Black Hollywood actress 'detained,' cuffed as a prostitute for kissing white husband in public

Current Events

Black Hollywood actress 'detained,' cuffed as a prostitute for kissing white husband in public

Herbert Dyer, Jr.

Sep 14, 2014

Comes now from the “kissing while black” department, Hollywood star Daniele Watts (Django Unchained and the TV show Partners) was recently “detained,” handcuffed and thrown into the back of an L.A. police cruiser for publicly kissing her white husband.

Unfortunately for Watts, L.A.'s finest only know one way to react when an interracial couple displays affection for each other – assume that he is a “trick” and she is a prostitute. At least, that was the rationale given by the police for accosting Watts and her husband, as reported by Mic.com. 

This high-profile case of racial profiling occurred not in the deep dark ghettoes of New York or Chicago, but in the middle of the glitter of tinsel town – Los Angeles' hallowed enclave known as Studio City. According to Watts and her husband, Brian James Lucas, two police officers mistook them for a prostitute and client as they lip-locked on the street. 

It didn't help matters, though, that Watts refused to produce identification when the cops began questioning her. She was then promptly handcuffed and placed in the back of their car as they tried to find out exactly who she was. She was released shortly thereafter.

Watts describes her ordeal much better than I can on her Facebook page. I reproduce it in its entirety below:

When the officer arrived, I was standing on the sidewalk by a tree. I was talking to my father on my cell phone. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I wasn’t harming anyone, so I walked away.

A few minutes later, I was still talking to my dad when 2 different police officers accosted me and forced me into handcuffs.

As I was sitting in the back of the police car, I remembered the countless times my father came home frustrated or humiliated by the cops when he had done nothing wrong. I felt his shame, his anger, and my own feelings of frustration for existing in a world where I have allowed myself to believe that “authority figures” could control my BEING … my ability to BE!!!!!!!

I was sitting in that back of this cop car, filled with adrenaline, my wrist bleeding in pain, and it occurred to me, that even there, I STILL HAD POWER OVER MY OWN SPIRIT.
Those cops could not stop me from expressing myself. They could not stop the cathartic tears and rage from flowing out of me. They could not force me to feel bad about myself. Yes, they had control over my physical body, but not my emotions. My feelings. My spirit was, and still is FREE.

I will continue to look any “authority figure” in the eye without fear. NO POLICE OFFICER OR GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ME. WE ARE EQUALS. I KNOW THAT I WILL ALWAYS BE FREE BECAUSE THAT IS THE NATURE OF MY SPIRIT.

Watts played CoCo in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and currently co-stars with Martin Lawrence in Partners.

Watts' husband, Lucas, had this to say on Facebook. “Today, Daniele Watts & I were accosted by police officers after showing our affection publicly. From the questions that he asked me as D was already on her phone with her dad, I could tell that whoever called on us (including the officers), saw a tatted RAWKer white boy and a hot bootie shorted black girl and thought we were a HO (prostitute) & a TRICK (client).”

Think about this ladies.  Being accused of prostitution because you kissed your husband in public.  The expression on this woman's face says it all.  Utter humiliation and degredation...the final realization that she really is not considered fully human by whole segments -- millions upon millions of people --  in this nation-state.  

Opinion

As the personal property of white men for hundreds of years, it has taken an almost equal amount of time for these rulers of the world to adjust to the ever-changing dispensation – that women (white, black and otherwise) are no longer their personal possessions.

With very few but spectacular exceptions, it was not until the late '60s when the minuscule number of black actresses in Hollywood were allowed to play any roles other than:

• • Loyal maids to white women,
• • Buxom “mammies” and nannies to white children,
• • Conniving, loud and devious Jezebels,
• • Incessant brow beaters of their depressed black husbands (“Amos & Andy's 'Sapphire'), or
• • The default role of the ubiquitous, sex-obsessed and promiscuous prostitute.

In Watts case, she just had to be a prostitute in the eyes of these two L.A. police officers. As her husband said, she fit the profile – and so did he as a tattooed white dude feeling up a black woman in the middle of Hollywood. 

These cops probably figured that if he wasn't a trick, he was probably her pimp. In the cops' minds, the absolute last two things these people could be were a possible "legitmate" boyfriend/girlfriend duo, -- and certainly not a married couple.
But the point here is not these two peoples' relationship. It is the assumptions about and the “liberties” taken with black women's bodies:

The rape.

The working-them-like-a-mule.

The rape.

The forcing them to deny their own children in favor of yours.

The rape.

Making her man ... her black man, 

And sometimes ... her children

watch.

The rape.

References

http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/09/lapd_confuses_black_actress_for_prostitute.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr%3Acontent%26
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/daniele-watts-arrested-django-unchained-actress-detained-in-los-angeles-after-being-mistaken-for-a-prostitute-9731871.html
http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/13/black-actress-daniele-watts-handcuffed-d
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/django-unchained-actress-daniele-watts-handcuffed-by-police-after-kissing-white-husband-1465388
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2755113/Django-Unchained-actress-claims-handcuffed-detained-police-mistaken-prostitute-kissed-husband.html

'Game changing' new video shows white workers' immediate reactions to Michael Brown's killing

Herbert Dyer, Jr.

