Idris Elba, You're not Helping Anybody Here

Ok, can we be real (and obvious) here? I am a white woman. My last post was about race and I'm sure that my bringing up race relations could inspire some skepticism from people who personally face racial prejudice regularly. But I went to school in Newark, which for anyone who is not familiar with the area, has a predominantly black population. The school which I attended there has been ranked for over a decade as the most diverse school campus in the country, and it is a place wherein race and gender relations are discussed openly on an everyday basis. It is a place which I love dearly and which I went to straight from a public high school in a town with about a 1.4% black population (no exaggeration). It is also a place where minds are continuously expanded and improved not just by the classroom curriculum but by the vast range of attitudes and ideas which come along with rampant diversity. My point so far is this: I may not be the first image you think of when you think about racism, but I have definitely experienced it in some less traditional forms, and I am always offended by racial prejudice, even (and especially, since I often share a race with the offenders) when it is directed at a group to which I don't belong. One of the most consistent offenders in this area, to me, is the entertainment media industry and particularly the film industry.

Case in point (and my current case of contention): No Good Deed, an upcoming Screen Gems film starring Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson. In some ways, it is encouraging that a major production company is releasing a big movie with not one, but TWO black characters in lead roles. To anyone paying attention to race in major films, this is kind of shocking. Take, as evidence, this USC study from a couple of years ago which looked at race prevalence in 500 popular movies over a five year span. What the authors found was disconcerting, if not surprising. When considered as a group and when looked at as individual films, black speaking characters are few and far between, holding just 10.8% of these roles. This number increases significantly (to over 50%) when a black director controls the reins of a film, so it might not be shocking to see two lead roles filled by black actors if this were the case, but No Good Dead was directed by white British director Sam Miller. Its writer? Aimee Lagos (also not a black person).

This film is a bit of a statistical anomaly: a movie written and directed by white people, starring black people. How exciting! What progress! What is the movie about!? "Terri (Taraji P. Henson) is a devoted wife and mother of two, living an ideal suburban life in Atlanta when Colin (Idris Elba), a charming but dangerous escaped convict, shows up at her door claiming car trouble. Terri offers her phone to help him but soon learns that no good deed goes unpunished as she finds herself fighting for survival when he invades her home and terrorizes her family." Oh, that's ... cool? So, basically, a black actor gets a lead role in a major motion picture crafted by white people and he plays a "dangerous escaped convict"? Pardon my French, but wtf is that!? Come on, Hollywood, do better. How about instead you take the other bad-ass looking movie coming out, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and switch the lead actors so Liam Neeson is the "dangerous escaped convict" attacking a black family and Idris Elba is the private investigator tracking down the seedy low-lives that killed a woman? 

Orwell Was Right, Just 30 Years Off

In the past few weeks in the United States there have been three well-known and evidently egregious abuses of police power, resulting in the deaths of three black males. There may likely have even been more than just three but these are the ones we know about right now, though we don't know enough about them. The most high profile case right now is certainly that of Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth in Missouri whose shooting by a member of the Ferguson Police Department has sparked major upheaval all across the state and general outrage across the country. Less than a month ago, our collective disgust at the mistreatment of (overwhelmingly, black male) people by law enforcement stemmed from a more familiar seed: the NYPD, specifically for the death of Eric Garner, which occurred after being put in a chokehold during an attempted arrest. And now, on the heels of the Michael Brown tragedy, come reports of abuse by still another familiar acronym in the topic of over-zealous police: the LAPD. This week reports surfaced that an unarmed black man was shot and killed by members of the LAPD, while he happened to be on the ground (after being stopped for seemingly no reason to begin with). While mistreatment of black men by law enforcement is far from a new phenomenon in this country, it is clear from these incidents that the problem is only getting worse- to the point where it may be best classified now as a social epidemic.

