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For AP, Being Shot by a Cop Makes You a Suspect

#1

For AP, Being Shot by a Cop Makes You a Suspect

Janine Jackson

I often think the clearest glimpse into a media outlet’s view of an issue comes not in the articles that directly engage it, but in the little throwaway descriptions—the shorthand used to sum up the story.

Take a look, then, at this AP wire report (6/8/15), in which an account of a brutal policing incident at a Texas pool offered this by way of background:

#2

Nothing to suspect about corpress complicity with the forces of “law and order”, is there?

It’s all there in black and white – figurative, and literal.

#5

What?

  • The Fourth Reich is getting more like the Third Reich every day!
  • It has its SA, its SS, its Gestapo, its overwhelming Wehrmacht spreading death around the world.
  • From what has been going on recently, it also has its Untermenschen to bully, mock, beat and jail. Being black or brown is a target for harassment and even easier to spot than a Jew was in Nazi Germany.
  • Hitler and the Third Reich had its Enabling Acts to strip the German People of their rights, the Fourth Reich has its version of the same, in the Illegal, unconstitutional and misnamed Patriot Act and its numerous successors, to strip the protections of the Constitution and Bill of Rights from We the People.
  • As this process continues to grow, we are all becoming Untermenschen, no longer citizens, but subjects of the new Reich.
    ;-})
#6

I read this in high school 60 years ago and never forgot it. It’s the only poem I never forgot.

Nowadays I pick up newspapers and watch newscasts that send me back to that moment in that classroom, and to this. This Baltimore is still here

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

–Countee Cullen