Native stereotypes in Peter Pan Live!

Let's turn from the overall production of Peter Pan Live! to its Native aspects. First, the problems in the source material:

What's up, Tiger Lily? Peter Pan and the Native American stereotype that has certainly grown old

NBC featured an actress of Cherokee descent, but some say Rooney Mara’s forthcoming film turn will merely be ‘redface’. Is there any way to redeem JM Barrie’s most dated character?

By Alan YuhasIn the 1904 play and 1911 novel that brought Peter Pan to fame, Barrie calls Tiger Lily a princess of a “Piccaninny tribe.” She has all the trappings we now recognize from the worst sort of Native American stereotype. Tiger Lily puts her ear to the earth, breaks out a peace pipe, and speaks with her cohorts in guttural gibberish. Most uncomfortably, Barrie is not only prolific with the word “redskin” but also has Tiger Lily rapturously declare Peter “the Great White Father,” after he saves her life.

There is, however, “something about Peter that captivated everyone and let Barrie get away with a lot,” said Anne Hiebert Alton, a professor at Central Michigan University and the editor of a scholarly edition of Peter Pan. From Barrie’s perspective, she said, the world divided easily between the British and everyone else.

“He’s not being consciously racist,” she said. “But we still can’t let him off the hook.”

Barrie’s works do stink of their era. He turns Tiger Lily into a hero but makes sure she is subservient to Peter; he treats her tribe as better than the true enemy (pirates, adults) but not nearly as important as the heroes (boys, kids, not girls). Alton also pointed out that Barrie died in 1937–long before anyone thought to take issue with his portrayal of Native Americans.

The production tried to fix the problems:

Ugg-A-Wha? Updating Stereotypes in ‘Peter Pan’

By Jeremy EgnerAll of which put the casting of Tiger Lily and a reworking of the song “Ugg-A-Wugg” near the top of the list of things NBC’s new “Peter Pan Live!,” which debuts at 8 p.m. Thursday Eastern time, had to get right.

“Tiger Lily needed to be Native American—that’s how Barrie conceived the role,” said Neil Meron, an executive producer. But the treatment can’t be “insulting to the Native American community,” he said.

Enter Alanna Saunders, 22, who graduated from the University of Miami in May and had lived in New York for roughly two weeks before she saw a flyer seeking Native American actors to audition for Tiger Lily. Ms. Saunders, a descendant of the Cherokee Nation, won the part and is thus starting her professional career on a live network extravaganza before an audience of millions, sharing the stage with the likes of Christopher Walken (as Captain Hook).

“It feels so ridiculous that I got this opportunity,” she said from the set last week.

Ms. Saunders brought no expectations to the production, she said, mostly because she had so little experience to draw upon. But she was curious about how “Peter Pan Live!” was going to handle one of the musical’s most famous numbers.

“I was thinking, ‘There’s no way they can do “Ugg-A-Wugg,”’” she said. “Because the lyrics are gibberish, and they’re pretty offensive in terms of trying to be any sort of authentic Native American reference.”

The song is a duet between Tiger Lily and Peter Pan, in which the islanders and Peter’s Lost Boys form an alliance against Captain Hook. To refresh it for modern sensibilities, the songwriter Amanda Green, the daughter of an original “Peter Pan” lyricist, Adolph Green, and David Chase, the production’s music director, worked with Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, an Emmy-winning composer and member of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. The nonsense lyrics were replaced with nursery rhymes and the rhythms were shifted to make the song less stereotypical and more authentically Native American. (Mr. Tate discussed the process in more detail in recent interviews.)Natives still criticize production

From Debbie Reese's American Indians in Children's Literature blog:

"True Blood Brothers" in NBC's production of Peter PanThe take away? Lot of stereotyping:

Indians with crossed arms: check
Scantily clad Indians: check
Playing drum with hands: check
Kids playing Indian: check
Hollywood Indian music: check
Overrepresentation of men: check

So--a question.

"O-a-hey" is supposed to be a Wyandotte word. Does that make this all better? No. Not at all.

#NotYourTigerLily: Nine Months Later and They Still Don’t Get the Point

By Johnnie JaeHaving seen the production, I cannot even begin to understand how anyone could think that this gross misappropriation of our indigenous identities and culture is a step forward in diminishing harmful and racist stereotypes. It’s still the same disappointing, exploitative and racist characterization of indigenous women and people that it has always been. What’s really disheartening is that they took the same approach that Warner Bros. has decided to take with their feature film, Pan.

“They created a non-Native “tribe” that faux-headdress-loving Coachella fans would be proud of, while simultaneously engaging in an activity mainstream society is adept at—silencing Native peoples,” says Tara Houska of Not Your Mascots. “There are plenty of Native actors and actresses to fill Native roles, and plenty of Native writers to consult. If Hollywood feels the need to bring back a character entirely based on racist stereotypes, one would think the smartest approach would be involving Natives as much as possible in the character’s re-imagination.”

Let’s be honest. Peter Pan is one of the most racist and misogynistic literary classics and so are the cartoons, plays and films inspired by the novel. The world of Peter Pan is fiction, but the harm done through the blatantly racist treatment and portrayal of Indigenous people in the story is our reality.

I asked Not Your Mascots’ Maggie Hundley why it was important to discuss the issues with Tiger Lily and her Tribe in the Neverland Universe and she replied:

“Unfortunately, as a kid, I bought into the Indian ‘maiden’ and ‘princess’ caricatures that I saw in movies and cartoons and used them to judge myself. Things need to change. By calling out the degrading and exploitative character of Tiger Lily in Peter Pan movies and plays, we are challenging institutionalized stereotyping of indigenous girls and women in entertainment. It is important to call out these mockeries and create a new narrative to replace the false ones that are force-fed to us by major companies such as Warner Brothers and NBC.”While Johnnie Jae wanted Native creators to fix the Native portrayals, Adrienne Keene suggested another approach:

Keene: Why 'Fix' Tiger Lily? Why Can't We Just Let Her Go?

By Dr. Adrienne KeeneThose who may have followed my writings on Tonto and Disney’s 2013 Lone Ranger film might see this as a marked switch from my attitude at the beginning of that journey. I argued, very strongly, that Disney should have cast a Native in the role of Tonto, that Comanche advisors and other Native peoples should have been involved much earlier in the process to shape and develop portrayals of Native peoples on the screen.

After watching that long saga unfold, I have a different opinion. I don’t want Native peoples to be forced into a role of trying to put band-aids on a gaping wound of racism. I want Hollywood to stop resurrecting these racist characters.

Think of the world created by the story of Peter Pan. Neverland is inhabited by mermaids, pirates*, fairies…and Indians. Fantasy creatures, meant to show how different Neverland is than the world the Darling children inhabit. The problem is, Native peoples aren’t fantasy creatures, nor are we something of the past, like pirates. We’re real, contemporary human beings. We don’t all live in tipis and smoke peace pipes and say things like “squ*w gettum firewood.”

So my advice the next time that a high school wants to put on Peter Pan or the next studio wants to make another remake: Cut the “Indians” out. Completely. Be creative. Find some other fantasy creature to replace them with. My colleagues last night came up with the idea of space aliens, which I kinda love. A completely fictional “other,” allowing for full creativity. Make up some shiny silver blobs for them to live in. Make up a language. Wrap them in foil or something. Just don’t call them Indians.Comment:  For more on Peter Pan, see Peter Pan Live! Reviewed and A 21st-Century Peter Pan and Peter Pan's Racist History.

Peter Pan Live! reviewed

NBC's mega-event production of Peter Pan Live! aired Sunday night. The reviews were mixed, to say the least.

Some people liked it:

Smooth Flight to Neverland, Mostly. Just Ask @tinkerbell.

'Peter Pan Live' review: Allison Williams-led production, broadcast from Long Island, nearly soars

Others, including me, didn't find much to like:

TV Review: NBC's 'Peter Pan' falls sadly flat

By Mark KennedyThis "Peter Pan" needed a lot more fairy dust.

NBC's live telling of J.M. Barrie's classic tale Thursday was an oddly ponderous, disconnected, disjointed and jerky mess. If it had been a Broadway show, it would have gotten the hook (pun intended).

It wasn't the small things that broke the spell—ungraceful wire work, clunky transitions, a Tinkerbell that was as annoying as a mosquito and sounded like a wind chime, a tea cup that fell from Peter's head and some technical glitches.

"Peter Pan Live!" simply never flew.

