America’s Black Curse

By now we all know how long George Floyd, a black man, lay under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.

Does anybody know how long it took Tessa Majors, an 18-year-old white college student, to crawl up the stairs in a New York City park after three black teens robbed and stabbed her? What was it like for her struggling up those stairs? Did she clutch at her wounds? Did she say anything?

Nobody caught it on video – not that it would have made any difference if somebody had. She was white, her attackers black.

This week Americans across the country took to the streets to again turn protesting into a hot trend. Americans love trends. Nike is probably now working on a design for a protest shoe; maybe they will call it “The Floyd.”

So even in New York, many folks didn’t notice that the youngest offender in  Majors’ murder pleaded guilty on June 3.

Because he was 13 at the time of her death (he is now 14), he was charged in juvenile court and his name withheld. He pleaded guilty to robbery, maintaining that all he did was hand the knife to Rashaun Weaver who stabbed Majors while the third teen, Luchiano Lewis, kept her in a chokehold.

The trio entered the park near Barnard College about 7 p.m. Dec. 11 looking for people to rob. At first they were going to rob a white man, then they saw the slightly built Majors.

The unidentified teen will be sentenced June 15 to a limited security facility for six to 18 months. The Legal Aid Society that defended him offered a standard, rote statement:

“Tessa Majors’s death was tragic. It caused incalculable pain to her loved ones and affected our entire city,” it said. “This plea to robbery in the first degree is consistent with our client’s limited role in this tragic event. He did not touch Ms. Majors or take any of her property. Furthermore, no DNA evidence exists linking him to the events.”

Then the Legal Aid Society added this whopper: “He will face its repercussions for a long time, likely the rest of his life. This plea clears a path for him and his family to move forward with their lives. His acceptance of responsibility is an important first step; it provides an opportunity for this now 14-year-old to achieve a successful future.”

What repercussions? How many times has he been told, and will continue to be told, that he is a victim of America’s systemic racism? He and his friends are not responsible.

News accounts in New York called Majors’ death “a mugging gone wrong.”

Was the death of George Floyd an arrest gone wrong? Or was it the result of one man’s cruelty and the cowardice of onlookers? The fact that Derek Chauvin was a police officer adds an extra dimension to the crime. It does not justify destroying America’s criminal justice system.

From the protests, it would appear that George Floyd’s death was a crucifixion. It wasn’t. He had a bad heart and fentanyl in his blood. Police responded on a call of Floyd allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a store, certainly no major offense. Floyd and Chauvin both worked as bouncers at the same nightclub, so there are questions regarding that relationship. The image of Chauvin, in his role as police officer, forcing his knee on Floyd’s neck as if he were grinding out a bug on the pavement is disturbing. But it’s not worth dismantling all police departments.

Defunding and debasing all police because of a bad cop in Minneapolis will have profoundly negative impacts on all Americans – particularly crime victims, many of whom are poor and black. Why would any American police officer intervene if he suspects a black motorist is driving under the influence? Why would an officer try and stop a black man from beating up his wife/girlfriend/child? Why aggressively hunt for a black robbery/assault/rape/murder suspect?

Why stick your neck out for people who hate your guts?

As usual, the protests and media coverage turned into a great pile-on with various actors seeing a chance for a star turn at a local venue.

Lakayana Drury, co-chair of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP), one of the city’s police oversight groups, called a special meeting last Sunday to discuss the protests.

Typically, PCCEP in-person meetings seldom attract more than 50 people. This meeting via ZOOM (because of the pandemic) had at least 355 persons logged in at one point. Drury wanted to give people a chance to vent. He announced, though, that black people would go first. It was a racist gesture.

Among the speakers was Kevin Modica, a black, retired assistant police chief in Portland. His primary concern was the race of the looters. What if the folks that created the damage were from out of state and “possibly, mostly Caucasian, and they are never found and apprehended? What is it that we are going to do with individuals that present as African-American and other ethnicities when it comes to arrests?”

Modica favored “restorative justice,” which calls for “diversion” instead of arresting and punishing.

“It is my understanding the business owners all have insurance,” he concluded, minimizing the damage as if it were just a temporary inconvenience.

The following day, Drury appeared on OPB’s “Think Out Loud” where he continued to use Floyd’s death to pursue his personal crusade. He started off by reading the names of nine black persons who have been killed by Portland police, ignoring that many of them were armed and threatening police and others at the time of their deaths.

