye.  This time it's Roy Barnes, whom deliberately avoided being seen near President Obama in Atlanta on Monday when he was there for Disabled Veterans organization speech and Democratic National Convention fundraiser (all in the same hotel, Hyatt Regency Atlanta in downtown).  That's what I call a "nod and wink" stunt to the black Democrats, whom he went all out the way to court up until 3 weeks after he won the Democratic gubernatorial primary...

In the Greater Birmingham area, an young, black Democratic nominee for circuit judge position of Jefferson County, Kenya Lavender Marshall,  might be disbarred by the Alabama State Bar for using clients compensation for personal use.  UH OH, HOT DOG!  That's has to be one of the DUMBEST things I've seen person do when they are running for a judicial position when it requires prudence and discernment to do the job...

Oh yeah, black Democratic Congress members Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters ought to be ashamed of themselves for being SO DAMN STUPID.  I mean allegations of taking money and using it for their own personal usage and now both face ethics violations when they know they are up for reelection in 3 months.   I don't care how progressive you too maybe on key social issues, you have to be DUMBEST DEMOCRATS in the current sitting Congress, plain and simple.  Once again you see another Southern (white) Democrat pretending to be too busy worried what some rural (white) people will think of them rather than just showing their face for a few minutes with the president...PATHETIC!

LESSON TO ALL BLACK DEMOCRATS: DON'T GIVE OTHERS A REASON TO GET YOU WHEN YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT THEY WILL THOSE OUT THEM WANTING TO GET YOU!  YOU WILL GET GOT!

Blind justice or inherent ignorance?

I don't know what to make of the situation of the verdict of the Bay Area Rapid Transit officer that killed an unarmed black male, Oscar Grant, in January of 2009.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the verdict was "involuntary manslaughter" for former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle. 

Although there were protests as a result of the verdict, according San Francisco Bay Area ABC owned-and-operated station KGO-TV "ABC7",  the Oakland Police the protesters were mostly outside agitators attempting to take advantage of the situation.  Regardless, if there are outside agitators or not the vast majority of the anger and aggravation associated with the verdict of the case is understandable.  The looting and property damage/destruction isn't excusable at all, but a significant number of East Bay (of the San Francisco Bay Area) citizens are upset that this verdict doesn't fit the crime.

It also vexes me as an independent thinker and black male as to why would a jury after realizing that if there tables were turned that the verdict would have highly likely harsher.   (In reference for those don't understand what I mean is if somebody was being apprehended by a police officer and the officer is accidentally killed in pursuit of the person).

The grasping of the conceptualization of why that the existence and lives of black American males is seen as the lowest of the low in the westernized world.  This can also be applied to the lives of any non-white males.  In particular, black males deal with the paranoia of everyone since we are seen as the "boogeymen" of society since there are higher incarceration and death rates. 

Adam Serwer of American Prospect summed it up quite eloquently:

I want to focus for a moment on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. To convict on the higher charge of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would have had to prove that Mehserle's fear of Grant and his friends was "unreasonable." It decided the crime was involuntary. In other words, Mehserle's fear? That was reasonable.
Fear is at the core of questions of justice involving the deaths of black people at the hands of the authorities in the United States of America, dating back to when Toussaint L'Overture put the fear of G-d in slaveowners by revealing that their "property" might someday rise up against them. L'Overture still has that effect on some people. Following emancipation were the days when "justice" was meted out in the South by terrorists posing as vigilantes. Even then, when such atrocities were an accepted part of black life, people inside and outside the South found ways to sympathize with the anger and fear white Southerners felt toward their black neighbors -- The New York Times editorialized in the 1890s that no "reputable or respectable negro" had ever been lynched.
Even decades after the civil-rights era, a cop shooting an unarmed black man is barely a crime -- a 2007 ColorLines investigation of police shootings in New York City found that in 12 instances when the victim was unarmed, only one officer was found criminally liable. There hasn't been a murder conviction on a police shooting in Oakland since 1983.  As Kai Wright wrote in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict, "American law has been sanctioning the killing of black people to mollify white fear for centuries. ... We scare the shit out of America. And that fear excuses just about any reaction it spawns." Mehserle is profoundly unlucky to be punished at all.
Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proved to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people -- it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not "unreasonable." All of which is to say, while it infects all of us, a few of us bear the brunt of the suffering it causes.

After all this "post-racial notions" of the election of Barack Obama there seems to be no end in sight to mollify the negative connotations associated with the black male.  Instead, we still live in a society where there is more "reasonable" fear of our existence than anything else.  Me being a generally non-temperament, usually varied dress, and friendly individual would still be accused of being "wild, temperamental, and aggressive" since I am black and a male.  Sad, just plain, sad.

The only upside to this case is the U.S. Department of Justice is considering looking into this to see if the case was taken too lightly by California state officials. (courtesy of KGO-TV)