It suffered a draggy start, cursed by a "Downton Abbey" drawing room dialogue and a call for everyone to go to bed. It grew better in the colorful Neverland but veered into parody with a Captain Hook by Christopher Walken that seemed like a failed "Saturday Night Live" sketch about Johnny Depp. The whole thing lost steam by the second hour. Was anyone still trying to save Tinkerbell with 45 minutes to go?The boggling mixed signals of “Peter Pan Live!”: Why on earth did NBC decide to do this show?

"Peter Pan" wasn't a technical disaster or a racist cringe-fest--but man, was it weird

By Sonia SaraiyaNBC’s production of this 1904 musical did nothing different, interesting or risky. (It might not even have been sung live! What was the point, NBC?) Aside from a few changes to Tiger Lily’s song to make it slightly less racist, “Peter Pan Live!” was “Peter Pan,” more or less intact. Which is mind-boggling. If Disney had produced this, audiences would be asking: Why is it so overwhelmingly white? Why wasn’t Tiger Lily’s role rethought or cut entirely?

And the most obvious response to all of this, naturally, is that “Peter Pan” isn’t meant for television, because it’s a play, and it’s not meant for modern audiences, because it was written in 1904. But then that leads to the most obvious question that struck me as I was watching last night: Why on earth would anyone make this show in 2014? As the fabulous and opinionated Tom and Lorenzo wrote this morning: “There’s a difference between ‘old-fashioned entertainment’ and ‘offensive minstrel shows’ and this falls somewhere in the middle.”

We live in a world where a feminist retelling of the book of Genesis is a bestselling book and an upcoming miniseries on Lifetime. Where children’s fables are being unpacked and retold to include more female and minority perspectives. The “Hunger Games” franchise and the Marvel and DC universes are engaging with complex, dystopian themes in their storytelling. We are not shrinking violets in our American living rooms, and neither are our children, and yet this version of “Peter Pan” is like a time capsule from 1904, unwilling to do anything to disturb the fragile social norms of a bunch of long-dead white Brits.The 7 worst things about NBC’s “Peter Pan Live!”

Nearly two days later, we still can't quite believe what we just saw

By EJ Dickson1) Cast someone who can actually pull off the role of Peter Pan.

The problem was that Williams simply doesn’t have the charisma to pull off the Boy Who Never Grew Up. She looked nice, and sounded nice, but as the A.V. Club’s Caroline Siede put it, “Williams feels like the girl who got every lead role in high school but couldn’t quite compete with stronger performers in college. She’s not bad, but she lacks the right impulsive, impish energy for Peter Pan.” Someone with more firecracker energy, like an Anna Kendrick or an Ellen Page, would’ve made for a much stronger Peter.

4) Replace or cut out the “Ugg-A-Wugg/True Blood Brothers” number.

The trouble is that no matter what you do to Tiger Lily and the “Ugg-A-Wugg” number, it’s still a song about Native peoples celebrating Peter Pan, their white male savior; replacing the “gibberish” Native American lyrics with equally gibberish nursery rhymes doesn’t necessarily make it any better. And because the number itself really isn’t that integral to the narrative or even very good to begin with, the smart choice would’ve been for NBC producers to cut it (as they did with the operatic “Mysterious Lady,” presumably due to Williams’ vocal limitations) or replace it with a new, equally rousing, more politically correct number.

7) Pick a better show.

Let’s be real: Peter Pan is not the best musical in the world. While it’s great for parents to turn on when they’re busy, so they can plop their kids in front of it and watch them zonk out for a few hours, the pacing is slow, the score subpar and poorly edited—I know we all love Christopher Walken, but do we really need at least three musical numbers for Captain Hook and his band of pirates?—and the libretto full of stodgy, regressive ideas about women and gender. Considered as a whole, I’d take a good production of Guys and Dolls, The Music Man, South Pacific or even Grease over Peter Pan any day.A few people simply gawked at it:

Peter Pan Live on NBC: Reviewed

Hate-watching “Peter Pan Live!”: The funniest tweets during tonight’s NBC musical

Comment:  For more on Peter Pan, see A 21st-Century Peter Pan and Peter Pan's Racist History.

Our broken justice system

Why Is America's Sense of Black Humanity So Skewed?

There is a real disconnect between what white people know and what black people know in this country.

By Brittney CooperUnfortunately, key players in this case, buttressed by a particularly clueless segment of white America, actually seemed to believe that a grand jury decision in favor of Darren Wilson would simply be accepted by black America. The outrage from the St. Louis Police Officers hearkens back to an era when black people were expected to willingly endure white people’s routine horrific acts and humiliations committed against them. That this decision feels like a travesty worthy of literally stopping traffic in locales all over the country is an affective response that seems to escape white notice, an apparent casualty of the well-documented racial empathy gap, among white Americans. Though many white people do understand the racial magnitude of last week’s devastating decision—the sense it offers that black people, and in particular young black men, are simply sheep for the slaughter—far too many white people do not understand this.

Among those with more insidious and overt racial animus, the belief is that we should simply “lie down and take it.” Among well-meaning, reasonable white people, the view is more anodyne. These people implored us to wait for justice to take its course, for the evidence to be evaluated, the witnesses to testify, a decision to be made.

There is a real disconnect between what white people know and what black people know in this country. Philosophers and political theorists understand these as questions of “epistemology,” wherein they consider how social conditions shape our particular standpoint, and ability to apprehend the things that are supposed to be apparent to us. “How do we know what we know?” is one way we might ask the question.

It is deeply apparent to most black people that the legal proceedings in the grand jury deliberations were a farce. Whether we consider the deliberate incorrect instructions given to jurors by the prosecutor, or the refusal to challenge the incendiary and inhumane characterizations of Michael Brown as “it,” “demon” and “hulk,” black people know that a lie has been perpetrated.

Too many white people lie comfortably in bed each night with the illusion that justice was served, that the system worked, that the evidence vindicated the view they need to believe—that white men do not deliberately murder black boys for sport in this day and time and get away with it. Most well-meaning white people need to believe this. For me as both teacher of different kinds of epistemology and as a black person, I do not have the luxury of believing this. I do not have the luxury of stepping over the bodies of Eric Garner, John Crawford and Tamir Rice, leaving my unasked questions strewn alongside their lifeless bodies.The American Justice System Is Not Broken

By Albert BurnekoThe American justice system is not broken. This is what the American justice system does. This is what America does.

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has written damningly of the American preference for viewing our society's crimes as aberrations—betrayals of some deeper, truer virtue, or departures from some righteous intended path. This is a convenient mythology. If the institutions of white American power taking black lives and then exonerating themselves for it is understood as a failure to live out some more authentic American idea, rather than as the expression of that American idea, then your and my and our lives and lifestyles are distinct from those failures. We can stand over here, and shake our heads at the failures over there, and then return to the familiar business, and everything is OK. Likewise, if the individual police officers who take black lives are just some bad cops doing policework badly, and not good cops doing precisely what America has hired and trained them to do, then white Americans may continue calling the police when black people frighten us, free from moral responsibility for the whole range of possible outcomes.

The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Sam Shepherd, and countless thousands of others at the hands of American law enforcement are not aberrations, or betrayals, or departures. The acquittals of their killers are not mistakes. There is no virtuous innermost America, sullied or besmirched or shaded by these murders. This is America. It is not broken. It is doing what it does.

America is a serial brutalizer of black and brown people. Brutalizing them is what it does. It does other things, too, yes, but brutalizing black and brown people is what it has done the most, and with the most zeal, and for the longest. The best argument you can make on behalf of the various systems and infrastructures the country uses against its black and brown citizens—the physical design of its cities, the methods it uses to allocate placement in elite institutions, the way it trains its police to treat citizens like enemy soldiers—might actually just be that they're more restrained than those used against black and brown people abroad. America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that's OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design.

The real problem in Ferguson, New York and all of America is institutional racism

By Vincent WarrenBlack men are not dying at the hands of (mostly) white cops–nor are those cops being excused from legal responsibility–because of mutual distrust between black and brown people and law enforcement agencies. To suggest so simply, and perhaps deliberately, mistakes the symptom for the disease.

Trust, or lack thereof, is based on lived experience, and it is the actions of law enforcement in communities of color that has eroded black and brown Americans’ trust. To present the situation as mutual distrust not only obscures the specific causes of that distrust–it intimates that everyone is equally responsible for the problem. The call for “conversation” as the solution then reinforces this idea that the legitimate problems with law enforcement vocalized by minority communities are really all just one big misunderstanding.