PCCEP was created to monitor a settlement agreement reached with the U. S. Department of Justice into Portland police treatment of the mentally ill after James Chasse, a mentally ill white man, died in custody. Portland’s black activists have been coat-tailing on that settlement agreement ever since, trying to shift the focus to blacks.

One of those long-time activists, Jo Ann Hardesty, is now a member of the Portland City Council (put there courtesy of a mostly white electorate). After years of counseling young black males on how not to cooperate with the police, she was briefly the voice of reason when looters – predominantly white – descended on downtown. With Mayor Ted Wheeler out of town, she was acting mayor and called for an 8 p.m. curfew. She even called for looters to be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”

It didn’t take long for her to revert back to form. Hardesty is now using George Floyd’s death to substantially reduce police funding. Hardesty is the kind of black activist who demands that police disband their gang unit, then blames police for gang-related violence.

Her anger over racial injustice has compounded over the years, and I have to wonder if there isn’t part of her that enjoys seeing the destruction of America. What does it mean, though, when white folks in expensive SUVs converge on Midtown Manhattan and hit the high-end stores? That has nothing to do with George Floyd.

American rioters and protesters claim to be mad at racial injustice and Donald Trump. What truly has them outraged is that their America isn’t what it used to be. It’s no longer the Baby Boomers’ or the Greatest Generation’s America. It’s not white privilege they’re losing. It’s American privilege, and it comes in all skin colors.

The curse that Melvin Van Peebles placed on white folks in 1971 has finally borne strange fruit.

Van Peebles is a black writer and musician with many accomplishments to his name, among them the Broadway musical, “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death.”

It’s a collection of vignettes featuring assorted black street characters — pimps, whores, corrupt cops, winos, junkies, Malcolm X radicals. Its signature song, “Put a Curse” comes at the end from a bag lady who lost a child to drug addiction. She snarls at white people:

Put a curse on you
May all your children end up junkies too
Yo mammy trick by the pound to buy that ounce
Yo young daughters
Give rich old dudes head in limousines too
Put a curse on you
Put a curse on you

Your warriors maimed
Or on the run
Your sons lag for pennies
All night long in the bus depot
‘Cause they ain’t got no place to go
And lose too
Put a curse on you
Put a curse on you … .

Here we are now, a cursed bunch. Black and white alike.

Had we done something about the drugs and misery taking hold in black inner-city neighborhoods more than a half-century ago, we likely would have a very different America today. The three black teenagers who killed Tessa Majors might have had different lives. George Floyd, too. And Officer Chauvin – how would his law enforcement career have been different?

Peter Bailey, a Jet Magazine theater reviewer in 1971, also foretold a future that could have been: “I would like to see Van Peebles and others put their talent to use, telling of that brother who grows up in the same block as the pimp, yet never sells his woman’s body, shoots white death into his arm or sells death-dealing drugs to Black youths. Or let us know how that Black woman, who lives in the apartment house, may be right next door to that whore, doesn’t end up selling her body on the streets. Yet, she keeps her family together. These are the people who produce the future liberators of Black people. They are some of the main reasons for our survival. We would all benefit from knowing how they do it.”

Unfortunately, those are not the people now making the most of America’s bad situation.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Delusions of Black Americans

The Tail Wagging the Police Dog

The Next Rodney King

Wild Shots in the Dark

Doing the Wrong Thing

Good Morning, Heartache

28 Comments

  • Dexter wrote:

    You’re howling in the Portland wilderness. Be careful. Black people are never responsible when something Bad happens, Bill Cosby being the exception.

  • White girl bleed a lot.

  • G. Sanchez wrote:

    Portland is so fucked up. Do they know what’s life like inTijuana or Juarez. Do they know why people come to America? You lived down near where I used. Get rid of cops. See what moves in. You heard didn’t you the police chief quit. He’ll last a year. Downtown isn’t going to be the same for years.

  • Hardesty won’t be happy until she has a dead cop to her credit. Her ancestors are from the warrior tribe who kidnapped the African boy you wrote about last time. She’s vicious.