When stories like this are few and far-between, it is almost possible to believe that they are simply unfortunate run-ins with individual police officers which get out of hand; when three instances happen in less than a month it becomes difficult to deny that being black is its own type of probable cause in the eyes of law enforcement, sometimes punishable by death. It also becomes increasingly evident that we must do something to reign in the virtually unchecked physical power police departments across the country have been misusing.

Other than the tragic death of an innocent teenage boy, what was most disturbing about the behavior of the Ferguson PD is their unwillingness to release the name of the officer who fired the shots that killed him. Had the situation been reversed, and Michael Brown had shot and killed a member of the Ferguson Police Dept., you could rest assured that you'd know his name. You would know his name, and you would be assaulted by pictures shown out of context meant to incriminate him (you guys remember Trayvon Martin?). When the unprovoked shots ring out from behind the cop car, though, the shooter is apparently entitled to privileged privacy.

Since Brown's death, Ferguson and much of the rest of Missouri has been in a state of turmoil and rage, with local businesses being destroyed or looted and fires burning in the streets. This is almost the opposite of the reaction that we should aim for, and it has served as justification for not releasing the officer involved's name, giving Ferguson the excuse that he would be in danger. The question that remains, with that being said, is why, if Missouri law enforcement has the type of security capability documented by the widely-circulated picture below, could they not simply assign a protection detail for that officer and his family?
       

If this is about safety, how come this officer didn't look out and see this kind of security outside his home?

The obvious answer would seem to be that keeping this officer's name a secret has little, if anything, to do with keeping him physically safe; if that's the case, there must be another reason to protect the officer's identity. Though it may be mere speculation, a number of people have suggested (even in casual conversation, I've overheard...) that the delay in releasing his name has more to do with protecting his and the department's image. It's 2014. If this man's name was publicly known, millions of people would access every one of his social media accounts in a matter of minutes. Every comment he had ever made on Twitter, Facebook, or even in real life, would be thrust under a microscope and dissected for any hint of prejudice. 

Whether this is even partially the motive behind keeping the officer's name hidden or not, the move effectively disables the public's powers of independent investigation. Protesters have claimed that their rights to peacefully assemble have also been infringed upon (though some of this may be due to the abuse of this privilege by looters and violent demonstrators), and most recently there have been claims from two journalists that they had been arrested by Ferguson police while covering the situation. So with basic rights essentially stripped down, how do we work to combat the problem of the over-militarized and over-zealous police? 

The first job is to remember that the people involved in these tragic occurrences are only the police officers that we hear about in the news. They are not the majority, they are not even a plurality. They are the few rotten apples and it is in no way helpful to decide that we are against police, in general. Most police officers are good people who actually want to both protect and serve. But they do have relatively unchecked power, and they must be held accountable. Nearly everybody has a camera on their persons at all times in public, and it is perfectly within your rights to videotape police in public places, so long as you do not interfere with their doing their jobs. But that is not enough; it should not be the task of the public to enforce accountability onto law enforcement, and so we must demand that officers be equipped with cameras by their departments. Where this has been tried, it has resulted in fewer violent encounters with police and civilian complaints against them. 

Finally, though, most of all, the good cops need to come out against the bad. 

In the heart of the protests, Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol has led by shining example. As a native of the city, he has done what more cops everywhere need to do: acknowledge that their personal behavior greatly affects their cities and their image within them. By joining and even leading these protests, Ron Johnson has reminded other officers around the country something they desperately seem of which they desperately seem to need reminding-- the fact that without their uniforms, they are just another (black, or hispanic, or just "suspicious") guy walking down the street, and if they live in a world where officers are ready to draw their guns at any moment, they could end up on the receiving end, too. 