Our political leaders should not begin to offer solutions for a problem if they won’t even name it: systemic, institutional racism exists in police forces throughout our country.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Frederick Douglass famously said. “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”

From the prosecutor and the grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island to the halls of Congress–where reform ideas like the End Racial Profiling Act or the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act have hit a dead end–and a thousand places in between, our government institutions have been largely unresponsive to demands for real structural reform. Much like the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, grassroots protests in Missouri and New York and across the country–including the hundreds of actions of civil disobedience, bridge and highway shutdowns, and walkouts–are the engines of change, and communities and grassroots organizers are the ones providing the concrete solutions to the problem.We Don’t Need Nice, We Need Justice: Racism and the Moral Blindness of White America

By Tim WiseNice is the enemy of justice because to raise one’s voice against oppression is to be instantly pegged as not nice, as disruptive, as unruly, as dangerous. To block traffic, or interfere with the all-important Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center is not nice. To interrupt the symphony orchestra in St. Louis, or the drunken revelry of nice white baseball fans at a Cardinals game is not nice. To signify sympathy for a murdered young man in Ferguson, with even a gesture as simple as raising one’s hands as you come out of the tunnel before the football game is not nice. It is, to some—who would rather just watch black men entertain them with a few nice interceptions—worthy of punishment, or professional discipline. How dare they, say the nice white people who paid good money to see black men play gladiator for the glory of the hometown team.

Nice people change nothing. They never have and they never will. Those who are nice are so invested in their niceness, in their sense of propriety and civility that they rarely raise their voices above a whisper, even in the face of sweltering oppression. Nice white people were the ones who didn’t own black folks during the period of enslavement but also didn’t raise their voices against the ones who did. Nice white people are the ones who didn’t spit on sit-in demonstrators but also had no problem spending money with businesses that had remained segregated all those years.

To be nice is to have an emotional stake in the prevention of one’s own pain. Nice people don’t like to look at the ugly. It’s upsetting, and most of all because it puts us on the hook and calls forth our humanity to actually put an end to that pain. Precisely because most people are good and decent and nice, they turn away from any evidence that the world, and their society is less decent than the sum total of its citizenry. It’s too much to take in. This is the irony of niceness: unlike persons with antisocial personalities or severe sociopathy who quite enjoy pain and suffering and often seek to cause it, those who are nice are so wrapped up in rainbows and lollipops as to make gazing upon the truth a bridge too far.

Nice people do not protest, angry people do; and right now, I’d trade every nice white person about whom Chris Rock was speaking for 100,000 angry ones. But not those who are angry at black folks or brown immigrants or taxes—we have more than enough of them. I mean 100,000 who are angry enough at a system of racial injustice to throw ourselves upon the gears of the machine, as Mario Savio once insisted. A hundred thousand angry enough to join with our brothers and sisters of color and say enough. A hundred thousand who are tired of silence, tired of collaboration, tired of nice, and ready for justice.Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Grand Juries Won't Indict Killer Cops and Police Prejudiced Against Blacks.

Grand juries won't indict killer cops

Here's what people are saying about the Eric Garner case: in which another grand jury failed to indict another white cop for killing another black man.

Maneater (@kim_tastiic)
"What does that say about black life when we get murdered on camera and still get no justice?" ‪#‎EricGarner‬

jelani cobb (@jelani9)
As a matter of record, is there anything — ANYTHING — that law enforcement can do to a black person that qualifies as a crime? ‪#‎EricGarner‬

Tim Wise (@timjacobwise)
There is no killing of a black man by police that white folks won't rationalize/seek to justify... Somebody show me ONE case where I'm wrong

Systemic bias against blacks

Why It’s Impossible to Indict a Cop

It’s not just Ferguson—here’s how the system protects police.

By Chase MadarChapter 563 of the Missouri Revised Statutes grants a lot of discretion to officers of the law to wield deadly force, to the horror of many observers swooping in to the Ferguson story. The statute authorizes deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if the officer “reasonably believes” it is necessary in order to “effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”

But this law is not an outlier, and is fully in sync with Supreme Court jurisprudence. The legal standard authorizing deadly force is something called “objective reasonableness.”

This standard originates in the 1985 case of Tennessee v. Garner, which appeared at first to tighten restrictions on the police use of deadly force. The case involved a Memphis cop, Elton Hymon, who shot dead one Edward Garner: 15 years old, black and unarmed. Garner had just burgled a house, grabbing a ring and ten bucks. The US Supreme Court ruled that a police officer, henceforth, could use deadly force only if he “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The ruling required that the use of force be “objectively reasonable.” How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. All this appeared to restrict police violence—even if, in the end, Officer Hymon was never criminally charged for fatally shooting Edward Garner.

“Objectively reasonable”—what could be wrong with that? But in actual courtroom practice, “objective reasonableness” has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.

The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. Such was the case of Berkeley, Missouri, police officers Robert Piekutowski and Keith Kierzkowski, who in 2000 fatally shot Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley out of fear that the victims’ car was rolling towards them. Forensic investigations established that the car had not in fact lurched towards the officers at the time of the shooting—but this was still not enough for the St. Louis County grand jury to indict the two cops of anything.Why wasn't the cop who killed Eric Garner indicted?

By Amanda TaubWhy was there no indictment in the Eric Garner case? Two words: Police credibility. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that we have two different standards for guilt in the American criminal justice system: civilians get "beyond a reasonable doubt." Police get "beyond any possible doubt, no matter how implausible it may seem."

There is video of Garner's death. It shows NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo wrapping his arm around Garner's neck, and then throwing his entire body weight against it until Garner fell to the ground, choking and gasping that he could not breathe. The NYPD placed an absolute ban on the use of chokeholds in 1993, on the grounds that the technique was too dangerous to use in any circumstance. A New York medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. But that wasn't enough for the grand jury, because Pantaleo told a different story.

Pantaleo spoke before the grand jury for nearly two hours—itself a privilege that most defendants are not afforded. According to the New York Times, Pantaleo testified that he didn’t use a chokehold, but a "wrestling move." Pantaleo also testified that he got off of Garner "as quick as he could." (The video shows him and other NYPD officers piled on top of Garner even after he had fallen to the ground. One officer knelt on Garner's head as he gasped for breath.)

But when faced with the question "who are you gonna believe—the cop, or your own eyes?" the grand jury decided that the answer was "the cop." To them, his testimony outweighed the videos, as well as the testimony of 22 civilian witnesses.

10 Ways the System Is Rigged to Protect Cops Who Kill

Obstacles to accountability exist at every stage of seeking justice.

By Steven RosenfeldLet’s walk though 10 ways the system is predisposed to let NYPD Officer Daniel Panteleo off the hook, just as Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson police officer who shot and killed another unarmed black man, Michael Brown, last week escaped charges by a local grand jury.

1. There is a double standard for charging citizens and police. Everybody knows that police are authorized to use force in ways civilians are not. But if a civilian shoots a person outside his car window—as was the case in Ferguson—you can bet that shooter would be arrested, charged and have to defend his actions in court, David Rudovsky, a civil rights attorney and author on police misconduct told Vox.com. But that is not the case when cops are the shooters, he said, because “police are investigating their own.”

2. This inherent conflict of interest is all over the Garner case. If you watch the July 20 video by Tiasha Allen posted on the New York Times website, you see Garner after he is placed on the sidewalk, face-down, hands tied behind his back. A dozen NYPD officers mill around and act as if nothing is unusual or wrong. Forget that this video shows a dying man’s final hour, and that the NYC medical examiner concluded the chokehold and leaving him on the sidewalk face-down killed him. Look at the cops: this team of officers would include many likely witnesses called before the Staten Island grand jury. “It’s often the police department that is charged with investigating a particular incident, deciding who’s telling the truth, who used force first, and so on and so forth,” Rudovsky said, explaining the first of many conflicts of interest.

3. Then comes the legal framework that protects cops. This is how the law is layered to protect rogue cops. It starts at the very top, as the Nation pointed out, because the standard in a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that tried to restrict when cops could use deadly force has been twisted by police to defend each other. The court held that deadly force can be used when a police officer “has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” In 1989, the Court tried to be more specific by saying there had to be an immediate threat to their safety or to others. “But in actual courtroom practice, ‘objective reasonableness’ [standard] has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers,” the Nation said, explaining the loophole. “American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.”Legal Experts Say Eric Garner Grand Jury Did Exactly What DA Wanted: Nothing

By Christopher RobbinsWhile most legal experts believed that the grand jury did not have enough evidence to prove a murder charge, the grand jury could have charged Pantaleo with manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.