  • Pamela wrote:

    I’ve been thinking about your comment. A subject that is rarely touched on in all the stories about reparations is: How do you know who is owed what? What if Hardesty’s ancestors were African tribesmen who kidnapped other Africans and sold them? What if she descended from what was called “Free Negroes?” Or, what if she’s descended from blacks who owned slaves?

    Among the celebrity genealogy studies that Henry Louis Gates Jr. has done was on singer John Legend. Supposedly, Legend was a tad bit disappointed to discover he had descended from Free Men. Now why would somebody want to be descended from slaves?

    On the same show that Gates delved into Legend’s ancestry, he looked at comedian Wanda Sykes. He traced her ancestry back to a 1683 court case that concerned her paternal ninth great-grandmother, who was a free white woman and indentured servant, who gave birth to a child fathered by a slave, who inherited the mother’s free status (after she worked off her indentured servitude).

    If we go back far enough, most of us are going to find ancestors living in very rough circumstances — whatever their skin color. Most of us — whatever our skin color — are not descended from royalty or even slave-owning plantationers.

  • I am not a television watcher, rather I get my information online. However, one site steered me to the 15 minutes I link to below.

    Brace yourself – it’s Fox and Tucker Carlson.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv6Y3a4BV6E

  • The Oregonian is insane. “[U}prising sweeps the nation”? Jo Ann Hardesty’s moment.

    The unapologetic tearing down of the Washington statue: I studied the man late in my life and developed an admiration for him that perhaps exceeds my admiration of Lincoln.

    No police protection? No expression of dismay by the local authorities? No anything? I have a difficult time ordering my disgust.

    Happy Juneteenth and kneel when told or asked Americans. Maybe they’ll quit hurting you.

  • Pamela wrote:

    Like you, Larry, I’m not a television watcher. After I checked out that link you posted, I started noticing Carlson. Yesterday, he had something about the incredible popularity of BLM. He compared it to a political party, a much more effective political party than either the D’s or the R’s.

    I really think this insanity is fed by the pandemic. People are in a panic. Their lives are changing, and they are freaking out. The media, who have been having their own identity crisis for the past couple of decades, go along with the mob. No leadership anywhere.

    I was just looking at some videos of blonde women shrieking at the police in Washington D.C. They are screaming so hysterically, you can’t tell what they’re saying.

    Their high-pitched hysteria reminded me of the call-and-response I heard on the 15th night of the protests in downtown Portland: “Whose streets??! Our streets!”

    This was led by a white female. She probably thinks she’s making a difference. Given her skin color, she could be headed for irrelevance.

    The news coverage is so inadequate that I’ve gone down there to see for myself. Part of the problem is that the “media” — which these days includes anyone who has a cell phone — are usually embedded with the protesters. The police are cast as the aggressors when actually the police are outnumbered and on the defensive. The cops don’t order protesters to leave until the mob starts throwing things.

    The protesters need/want the police in order to validate their protest. At one point, I overheard a protester complain: “There are no police. We are wasting our time … let’s go.”

    Later that same night a swarm of protesters moved around to the back of the justice center. Some of them grabbed a large, mobile traffic advisory sign and rolled it to block the entry into the garage that police use. Then they moved two large Dumpsters to complete the task.

    I encountered a couple of hard-core Antifas, not as bad as the ones I dealt with three years ago.

    These two young women had helmets and severe masks form-fitted over their faces. The taller of the two said, “We noticed you taking notes. Who are you?”

    I asked them a question that clearly annoyed them. “Are these protests continuing in part because so many things are closed, and there’s nothing else to do?”

    They are convinced this is their American Revolution.

    Personally, I would like to see the police put up a banner outside the Justice Center: THANKS FOR THE OT!

  • Seems like the bad guys control and shape it all now.

    I was rude to my dental hygienist today. She was speaking of the latest information and discussion of the Wuhan flu. She spoke of articles she’d read in JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine. I said that they were shit. I could have remained silent and should have.

    I started noticing those two and Lancet fabricating content in advocacy against the Iraq War. Today, of course BLM is at the head of JAMA’s landing page.

    Then there’s this:
    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/what-massive-database-retracted-papers-reveals-about-science-publishing-s-death-penalty

    The Oregon Historical Society remains absolutely silent on the destruction of my state’s heritage. However, they do run a pretty constant line of lesbian, socialist, civil rights, and etc. pieces on the Oregon Encyclopedia’s Facebook page.