Na-Nu Na-Nu, or Why Our Funny Bones are Broken

A close friend of mine and I have talked before about the fact that I have come to expect celebrity-related bad news from her, as she was the one who told me of Amy Winehouse's death and then Paul Walker's. Feeling it was her duty, she sent me a text two nights ago telling me that Robin Williams had died and I was of course immediately upset. When I learned moments later that it had been a suicide, I had to suppress the instinct to cry. Yesterday it seemed to me that everyone I talked to was particularly saddened by Robin Williams' death. Yes, I know there are people all over the world (and in relative abundance pretty close to where I live) who see death in a much closer form every other week or even everyday, but for the fortunate of us who are less accustomed to it, celebrity deaths sometimes hit hard. On what is probably a stragely regular basis I find myself super bummed out when I think about Michael Jackson, even though he was somebody that I'd never met and he died over five years ago. Honestly, I get sad when I think about John Lennon's death and that happened nine years before I was born. Even today we learned that a screen legend of over seven decades had died, and yet still that news is over-shadowed by grief over Robin Williams. So the question is why, if celebrity deaths usually make us a little sad, do some make us feel as if someone we knew personally had died? In the case of Robin Williams, there seems to be at least a few different reasons.

The first and most obvious one for people around my age (the so-called "millennials") is that Robin Williams felt like a big part of our childhoods. Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, Aladdin, Hook, Flubber, even Popeye and Patch Adams, were movies that we'd all seen a hundred times and from which we could quote whole scenes by memory. They were movies aimed at us that we actually not only enjoyed, but loved wholeheartedly, and that our parents also loved. These were the movies that we watched after school that didn't embarrass us for being childish, and that's not just because they were actually funny, but also because Mrs. Doubtfire and the Genie didn't treat us childishly. Robin Williams was making movies for kids that took kids seriously as human beings, with complex emotions that were difficult to understand on our own. He helped us through our parents' divorces and through knowing other kids that were sick, and mostly, he helped us laugh and forget for a little while about the inherent loneliness of childhood. And when we got older and re-watched Good Will Hunting and Dead Poets Society from the viewpoint of people trying to transition from our teens into adulthood, he found a way to soothe us through that, too.

For some of us, he was also the master teacher of his specific trade. When I was growing up, if any adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I invariably answered the same thing: "Actress, writer, comedienne." I grew up worshiping the players of Studio 8H and The Kids in the Hall (I was kind of a weird kid...), and the rest of the late night comedy droves. I was caught somewhere between watching this adult comedy and watching the goofy stuff that was meant to make kids my age laugh, and luckily, so was Robin Williams. There was always something timeless about the way he made you laugh in that it worked on everyone equally- young and old- and as a kid, you could sense that, even though you didn't get to bear witness to the years of hilarity that had already solidified him as a god well before you were born.

For people my parents' age, his death is probably even worse, though they are better equipped to deal with shocking hero-type deaths. My parents, for example, clearly remember and often reference watching the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. They remember going to the movies to see The Producers, and the meteoric rise of Steve Martin.  Their early adulthood was dominated by undisputed geniuses of comedy, and they certainly recall the first time they saw the young, endearing alien named Mork.

Here was the embodiment of the radical shift from the perfectly normal Happy Days to the totally weird and alien, the new comedy. He was young like them, and they got to watch him grow and become this immense talent right before their eyes, and even though his less wholesome antics were well-known, he was always someone you liked and wished well.

Really, what makes Robin Williams' death seem to sting a bit worse than some other famous deaths, is that it was self-inflicted. This was the man who made us laugh so hard we got stitches in our sides and even found ourselves unabashedly guffawing over when we remembered that scene from Mrs. Doubtfire while riding on the bus and realizing we'd forgotten to shave our legs. And he was so sad, so deep into despair that he felt he had no possibility of ever crawling back out. We can't help but feel like we failed him in returning the favor of making him smile. I read this morning his daughter Zelda Williams' beautiful statement in response to his passing, in which she urges us to "work twice as hard" at filling the void of laughter this loss has left. We can certainly try, but I wonder if we will ever shake that collective twinge of regret that we didn't do enough to make him smile.