Held to answer

 Thank God for the NRA, or the media might have to contemplate the blood on their own hands in the creation of Vester Flanagan.

As it is, the media will probably let Flanagan fade away much the same way they let Christopher Dorner disappear. Remember Dorner? He was the black, ex-Los Angeles police officer who went on a rampage two years ago and killed four persons (including two cops) and injured three others.

Just as Dorner did, Flanagan contacted a television network and also left behind a manifesto detailing every wrong that had ever been done to him as a black man. Both men bought the myth – amplified by the media and certain political factions – that in the history of the universe nobody has ever suffered as much as the American black man.

Almost immediately after Flanagan murdered a white television reporter and white cameraman during an on-air interview, the media shifted the subject to gun control. NPR seized on Wal-Mart’s decision to stop selling AR-15 rifles. “The Takeaway’s” Todd Zwillich noted the announcement came the same day as the shooting. (He didn’t point out that Flanagan did not use a rifle; he used a handgun.)

What the national media should consider are the consequences of their never-ending racial stereotyping. It has become a gigantic pile-on. In any story that alleges racism, the tendency is to show sympathy for the black participant – whatever he or she may have done – by invoking “historic racism.”

It’s not surprising that a few warped individuals like Dorner and Flanagan come to believe that everything that has gone wrong in their lives is because they’re black. They are kin to Dylann Roof, who stewed in his own racist obsessions and also came to the wrong conclusion: Somebody else was responsible for his disappointing life.

While the media will scorn Roof’s racism, they will tread very carefully in commenting – if at all – on Flanagan’s.

Perhaps Flanagan was a regular listener to NPR’s “On the Media,” one of the worst perpetrators of racial profiling in the media. If so, a year ago while seething about another job loss, he would have heard co-host Brooke Gladstone deliver this opener: “Obviously, the killing of unarmed black people by white police, or just trigger-happy white people in general, has gone on for a long, long time.”

Either Gladstone doesn’t know or doesn’t want to acknowledge how many “trigger-happy” black people kill other blacks.

What would Brooke Gladstone do if she were confronted with a black gunman? I imagine her pleading like Miss Millie in The Color Purple: “I’ve always been good to you people.”

The American media have provided a friendly ear to the growing black whine, readily reporting on any charge of racism directed at other businesses and public institutions. This is the thanks they get – a black colleague who has been accorded several second chances to succeed in television accuses them of racism and turns a gun on them.

A couple of weeks ago, “On the Media” revisited the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and Gladstone didn’t hide her scorn for the melodramatic, reporter-in-the-storm coverage or the media’s failure to follow-up on two persons who were accused of negligent homicide for failing to evacuate a nursing home. (They were later acquitted.)

Gladstone apparently cannot see that the national media’s coverage of officer-involved shootings has been as distorted as the Katrina coverage. Every officer-involved shooting of a black suspect is treated as a race-based crime with few extenuating circumstances or little context provided. If, for example, a young black man named Michael Brown declined to get out of the street as requested by a white police officer and instead moved towards the cop, this fact is not routinely repeated. The white-cop-shoots-black-man refrain is recycled  constantly.

Has the continuous harping on race bred more racism?

I was recently at the Central Library in Portland using one of the copy machines and heard a woman at the machine next to mine complaining, frustrated that the copier she was using wasn’t doing what she wanted it to do. I turned to her in sympathy because I’ve had trouble with these machines. I was going to tell her that I was almost finished, she could use my machine. She was a black woman, who looked to be in her 20’s, and I found her glaring at me as if I were the problem. Did she think it unfair that a white woman had a better copy machine?

I saw the disdain (maybe even hatred) in her eyes, and I could almost hear Syl Johnson singing, “Something is holding me back, is it because I’m black?”

I don’t think that would have crossed my mind a couple of years ago.

Then there’s the publicity surrounding Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new memoir “Between the World and Me.” I look at the many photos of him, and instead of seeing the familiar face of a celebrity writer, I see a black man imploring me to feel sorry for him. Nobody knows the pain and trouble he has seen.

“This is required reading,” says a cover quote by black author and Nobel winner Toni Morrison.

I’ve read excerpts, but I’m not spending my money on Coates’ book.

When I was a newspaper reporter in Southern California I did my share of stories about black men and women who had ugly encounters with the police, or with school authorities, or with landlords, or with neighbors. Rarely was it a simple good guy/bad guy story.

One of the totally innocent black men I wrote about was Akintade Faleye. He was born in Ohio, but his parents returned to Nigeria when he was a toddler and raised him there. I met him when he was a young man attending college in San Bernardino, Calif.

One evening he was walking to his job at a service station about an hour after a restaurant had been robbed by three armed black men. The trio also tried to steal a bicycle from a man, and when he resisted, they shot and wounded him. One of the suspects was wearing a black T-shirt, which happened to be how Faleye was dressed. The cops spotted him in the vicinity and arrested him.

The police drove four victims from the robbery past Faleye in an “in-field lineup” where he was displayed in a spotlight. One victim identified him as a gunman. Police arrested a second suspect, and three victims identified that suspect.

In the patrol car on the way to jail, Faleye sat next to the other suspect who had blood stains on his fingers.

“Most of the time I was calm… ,” Faleye told me. “Once and a while I got emotional … I started praying in tongues.”

One of the cops asked him what was wrong.

“You got me,” Faleye replied.

To the cop this meant: We caught the guy. To Faleye, it was a simple statement of fact: The police got him.

Faleye’s friends and family insisted he was innocent. They were a dignified group, mostly from Nigeria, and they felt fortunate to be studying in America. They wanted no trouble. They feared for Faleye’s safety in jail.

“They say he has a gun!” cried his friend, Ose Amafidon. “This is a guy who barely owns a kitchen knife, and they are saying he has a gun?”

Faleye spoke with a Nigerian accent so I asked the restaurant manager if any of the gunmen had an accent. He said they all sounded like Americans.

The detective on the case found this interesting, but he was getting ready to go on vacation and promised to check it out when he returned. Most people who are arrested at some point claim innocence, and police become inured to it. Although the second suspect arrested with Faleye told officers they had the wrong guy, he didn’t volunteer the names of his partners.

It took almost a month for Faleye to be released from jail and the charges dropped. In the meantime, I stayed in touch with his friends and began to see black Americans through the eyes of black Africans. Nigeria is a much tougher country than America.

While Faleye’s friends were upset the police made a mistake, they felt free to protest to the media. They also understood there was other fault to go around. Had there been no robbery, or had the robbers been white, Faleye would not have been stopped in the first place.

Amafidon told me about some of the black Americans he met in his college classes.

“They have African names they cannot pronounce. They are seeking an identity in a name. You cannot find an identity in a name. You find identity through action.”

There’s a reason why black American males are associated with crime. And there’s a reason why the general public often give the benefit of the doubt to police and not criminal suspects. The two sides are not equal.

The black community is justified in wanting to turn their cell phones and cameras on police. How many of them will turn a lens on other blacks? They will have to as long as the national media won’t.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

“That (Cop’s) Crazy”

“NPR’s Racial Profiling”