    A historical society that hates its history and sits silent while it is effaced/erased/corrupted. Our institutions are rotten.

    Every American institution is unreliable and more often than not cowardly.

    I’m reading Failure is not an Option by Gene Krantz: The space program, an optimistic people, extravagant goals met. I don’t recognize my countrymen.

    It’s frustrating: facts do not back BLM version of reality. The best interests of American blacks are smothered in this lazy but vicious and emotion driven popular narrative.

    My god, the white hate for whites is insane.The white men are the more destructive but the white women are hysterical in their hate for whites.

    The local politicos inciting hate for cops? They have no idea. The ready popular embrace of police hate is testament to the failure of our ed system.

    And, there exists almost no forum for dissent. That might be a plus however because these racist haters will come for you in your home or on your job.

    https://katu.com/news/local/portlands-iconic-elk-statue-to-be-removed-after-vandalism-fires-during-protests

    Yes, I’ve hopped around but it all seems to bleed into one great leftist cloacal stew that America has become

  • Pamela wrote:

    Your science link led me to other links, including this:

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/amid-protests-against-racism-scientists-move-strip-offensive-names-journals-prizes-and

    The madness is catching. You would think scientists could remain above the political fray.

    It was almost appropriate that the Pioneer Mother and the Pioneer Man statues at the University of Oregon were brought down. We no longer exhibit any kind of pioneer spirit in this state.

  • Last night a busload of BLM/Antifa thugs stopped at my place of work to do laundry. Beefy boys though most beefy around the middle they loitered here in their oddly squared off reconstituted school bus for too long.

    Texas plates. Who paid these guys to come from Texas and attack my town?

  • Pamela wrote:

    Now that’s interesting. Did you jot down the plate? In the right hands, that could be useful.

  • I just posted a comment on Tina Kotek’s Facebook page: you are a mess.

    I took it down quickly as it was inspid, didn’t convey my estimate of the harm she is doing and has done to my city and state, and because I didn’t want to be hunted.

    Funny old world. Doesn’t seem to be a forum available for citizens to voice support for the authorities. Sorry that guy got nailed while harassing the Feds, but then he’d just handled a non-lethal munition with casual contempt.

    He took one for the team and they learned nothing, except for to raise the chorus of What the fuck! What the fuck!I truly hate the old women who run this town and state from Kotek to Wheeler.

  • Pamela wrote:

    Last year when the legislature was in session, Michael Strickland appeared on the floor of the Senate as a guest of Sen. Kim Thatcher, who offered a short speech under “Remonstrances” defending his free speech and Second Amendment rights.

    It takes far more courage for a Strickland or an Andy Ngo to exercise their free speech rights in Portland than it does for any antifa. And Strickland and Ngo don’t have to mark their territory like ignorant gangbangers.

    https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/10-opinion/472650-381955-countries-without-policing-have-suffered-because-of-it

    I still think the pandemic and its related lockdown have contributed to turning these protests into a form of entertainment.

    I told a friend of mine the other day, if we had another terrorist attack on a par with 9-11, these protests would quickly become yesterday’s news. George who?

  • Yes, I remember the progressive bumper stickers, “Speak the Truth though your voice shake” or some such.

    It really does tear me up inside this popular renunciation and hate of my beloved country by so many of its citizens.

    The one thing I am confident of is that no one is giving up his right to bear arms soon.

    https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

    Portland had a much reviled local writer named Jim Goad some years back. Name very appropriate. Did jail time for spousal abuse as I recall. Might have been more to that than meets the eye. Anyway, he often publishes articles about current events in Taki’s online mag.

  • Thank you for your fairly dangerous and very fine letter to the Pamplin people.

  • Yes. Good letter. Portlanders don’t realize what could happen to the Police Bureau. Look for a jump in retirements. Hardesty clones won’t replace them. They don’t want to get spit on.

  • The scary thing is that if Iannarone beats Wheeler, Hardesty will be the only thing keeping Portland Police from being functionally disbanded.

  • Pamela wrote:

    According to Willamette Week, Jo Ann Hardesty is already running the show. If Iannarone won, Hardesty would make a nice snack out of her. After 30 years in the trenches (which is how Hardesty sees her political life), she is not going to take a backseat to a frivolous, white upstart like Iannarone.