"In this case, you had videotape, and the videotape is pretty darn clear," Cohen says. "The video showed that the officer engaged in a long-prohibited conduct, a chokehold, and it doesn't seem to make any difference to the jury. And that's because the prosecutor decided that there should be no indictment for any criminal behavior."

Randolph McLaughlin, a law professor at Pace Law School and civil rights attorney, agreed.

"The grand jury is a tool of the prosecutor. At a minimum, it was negligent, it was reckless, it was some level of homicide. Surely they could have indicted this officer on any number of charges and let the public hear, let a trial happen, expose to the light of day what went on here. This man is a public servant, and he committed these acts as a public servant, wearing the uniform of a public servant, and he should be called to account for it."

In a statement, DA Donovan noted that he is barred from disclosing any details surrounding what took place during the grand jury proceeding, but that he petitioned for the information to be released on a court order.

Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia who specializes in police accountability and criminal law, says he was "not surprised" by the grand jury's decision.

"It’s politically costly for Dan Donovan to indict a police officer on Staten Island. He can easily shift the political and legal burden to the Department of Justice to decide whether to pursue criminal charges. He’s washed his hands of it."My tweets on the subject:

Proposed training for the NYPD: When a suspect says "I can't breathe," you stop choking him to death. ‪#‎EricGarner‬ ‪#‎HandsUpDontChoke‬

Coming soon: White cop shoots Obama, explains actions. "He looked so big! I thought he had a gun!" Grand jury declines to indict. #Ferguson

For more on Ferguson, see Police Prejudiced Against Blacks and Indians, Blacks Are America's "Others."

Police prejudiced against blacks

With two more black victims of police--Tamir Rice and Eric Garner--joining Michael Brown in the news, let's delve deeper into what's happening. First, whatever could be causing white police to kill young black men?

‘I hate n*ggers. That is all’: 5 Ohio deputies probed for years of racist text messages

By David EdwardsSheriff Plummer said that the deputies sent racial messages on their personal phones between November 2011 and January 2013. Some messages were sent while the men were on duty, and some messages were directed at African-American deputies, he said.

“The N-word was used several times as well as other racial slurs and jokes,” Plummer noted. “Racism will not be tolerated in this office.”

WKEF reported that it had obtained “hundreds of pages of text messages.” One read: “What do apples and black people have in common? They both hang from trees.”

“I hate N*ggers. That is all,” another text message said.

“Very simply put, they’re N*ggers, son,” one deputy wrote.These Comments By Cops on the Eric Garner Decision Will Turn Your Stomach

By Matt AgoristPerhaps only slightly less disturbing than these officers’ callous, racist, and repugnant remarks, is their grammar.

A recurring theme among these LEOs, is calling anyone who disagrees with a cop, a “thug.” In the comment below buddy245 is likely talking about protesters when he says, “chasing around these thugs.”

In perhaps the most disturbing comment from this policeone.com article, user SAPDMAS refers to a group of humans as “ungrateful, spoiled, hateful animals.” Way to show your true colors SAPDMAS.

With cops dehumanizing people in this manner, is it any wonder that they resort to deadly force so quickly?Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are. There’s only one fix.

By Redditt Hudson[I]n 1994, I joined the St. Louis Police Department. I quickly realized how naive I’d been. I was floored by the dysfunctional culture I encountered.

I won’t say all, but many of my peers were deeply racist.

One example: A couple of officers ran a Web site called St. Louis Coptalk, where officers could post about their experience and opinions. At some point during my career, it became so full of racist rants that the site administrator temporarily shut it down. Cops routinely called anyone of color a “thug,” whether they were the victim or just a bystander.

This attitude corrodes the way policing is done.

As a cop, it shouldn’t surprise you that people will curse at you, or be disappointed by your arrival. That’s part of the job. But too many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences.Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Indians, Blacks Are America's "Others" and Wilson's Testimony in Ferguson Shooting.

A 21st-century Peter Pan

The Racist History of Peter Pan's Indian Tribe

Even in the early 20th century, though, critics saw Tiger Lily and her fellow "Picaninnies" as caricatures

By Sarah LaskowMore recently, though, directors who take on Peter Pan have tried to update these ideas, a tiny bit. Hook, the 1991 Robert Zemeckis movie, leaves the tribe out altogether. When the British director Tim Carroll staged Peter Pan for the Stratford Festival in 2010, he turned the tribe into Amazons.

"The role of the Indians in the play is to be both exotic and a bit savage," he wrote in an email. "But the use of the term (and the stereotyped language) could only cause offense to a North American audience. It seemed to me that 'Amazons' was a neat way of killing two birds with one stone: as mythic warriors they satisfied the 'exotic and savage' criterion; but it also allowed me to cast a group of women."

2015's Pan, a film that imagines Peter's first years in Neverland as an orphan kidnapped by pirates and forced to work in a mine, made a similar choice. The film features Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily but dresses her tribe in a sort of outlandishly bright array of pinks, purples, browns and bright blues that manages to be fantastic enough that no one would ever confuse this tribe with an American Indian tribe.

NBC's 2014 version of the 1954 musical is going in the opposite direction, in search of something like authenticity. Unknown actress Alanna Saunders, whose paternal heritage has distant ties to the Cherokee nation, will play Tiger Lily, and the song "Ugg-a-Wugg" was updated to include actual Native American phrases. Perhaps these changes will keep today's directors from looking, in another hundred years, like purveyors of crude racial stereotypes; perhaps they'll seem just as clumsy as Barrie's original conception of the tribe's relationship to Peter—"We redskins—you the great white father."Updating the original

“We had to replace the lyrics ‘ugg-a-wugg’”: Meet the “Native American consultant” who worked on NBC’s “Peter Pan”

Salon talked to Jerod Tate about how NBC smoothed over the musical's un-p.c. edges

By Erin Keane[T]hen the really big thing that we worked on was the replacement of [the lyrics] “ugg-a-wugg.” Just a little background: In general, what we all know is that the Indian tribe that’s represented in Peter Pan was influenced by knowledge of Northeast Indians of the United States. So we’re talking Iroquois, Huron, Wyandotte, Algonquin, these kinds of cultural regions. So what I did was I set out to find a replacement word for “ugg-a-wugg” that was literally a Wyandotte word.CTC conjures a 'Peter Pan' for the 21st century

As NBC prepares to screen the musical this week, Children's Theatre is working on an update that may become the standard.

By Rohan Preston“What’s appalling about ‘Peter Pan’ is that everyone else in the play speaks perfect English, but when it comes to the Native Americans, the tribe, it’s the ‘ugga wugga’ song, which is made-up gibberish in the third person,” said playwright and choreographer Larissa FastHorse, a Lakota who grew up in South Dakota. “The play puts Native Americans in that realm of the fantastical, as if we were extinct. But we’re here, alive and creative, not better or worse than anyone else.”

FastHorse consulted with the Children’s Theatre, which plans to stage “Peter Pan” next spring and which wrestled with how to portray Tiger Lily, an Indian character, and the tribe. Artistic director Peter Brosius worked with director Peter Rothstein and new play director Elissa Adams to make changes to the script in consultation with some Indian artists.

They came up with an idea to change the tribe into a group of powerful, diverse girls known as the Pounce. They are a counterpoint to the show’s famous Lost Boys.

Theater officials were at first fearful that the licensing company would reject the suggested changes. Instead, Music Theatre International, which controls the performance rights of “Peter Pan,” is considering adopting them for all future productions that it licenses.Comment:  Let's look at possible changes:

1) Omitting the Indian tribe altogether may be the best solution. It's not critical to the story; it can be replaced by a few individuals or nothing.

2) Changing the tribe to primitive people in multicolored feathers doesn't address the "exotic and savage" issue. That isn't a goal, it's a problem. Yes, some indigenous people still go half-naked and hunt with spears, but they're likely to watch TV or log onto the Internet after a day in the jungle. Equating them with fairies and pirates from a couple of centuries ago will always be stereotypical.

3) Changing the tribe to Amazon women or "a group of powerful, diverse girls known as the Pounce" is better--if they don't look primitive and indigenous. Why not dress these women like warriors from Wonder Woman's Paradise Island--in full armor? Or as gang members from a West Side Story-like background?

4) Like Tonto and Turok, Tiger Lily is an iconic, if minor, Native character. Indians have so few roles that it's a shame to lose one. Producers should think about keeping her Native--but only if they solve the "tribal" problem.

If Tiger Lily isn't leading an Indian tribe, she obviously doesn't need to be Native. But if her "tribe" is a group of girls like the Pounce, she still could be indigenous. There's no reason a brown-skinned woman shouldn't lead a multi-ethnic society.

For more on Peter Pan, see Peter Pan's Racist History and White Tiger Lily, Aboriginal Chief?

Peter Pan's racist history

The Racist History of Peter Pan's Indian Tribe

Even in the early 20th century, though, critics saw Tiger Lily and her fellow "Picaninnies" as caricatures

By Sarah Laskow[I]n the play, as one New York Times reviewer wrote in 1905, "Mr. Barrie presents not the pirate or Indian of grown-up fiction but the creations seen by childish eyes."

In practice, that meant portraying the fierce tribe that lives on Neverland in a way that even in the early 20th-century looked like a caricature. As The Times of London wrote:

"...the Never-Never-Land is peopled by Red Indians and Pirates, who lose no time in showing us that they know how to 'behave as sich.' [sic] The Red Indians always lay their ear to the ground, then give vent to unearthly yells, and prepare for scalping somebody—a Pirate, for choice."

At the time, this portrayal wasn't controversial. But while much of Barrie's original work is just as delightful today as 110 years ago, Tiger Lily and her tribe have become a problem for contemporary productions. There's no real reason for a tribe of Native Americans—"not to be confused with the softer-hearted Delawares or the Hurons," Barrie wrote—to live on Neverland, where they are impossible to excise from the story. But it's almost as impossible to depict them in a way that's not offensive.

In the play, Peter refers to the tribe as "piccaninny warriors," and in Peter & Wendy (Barrie's book-long adaptation of the story, published in 1911), they are introduced as the "Piccaninny tribe"—a blanket stand-in for "others" of all stripes, from Aboriginal populations in Australia to descendants of slaves in the United States. Barrie's tribespeople communicate in pidgin; the braves have lines like "Ugh, ugh, wah!" Tiger Lily is slightly more loquacious; she'll say things like "Peter Pan save me, me his velly nice friend. Me no let pirates hurt him." They call Peter "the great white father"—the name that Barrie had originally chosen for the entire play. A tom-tom pounded in victory is a key plot point.

"It was a popular fantasy trope," says Anne Hiebert Alton, a professor of English at Central Michigan University and the editor of a scholarly edition of Peter Pan. "Barrie was telling the story in the very early 1900s, and so part of it, I think, was: this was a good story, this'll stage well. He was very Victorian—and that's the age when British people were still proud to brag that the sun never set on the British empire."Comment:  For more on Peter Pan, see White Tiger Lily, Aboriginal Chief? and Tiger Lily in Peter Pan: An Allegory of Anglo-Indian Relations.

White Tiger Lily, Aboriginal Chief?

A new image of actress Rooney Mara as Tiger Lily has people wondering:

Eric Haywood ‏@Eric_Haywood
Something’s odd about this new Peter #Pan movie, but I just can’t put my finger on it. #TigerLily



Here are some excellent analyses of the ongoing problems with the upcoming Pan movie:

Rooney Mara's Tiger Lily Could Not Be Less Native. That's a Problem.If this new Tiger Lily is not a person of color, why is her dad so dark?

A poster and movie trailer for Pan, the Peter Pan prequel planned for a summer 2015 release, is giving the public a first glimpse of actress Rooney Mara in the role of Tiger Lily, a Native American character in J.M. Barrie's 1904 play. The visuals have reignited the controversy that broke out in March over the casting of Mara, a non-Native actress, in the role. Reporting on the choice touted the film's "multi-racial" world and "a very different [Tigerlily] than was originally imagined."

But there was concern and even outrage over Mara's casting. An online petition was started to urge Warner Brothers to "Stop casting white actors to play people of color!" On Twitter and other social media, many people voiced disappointment in Mara for accepting the role.

In our our earlier coverage of this issue, we saw two possible explanations of the casting choice. One was simply the old Hollywood practice of casting white actors as Indians—the traditions of "whitewashing" (casting well-known white actors in Native roles to ensure ticket sales) and "redface" (white actors playing Indians, often by invoking common stereotypes) that have been common from the silent-film era up through Johnny Depp's Tonto in 2013. We entertained another explanation, though: that the filmmakers, concerned by the racist portrayal of Natives in Peter Pan—and it's really bad, particularly in the 1953 Disney film—were trying to avoid repeating it. After all, many ICTMN readers have commented that the character of Tiger Lily is an inherently racist creation, and that Mara might as well take it because no self-respecting Native actress should have to reinforce the stereotype for the sake of a blockbuster credit.The image seems to suggest Mara's Tiger Lily is not Native. Aside from the actress's own physical appearance, there's a touch of tartan in her costume; Tiger Lily is the daughter of the Chief in the original story, but it looks to us like this Tiger Lily's dad might be less of an Indian chief and more of a Scottish or Irish chieftain. There is a big, big problem with this reading, though.

The Chief in Pan is played by Jack Charles, a famous Australian Aboriginal actor. Here's what he looks like:The choice to cast Charles as the Chief supports the worst-case scenario theories about this whole mess. Charles clearly signifies that the tribe in the film (originally the "Pickaninny Tribe" in J.M. Barrie's play and book, let's not forget) is non-European in nature. How or why does he have this white, Irish-looking daughter? It's hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that the filmmakers feel people of color are good for supporting roles, but a lead actress must be white. If the filmmakers wanted to avoid the racist attitudes behind the Tiger Lily and Chief characters, and cast a white actress to create a new, stereotype-free Tiger Lily, why is her father the Chief so iconically ethnic? If Tiger Lily's ethnicity doesn't matter, then go ahead and cast Rooney Mara, and give the character a dad who looks like he could have fathered her, given what we know about genetics. Casting a white actress as Tiger Lily to sell tickets but an Indigenous Australian as the Chief to keep the racial other-ness in the original story just isn't right. Rather than an attempt to rehabilitate a problematic character, it is what concerned petitioners originally feared: simple and unsubtle whitewashing, based on the belief that the film would not succeed with a Native actress in a Native role.

And yes, we're braced for the "revelation" of the plot twist that Mara's Tiger Lily came to Neverland from England before Peter did, and was adopted by the Chief. We can see that one coming a mile away. That doesn't negate the cynical nature of Mara's casting, just shows the filmmakers felt they had write an explanation into the storyline.Worshiping whites

From Debbie Reese's American Indians in Children's Literature blog:

How 'bout we all pan NBC's PETER PAN and Warner Bros PAN, tooThe trailer for the new movie due out next year has a scene where Pan is on the floor, spears aimed at him. It looks like he's about to be killed, but an older man (which I imagine the script says is an elder or maybe Tiger Lily's dad) stops them. In his hand is a necklace of some sort that Peter was wearing. The man says:
"The little one. He wears the pan."

Here's a screen capture of that scene in the trailer:The trailer cuts to Tiger Lily, played by Rooney Mara, who says: "The Pan is our tribe's bravest warrior."

Here she is in that moment:Her line (Pan is our tribe's greatest warrior) points right at the foundation for Barrie's film. Indians who worship whites. That's not ok. It was't ok then, and it isn't ok to give that racist garbage to kids today. Right?

Some of you know that there was a lot of discussion when Rooney was selected as the actress for the part. Many people said that a Native actress ought to be cast instead of Rooney. I disagree with that idea, too.

Fixing the words in the song, and/or casting a Native person in that role does not change the point of view(s) on which the story rests. These are, through and through, "the white man's Indian." There is no fixing this story or any production of it so that the Native content is authentic.

Attempts to do so remind me of the many schools that sought/seek to make their Indian mascots more "authentic" so that they could keep objectifying Native people, using their ideas of who Native people are for their own purposes.

Can we just let that stuff go?Comment:  Even if all the "tribal" actors are white, the feathered costumes make them look tribal. Mara's ridiculous headdress makes her look tribal. That plus the spears make the tribe look primitive and savage. Even if they're white, they're strange and exotic--exactly what you don't want to see in a depiction of tribal people.