    Hardesty is in a curious place. She is about to get the changes she has wanted for so long. Then what? Is she prepared to take responsibility if the outcome is disastrous?

    One thing making the rioting worse in Portland is that it has a weak media, which acts mostly as an amplifier for the protesters. A strong, competitive media could make a difference. Instead, the media treat protesters almost like they’re journalists — armed with cameras and embedded with Antifa.

    State Rep. Jeff Barker (D-Aloha), a retired police lieutenant, wrote this last week. It’s excellent. Unfortunately, he is leaving office after this term:

    https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2020/07/opinion-elected-leaders-need-to-take-action-to-stop-the-rioting.html

  • Pamela wrote:

    If Michael Harriot can be a wypipologist, can I become a blapipologist?

    He has some good points, especially in Portland where white progressives can speak for blacks in a noblesse oblige kind of way. Some of the “Naked Athena” coverage was so over the top I told friends it was going to give Jo Ann Hardesty ideas. She could bring the protests to a halt by shedding her clothes and playing the Black Athena.

    Speaking of nude scenes, I saw the film you recommended “Melancholia.” Granted, nudity was the least of it, but Lars von Trier wasn’t going to let the lovely Kirsten Dunst go to waste.

    I rarely give up on a book or film. If I start, I finish. At two-and-a-half hours, the first hour of “Melancholia” was a challenge. What a bunch of boring, rich people at a wedding reception at a fabulous estate, which none of them seemed to appreciate. The bride and groom so completely self-absorbed.

    I kept thinking there has to be a pay-off. It’s the end of the world, after all. As you know, the second hour is completely different. Still, for me, the only sympathetic characters were the little boy and the horse. But the Kirsten Dunst character becomes much more interesting as a depressive and utters some thought-provoking lines: “The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it.”

    At one point she says the earth deserves its fate. Those are lines I revisit in my own mind. They are strangely reassuring.

    While the ending is not scientifically accurate, I thought it was glorious.

    So, thanks for the recommendation. For an end-of-the-world movie, though, I prefer “Last Night” for the variety of characters.

  • I don’t know how clear it is to those not involved with the riots, but there is no way this ends with anything other than disaster. The question is to whom and to what extent.

    With the Mayor, the entire city council, the governor, both senators, majority of US representatives, the state speaker, and any number of other elected officials all declaring the “protesters” are doing nothing wrong, it is frankly unbelievable that the police, at least PPB, are still opposing the declared morally correct liberators in any way. Perhaps if PPB acknowledged that they work for the citizens of Portland who, through their elected officials, do not want this mob policed and instead simply chose to retreat away from the chaos, the problems would end… or at least the hundreds of millions of property damage might convince the powers behind the power to put the kibosh on this nonsense.

  • Pamela wrote:

    I raise that question a lot with friends of mine. How is this going to end? We’ve come to the same conclusion as you. It can’t end well.

    Who will pay the biggest price? If it’s the police, there will be trickle down effects to the public — but not to people like Kate Brown, Tina Kotek, Chloe Eudaly, Ted Wheeler, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Earl Blumenauer. I’ve left Jo Ann Hardesty out because crime stats would suggest she has a better chance of being a victim (at the hands of someone who looks like her) than the others.

    Last night I was down at Lownsdale Square early in the evening. There is a black man who keeps a table selling “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts. As I walked by this table, I saw a stringy, red-haired guy waving his arms and telling the black T-shirt man: “Did you know the murder rate in Kansas City is higher now than all of last year?”

    You could tell the black guy was wandering where the conversation was going. He said cautiously, “Yeah?”

    I kind of wish I had joined in and asked these guys if they had heard of the Ferguson effect.

    Could it be that this is one of the best times in Portland to be a criminal?

  • Pamela wrote:

    You may seen a story in the Portland Tribune about Lewis & Clark History Professor Maureen Healy who got hit with a rubber munition at the protest. When I read it, I thought about this essay you’ve linked to. Then today I watched the Zoom press conference on Reimagine Oregon.

    This is a project centered around a list of demands developed by black organizations. The only white people who participated were female (Kate Brown, Deborah Kafoury, Washington County Chair Kathryn Harrington and Clackamas County Commissioner Sonya Fisher). All uttered familiar liberal platitudes.

    Malcolm X would not have been impressed.

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