The "bravest warrior" line may be an exception. But if the creators are sticking to the original story, it suggests a huge problem. Tiger Lily starts as a helpless damsel in distress; she ends up worshiping Peter Pan. Here's a key passage from the original book:

Peter Pan--Chapter 10One important result of the brush [with the pirates] on the lagoon was that it made the redskins their friends. Peter had saved Tiger Lily from a dreadful fate, and now there was nothing she and her braves would not do for him. All night they sat above, keeping watch over the home under the ground and awaiting the big attack by the pirates which obviously could not be much longer delayed. Even by day they hung about, smoking the pipe of peace, and looking almost as if they wanted tit-bits to eat.

They called Peter the Great White Father, prostrating themselves [lying down] before him; and he liked this tremendously, so that it was not really good for him.

"The great white father," he would say to them in a very lordly manner, as they grovelled at his feet, "is glad to see the Piccaninny warriors protecting his wigwam from the pirates."

"Me Tiger Lily," that lovely creature would reply. "Peter Pan save me, me his velly nice friend. Me no let pirates hurt him."

She was far too pretty to cringe in this way, but Peter thought it his due, and he would answer condescendingly, "It is good. Peter Pan has spoken."

Always when he said, "Peter Pan has spoken," it meant that they must now shut up, and they accepted it humbly in that spirit; but they were by no means so respectful to the other boys, whom they looked upon as just ordinary braves. They said "How-do?" to them, and things like that; and what annoyed the boys was that Peter seemed to think this all right.If there's even a hint of white-worshiping tribespeople in the Pan movie, look out.

For more on Peter Pan, see Tiger Lily in Peter Pan: An Allegory of Anglo-Indian Relations.

Wendigo in Sleepy Hollow

A recent episode of Sleepy Hollow, titled And the Abyss Gazes Back (airdate: 10/27/14) featured a Wendigo, the legendary monster of Algonquian tribes. Here's the story:

‘Sleepy Hollow’ Recap: Ichabod and Daniel Boone, BFFs?The episode centered on Joe Corbin, the son of the deceased Sheriff Corbin, who was Abbie’s mentor. Just back from Afghanistan with an honorable discharge earned under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Joe turned out to be afflicted with a curse that causes him to change into a monster from time to time. He was, in short, the featured creature of the week, the Wendigo, a forest beast with an appetite for human flesh.Wikipedia provides more details about the Wendigo legend:

WendigoA Wendigo (also known as windigo, weendigo, windago, windiga, witiko, wihtikow, and numerous other variants including manaha) is a demonic half-beast creature appearing in the legends of the Algonquian peoples along the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of both the United States and Canada. The creature or spirit could either possess characteristics of a human or a monster that had physically transformed from a person. It is particularly associated with cannibalism. The Algonquian believed those who indulged in eating human flesh were at particular risk; the legend appears to have reinforced the taboo of the practice of cannibalism. It is often described in Algonquian mythology as a balance of nature.

‘Sleepy Hollow’ recap: Downward Facing WendigoIt’s at this point we treated to yet another installment of “Ichabod’s Famous Friends.” This week, Ichabod name drops his good pal Daniel Boone, whose brother, Squire, was afflicted with a gnarly disorder following Valley Forge that led to cannibalism. Daniel, himself, fell victim to Squire, using his raccoon hat to hide the scars. The cause of the illness: a Wendigo, the Shawnee legend of a human/beast hybrid triggered by human blood.‘Sleepy Hollow’ Recap: Ichabod and Daniel Boone, BFFs?The best moment of Abbie and Ichabod’s pursuit of Joe the Wendigo was the discussion of Daniel Boone’s headwear. Ichabod apparently knew Boone—of course he did; they were contemporaries, and it was a small world back in the 1700s. Having hung out with Boone, Ichabod was able to correct Abbie and a two-century-old inaccuracy: Boone, he told her, preferred beaver pelts to the coonskin cap he is most identified with. And so we have a new entry for our Top 10 Lines Spoken by Abbie Mills in this series: “As much as I would love to debate the variety of rodent hats that existed in your day, can we please refocus?”Below:  Victor Gage as a Shawnee warrior.



Sleepy Hollow Recap: 'Even God Thought the Devil Was Beautiful'Enter Hawley, who’s brought in because he knows some Shawnee who might be able to help. But they kinda hate him. So Ichabod accompanies him to what looks like SAMCRO: Native American edition, and they succeed in securing a cure for what ails Joe.Big AshBig Ash is a Shawnee contact of Nick Hawley. He and his fellow Shawnee run a motorcycle repair shop. Ash was displeased with Hawley for selling off the tribal mask, as Hawley dishonored his agreement to keep the mask.

Hawley initially assumed that Ichabod Crane was too socially awkward to communicate with Big Ash. But Crane's mention of Squire Boone became the key for Big Ash to agree to help them find a Wendigo cure for Joe Corbin.‘Sleepy Hollow’ recap: Downward Facing WendigoTheir only shot is to corner Joe before he kills and recite some Shawnee prose inscribed on a skull over the Wendigo’s blood. Simple enough. An alleyway standoff ensues and while it doesn’t look good for Joe for a second there, Abbie begs him to pull though and shed his husky Wendigo suit. Cured, he asks Abbie for her recommendation to Quantico, though I doubt a trainee who turned them down carries any sway.

Comment:  A few shadowy Shawnee appear briefly when Crane talks about the Boones. The Indians' primary appearance comes in the single motorcycle shop scene.

Actor Eddie Spears does a good job as the suspicious modern-day Shawnee. The only glitch comes when he refers to an older Indian as a "shaman." Once again, a shaman isn't an all-purpose Native wizard, and few tribes had shamans.

The "Shawnee prose" could be real Shawnee words written in the English alphabet, but it's probably not. Slightly more likely is that Crane uttered real Shawnee words when he supposedly read the curse--but again, probably not.

All in all, And the Abyss Gazes Back was a typical episode of Sleepy Hollow--nothing special. Add points for featuring genuine Native lore and Native actors. Subtract points because movies and TV shows have used the Wendigo dozens of times before. At this point it's totally unoriginal--practically a cliché.

For more on Sleepy Hollow, see Mohawk Shaman in Sleepy Hollow.

Indians, blacks are America's "others"

A blogger makes the case for how Native stereotyping relates to shootings, violence, and terrorism:

Ferguson, #ChangeTheName, and White Supremacy Entangled

By Miguel GarciaBoth the movement to fight against offensive native mascotry and the murder of yet another unarmed young black man are connected through “othering” and the dehumanization of people of color. “Othering” can be defined as the concept of creating and maintaining a difference of division between one group of people and another (Said, 1979). This of course is white society and the other, the non-white society.

This creation and maintaining of difference manifest itself in Native Americans portrayed as mascots on football helmets, and young black men seen as “demons” by White police officers. The “other” is not viewed by white society as a human being. The “other” is viewed as non-living, a caricature, a mythical devil or demon.

This dehumanization is a product of White Supremacy and Colonialism. White Supremacy is the political ideology that believes white people (Europeans) are superior over people of color. White supremacy is upheld and reinforced through political, economic, social, cultural, educational, legal, and military systems of power. Colonialism can be defined as the subjugation or domination of a group of people and/or culture over the other through the establishments of settlements in a distant territory.

In the white imagination, Native Americans don’t exist anymore but only as artifacts of the past, in the form of mascots. Not only did European settlers commit the biggest genocide in human history when Columbus landed in 1492, Native Americans never existed in the white psyche to begin with. This Thanksgiving let’s not forget that fairy tale of manifest destiny. European colonial settlers as the great discovery states, discovered a land unoccupied by no one. God had made them the chosen people, who had the right to this uninhibited land. So how would white society even treat Native Americans as humans, when they didn’t exist in the first place?His conclusion:Like the Hottentot Venus human zoos (Blanchard, et. al., 2009) and Buffalo Bills Wild West shows (Maddra, 2006) of the past, Black and Indigenous people are only here for white society’s entertainment. What’s the difference of displaying Black people in cages and Native Americans portrayed as uncivilized savages who had to be tamed by the Cowboy hero Buffalo Bill? There is no difference. They were both seen as not humans. They were “othered.”Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Black and White Rage in Ferguson and Prosecutor's Bias in Ferguson Shooting.

Black and white rage in Ferguson

Repetitive Motion Disorder: Black Reality and White Denial in America

By Tim WiseI suppose there is no longer much point in debating the facts surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. First, because Officer Darren Wilson has been cleared by a grand jury, and even the collective brilliance of a thousand bloggers pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in his version of events that August day won’t result in a different outcome. And second, because Wilson's guilt or innocence was always somewhat secondary to the larger issue: namely, the issue of this gigantic national inkblot staring us in the face, and what we see when we look at it--and more to the point, why?

Because it is a kind of racial Rorschach (is it not?) into which each of these cases--not just Brown but all the others, from Trayvon Martin to Sean Bell to Patrick Dorismond to Aswan Watson and beyond--inevitably and without fail morph. That we see such different things when we look upon them must mean something. That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially-constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.

Not to overdo the medical metaphors, but as with those other cases noted above, so too in this one did a disturbing number of whites manifest something of a repetitive motion disorder--a reflex nearly as automatic as the one that leads so many police (or wanna-be police) to fire their weapons at black men in the first place. It is a reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, trash the dead with blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one's own response to it had anything to do with race.And:Reflex: To deny that there's anything at all racial about the way that even black victims of violence--like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens of others--are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for several weeks.

And most of all, the reflex to deny that there is anything racial about the lens through which we typically view law enforcement; to deny that being white has shaped our understanding of policing and their actions in places like Ferguson, even as being white has had everything to do with those matters. Racial identity shapes the way we are treated by cops, and as such, shapes the way we are likely to view them. As a general rule, nothing we do will get us shot by law enforcement: not walking around in a big box store with semi-automatic weapons (though standing in one with an air rifle gets you killed if you're black); not assaulting two officers, even in the St. Louis area, a mere five days after Mike Brown was killed; not pointing a loaded weapon at three officers and demanding that they--the police--"drop their fucking guns;" not committing mass murder in a movie theatre before finally being taken alive; not proceeding in the wake of that event to walk around the same town in which it happened carrying a shotgun; and not killing a cop so as to spark a "revolution," and then leading others on a two month chase through the woods before being arrested with only a few scratches.

To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don't. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the twentieth century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department's killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it's a fact. And the fact that white people don't know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what's wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don't have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won't be on the test, so to speak.
Being Black: The Real Indictment in Ferguson and the USA

By William C. AndersonNow that the grand jury has returned with their decision on the extrajudicial killing of Michael Brown, we should be reminded that even though Darren Wilson was not indicted, Blackness was certainly indicted by the grand jury.

Darren Wilson is free and the police continue to be empowered to kill with impunity. Blackness was found guilty yet again, as witnessed by the many Black slain and their stories. The color some of us carry around can exact a death sentence at a moment's notice. Ever since the formation of the world's greatest empire, Black people have been the eternal scapegoat for all that's been wrong. Our blood waters the roots of war.

There is nothing that can be expressed but grief, anger and frustration at the depraved patterns of this consistently immoral farce that calls itself the "criminal justice system." Kill the Black body and then blame the corpse. This happens repeatedly. Anything is a good excuse to kill a Black person. In Michael Brown's case, stolen cigarillos were worth his death. In 12-year-old Tamir Rice's death this week, it was his unmarked toy gun. And recently, Tanesha Anderson's mental illness made her death worth a violent killing in front of her own family. No matter what, the dead Black body is at fault.

The United States was born out of an incident where a Black man was victim blamed for his murder. It was the Black blood and "mad behavior" of Crispus Attucks that led founding father John Adams to defend the beguiled crown when Attucks was the first American shot down leading up to our nation's birthing revolution. What was his defense of the British patrols overzealous policing? Adams uttered words that would cement our ever-present pattern, stating it was the fault of Attucks "whose very looks was enough to terrify any person." Two hundred and forty-four years after the moment that sparked the fight for independence, we are still dealing with this type of thinking.

Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid

Violence works. Nonviolence does too.

By Ta-Nehisi CoatesIn 2008, Barack Obama's task was to capture the presidency of a country which historically has despised the community from which he hails. This was no mean feat. But more importantly, it was not unprecedented. And just as Léon Blum's prime ministership did not lead to a post-anti-Semitic France, Barack Obama's presidency should never have been expected to lead to a post-racist America. As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state. On Monday night, watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of a man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.

Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.

What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him. King had the courage to condemn not merely the violence of blacks, nor the violence of the Klan, but the violence of the American state itself.

What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.

Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.

By Carol AndersonNow, under the guise of protecting the sanctity of the ballot box, conservatives have devised measures—such as photo ID requirements—to block African Americans’ access to the polls. A joint report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the NAACP emphasized that the ID requirements would adversely affect more than 6 million African American voters. (Twenty-five percent of black Americans lack a government-issued photo ID, the report noted, compared with only 8 percent of white Americans.) The Supreme Court sanctioned this discrimination in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to 21st-century versions of 19th-century literacy tests and poll taxes.

The economic devastation of the Great Recession also shows African Americans under siege. The foreclosure crisis hit black Americans harder than any other group in the United States. A 2013 report by researchers at Brandeis University calculated that “half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession,” in large part because of the impact on home equity. In the process, the wealth gap between blacks and whites grew: Right before the recession, white Americans had four times more wealth than black Americans, on average; by 2010, the gap had increased to six times. This was a targeted hit. Communities of color were far more likely to have riskier, higher-interest-rate loans than white communities, with good credit scores often making no difference.

Add to this the tea party movement’s assault on so-called Big Government, which despite the sanitized language of fiscal responsibility constitutes an attack on African American jobs. Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.

So when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.

Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.

The Right’s Vile Ferguson Ploy: Why They Really Want to Focus on the Riots

Supporters of Darren Wilson and apologists for Ferguson officials are desperate to change the subject.

By Elias Isquith[W]hile some of the biggest names out there fell for the trick, focusing on the small number of rioters instead of Wilson’s verdict, most editors understood that the controversy in Ferguson remains what it’s always been: A jarring reminder that the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of universal human equality (the “promissory note,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once called it) remains, for millions of Americans, a debt unpaid.

There’s a lesson here, one that those outraged by what’s happened this year in Ferguson—and happens countless times throughout America, each and every day—should keep in mind as they contribute to our amorphous yet powerful national conversation. We must not allow supporters of the Wilson verdict to distract us by making this a conversation about rioting or poverty or race. That’s not to say we should condone the riots; and it’s not to say we should avoid subjects that involve issues of race and poverty. What it means instead is keeping in mind that riots are nothing new, that the unique struggles of the African-American community can’t be simply attributed to poverty, and that discussions of “race” that aren’t linked with specific policy changes often result in little more than frivolous declarations of privilege.

If we can combat the dual influences of a Ferguson elite that wants national attention to drift elsewhere; and a national media that dislikes policy and favors more watchable, clickable, shareable and fundamentally empty manifestations of the culture war—if we can do that, there’s hope that even though the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson will always be an obscenity, it won’t have been entirely in vain. Let’s ignore those in American society who would rather debate the merits of trashing a bodega than the killing of an unarmed man, and let’s not listen to those who would use this opportunity to relitigate the civil rights movement, the Rodney King riots or the Trayvon Martin case. Let’s honor the wishes of Michael Brown’s parents and decline to “just make noise” in favor of making “a difference.”

How to define that difference—whether through body cameras on police, constraining the power of prosecutors, mandating that police departments reflect the communities they serve, etc.—is the debate we need to have right now. The culture war can wait.Also:

America’s toxic race rule: Why Ferguson protests revive the ugly “twice as good” myth

Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Prosecutor's Bias in Ferguson Shooting and Wilson's Testimony in Ferguson Shooting.

45th National Day of Mourning

National Day of Mourning Reflects on Thanksgiving’s Horrific, Bloody History

By Matt JuulWhile families across the country indulge on their Thanksgiving Day feasts, hundreds will gather at Cole’s Hill in Plymouth on Thursday to commemorate a different tradition: the National Day of Mourning.

The event, held annually on Thanksgiving, is meant to honor Native American ancestors who died due to the European invasion, and to expose the bloody history behind the November holiday.

Now in its 45th year, the National Day of Mourning’s organizers hope to shine a light on modern issues facing Native Americans today, as well as to bring more awareness to the real, horrific story behind Thanksgiving.

“I think there seems to be this myth in this country propagated about Thanksgiving that, ‘Oh, you know, the Pilgrims and the Indians all sat down to have a meal together and they were good friends and everybody lived happily ever after,” says Mahtowin Munro, co-leader of the United American Indians of New England, which organizes the annual event. “It’s really important for us to stand up and talk about what the reality was and to teach others about that reality.”This Thanksgiving, Let’s Talk About Genocide Rather Than Pilgrims and ‘Friendly Indians’

By Sonali KolhatkarFew people have put that context of violence on paper as eloquently as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an American Indian activist and academic whose latest book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” is now in its fifth printing in less than two months since it was released. In it, Dunbar-Ortiz teases out the complex web of intersecting American policies toward Native peoples that include land theft, dispossession, extermination, broken pledges, Christian missionaries and boarding schools, but also self-determination, resistance and survival. Dunbar-Ortiz refutes the Thanksgiving ideal, writing that “the idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the U.S. is an insidious smoke screen.” Rather than her book being one that is told from a collective indigenous people’s perspective, she writes, “This is a history of the United States.”

American Indians are not simply a footnote in our collective origin story. They are here because they have survived genocide. Today there are nearly 3 million American Indians, comprising more than 500 federally recognized indigenous communities and nations. In the late 1800s, after centuries of extermination, there were fewer than 1 million indigenous people left who had descended from 15 million inhabitants of the land that we now call the United States of America. In a Nov. 5 interview on “Uprising,” Dunbar-Ortiz told me that “the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 marks what people in the U.S. call ‘the end of the trail’—the last Indian. There was a [real] genocide and then a ‘narrative genocide’ in history.” It is this narrative genocide that Dunbar-Ortiz attempts to undermine, because, as she writes in her book, “it was crucial to make the reality and significance of Indigenous Peoples’ survival clear.”

To understand the magnitude of the genocide, it is instructive to lay out the pre-colonial sophistication of indigenous societies in the Americas. Not only were their agricultural systems highly developed to coexist with natural systems, they even invented methods of mass food storage, and charted trails within and between territories, many of which form the basis of the modern freeway system. Additionally, American Indians “were very healthy [and] lived long lives,” said Dunbar-Ortiz, “partly supported by excellent hygiene, which the Europeans always noted with some suspicion.” Many American Indian forms of self-government were matrilineal, which, explained Dunbar-Ortiz, was not simply “the opposite of patriarchy”; rather, it was a democratic form of government. In fact, “women were in charge of the food supply and the distribution of food.” There was also a rich and vibrant system of trade. These facts about pre-colonial Native American history “[don’t] make it out of the technical and archaeological journals,” she lamented.

The arrival of the pilgrims, which is celebrated today as part of this nation’s birth story, represented the beginning of the end of an indigenous way of life. Foremost in the project of extermination was the land grab, which is rooted in notions of “manifest destiny,” a sense of entitlement of land by Anglo settlers that was free for the taking. But that land was not free—it was inhabited for generations by indigenous people who had a very different approach to land ownership from the settlers. Dunbar-Ortiz expanded on that difference, saying, ” The United States when it was founded created this whole new idea of ‘parcels of land’ ... making parcels that were commodities for sale, real estate.” It promoted the notion of land as “private property,” which had never before existed on the continent.

Prosecutor's bias in Ferguson shooting

The Day After the Verdict: Is This a Joke?

By LizLike many others, I have been asking this question for months.

First, back in August, when news outlets reported that Bob McCulloch, the prosecutor for St. Louis County, had a long history of siding with the police; that his father, a St. Louis cop, was killed on the job by a black man; that his brother, uncle, and cousin were cops as well; that his mother had worked as a clerk in police headquarters; that he himself had wanted to be a cop until one of his legs was amputated in high school. His office would be responsible for presenting the case of Darren Wilson, a Ferguson cop who shot and killed Michael Brown, before a grand jury.

Is this a joke?

And then when McCulloch said he would let the jury of 12 civilians figure out what charge to bring, if any, instead of making a case for a specific charge, as prosecutors usually do. And instead of selecting a few key witnesses and experts to testify, he would give them “every last scrap of evidence”—essentially drowning them information that they did not have the skills to parse. As former federal prosecutor Alex Little told Vox, “So when a District Attorney says, in effect, ‘we’ll present the evidence and let the grand jury decide,’ that’s malarkey. If he takes that approach, then he’s already decided to abdicate his role in the process as an advocate for justice. At that point, there’s no longer a prosecutor in the room guiding the grand jurors, and—more importantly—no state official acting on behalf of the victim, Michael Brown.”

Is this a joke?

Everything the Darren Wilson grand jury got wrong: The lies, errors and mistruths that let Michael Brown’s killer off the hook

The prosecutor's document dump was designed for transparency. It shows how transparently flawed the process was

By Paul Rosenberg[A]uthor, attorney and NBC analyst Lisa Bloom did the best job of zeroing in on precisely how the grand jury process had failed in a number of appearances on MSNBC the day after McCulloch’s announcement. In a virtual replay of the Trayvon Martin case, subject of her book Suspicion Nation, the prosecutors simply dropped the ball and did not do their jobs.

“The biggest thing that jumps out is prosecutors who aren’t prosecuting,” Bloom said, “prosecutors who let the target of the investigation come in, in a very friendly, relaxed way, and simply tell the story. There is absolutely zero cross-examination. Cross-examination is the hallmark of our system, it’s the crucible of truth. And I don’t say that to use flowery language. That’s how we get at the truth.”

Before she read the transcripts, Bloom noted, “I suspected that he wasn’t cross-examined, instead he was just allowed to talk in a narrative and tell a story and in fact, that’s exactly what happened,” which is a lawyer’s way of saying what the woman in Starbucks told Zach Roth—the prosecutors were treating Wilson like he was their witness, helping them make their case against the accused—Michael Brown. They were not treating him like a suspect or defendant, or even a witness for the other side. They were treating him like one of their own—which, of course, is exactly what he was. And that’s the basic problem, in a nutshell.

While McCulloch had gone out of his way to paint all the witnesses against Wilson as unreliable, offering confused and contradictory testimony, Bloom zeroed in on the most obvious contradiction provided by Wilson himself. “Darren Wilson, as you can see in these pictures, doesn’t have any obvious injuries, maybe, if you look really closely, a tiny bit of pinkness on his face,” Bloom said. “That is completely inconsistent with his story that Mike Brown, with full force, he says, punched him twice, solidly in the face—big, strong Mike Brown. Inconsistent with his injuries, he’s not cross-examined about that, or about anything else.”

That was hardly the only example Bloom cited on air that day. “There are so many parts of that transcript that jumped out at me as a trial lawyer that I would want to cross examine him about if I were the prosecutor,” Bloom said.
Justice Scalia Explains What Was Wrong With The Ferguson Grand Jury

By Judd LegumJustice Antonin Scalia, in the 1992 Supreme Court case of United States v. Williams, explained what the role of a grand jury has been for hundreds of years.It is the grand jury’s function not ‘to enquire … upon what foundation [the charge may be] denied,’ or otherwise to try the suspect’s defenses, but only to examine ‘upon what foundation [the charge] is made’ by the prosecutor. Respublica v. Shaffer, 1 Dall. 236 (O. T. Phila. 1788); see also F. Wharton, Criminal Pleading and Practice § 360, pp. 248-249 (8th ed. 1880). As a consequence, neither in this country nor in England has the suspect under investigation by the grand jury ever been thought to have a right to testify or to have exculpatory evidence presented.This passage was first highlighted by attorney Ian Samuel, a former clerk to Justice Scalia.

In contrast, McCulloch allowed Wilson to testify for hours before the grand jury and presented them with every scrap of exculpatory evidence available. In his press conference, McCulloch said that the grand jury did not indict because eyewitness testimony that established Wilson was acting in self-defense was contradicted by other exculpatory evidence. What McCulloch didn’t say is that he was under no obligation to present such evidence to the grand jury. The only reason one would present such evidence is to reduce the chances that the grand jury would indict Darren Wilson.Experts Blast Ferguson Prosecutor’s Press Conference, Legal Strategy



More evidence of mistakes

Failing to indict someone is incredibly rare:

It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did

The police as well as the prosecutor handled the Brown case badly:

Ferguson Grand Jury Evidence Reveals Mistakes, Holes In Investigation

More thoughts on what the outcome says about our flawed and biased justice system:

“Something is very, very wrong”: Why Ferguson exposes our system of justice

White supremacy lives on: Ferguson decision confirms absence of legal and moral justice

Comment:  For more on Ferguson, see Wilson's Testimony in Ferguson Shooting and Killing Blacks = "Perfect Crime."