Sep 13, 2014

What is being called "game changing" new footage showing the reactions of two white construction workers who actually witnessed Ferguson, Missouri, teenager Michael Brown's killing has been released.

The video has been published by CNN. It shows a number of black people gathering at and near the site immediately following Brown’s slaying. The two white construction workers are clearly visible in the foreground and can be heard talking as they face the killing zone.

“He had his f**king hands in the air,” the worker shouted. He later told CNN that he was not from Ferguson and did not want to be identified. The boy's “hands were up” when he was killed, he repeated.

"The cop didn't say get on the ground. He just kept shooting." He then said that he actually saw Brown's "brains come out of his head." And, once more with even more emphasis: "His hands were up!," he shouted.

And, for the first time, we hear from the man’s fellow construction worker, also seen in the video. He told CNN that Brown was indeed running away from the policeman; that Brown "put his hands up;" and that "the officer was chasing him."

Both men again reiterated that they did not see how the incident began.

The video was recorded on the cellphone of an unidentified witness, CNN reported.

A number of legal eagles have weighed in on the obvious importance of this new evidence and have made the following interesting, cogent, and damning points as to Wilson's culpability.

These witnesses are white

Like it or not, believe it or not, these two construction workers' whiteness will play a pivotal role in this case. They also do not live in Ferguson and have presumably had no untoward encounters with Ferguson police in the past.

The reason their whiteness is important, indeed crucial, is because this killing of a black manchild by a white policeman occurred in America. It is just that simple. It is just that basic. This is a fundamentally white supremacist nation-state still mired in white racism. The skin color of every "criminal justice" defendant is therefore the first consideration in determining his or her guilt or innocence. 

Mark Geragos, a CNN legal analyst and criminal defense attorney broke down this racial dynamic for us in terms of the composition of the grand jury hearing this case even as we speak. There are nine whites and three blacks on the 12-member grand jury panel, he says.

"You now have some witnesses who the majority of this grand jury are going to better relate to. I hate to say it, but that's the reality of it, and that's why it's a game changer to me," Geragos said.

Of course, Geragos is only stating a truth and the hard reality that black people have lived with for their not quite five-century sojourn in this nation-state. For the vast bulk of this country's history, black people were not allowed to testify against white people in court. After slavery ended, of course, and straight through to the civil rights movement, black testimony was always considered less “credible” – especially against white defendants.

This video is almost in real-time

Of all of the testimony of eye- and earwitnesses, these construction workers' videotaped reactions are apparently almost contemporaneous with the shooting.  CNN's Jeffrey Toobin explains, "You have practically in real time someone discussing what they saw, and that's just good evidence," Toobin said.

The white guys corroborate all of the black witnesses

Every single black person who claims to have seen this killing insists that Brown was trying to surrender using the universal “hands up” signal.

Sunni Hostein, also of CNN, weighed in with this: 

"They're saying that he was running from the police officer and that his hands were up," she said. "I don't know what other witness testimony at this point or account we have to hear. The bottom line is having your hands up is the universal sign for surrender."

Hostin, however, seemed confused as to why or how the two white guys' statements are given more credibility than a whole handful of black witnesses.

"Five other witnesses from the community said the exact same thing, and it is befuddling to me how with these two witnesses, suddenly this is a game changer," she said.

Commentary

We are getting closer to a video of the actual killing. I contend that such a video is out there and will be released whether Wilson is indicted or not.

Officer Wilson's defenders will continue to support him despite this new “game changing” evidence – or perhaps because of it. Indeed, look for them to double-down in their defense of this latest state-sanctioned killer of a black manchild. 

They will first note and take comfort in the fact that the two white witnesses admit to not seeing the initial contact between Brown and Wilson. That leaves just enough room for their hope and prayer and fervent belief – for their fevered imaginings to concoct and take solace in even the faintest possibility that this big black thug called Brown somehow and for some mysterious reason attacked their honest, upstanding, hardworking, and above all, innocent white cop who was just doing his duty. 

"You have to look at where they're standing," said Neil Bruntrager, general counsel for the St. Louis Police Officers' Association. Where the men were positioned is important, he said, because rather than the 50 feet away that they claim, it seems more like 100 feet from the shooting. Thus, "They couldn't have seen everything," he said, dismissing their entire testimony as unworthy of even the slightest consideration.

Wilson's defenders will also claim (hope) that there is more (preferably exculpatory) evidence out there that has simply not been publicized. They are also banking on a long grand jury process so that things might cool down with the coming cold weather. Folks don't riot during winter, you know. Although a mid-October date had been earlier mentioned as a likely time when the grand jury would indict or not indict, officials have now backed off that, saying it could take several months for the grand jury to review all the evidence. 

And, Wilson's defenders will hang their hats on the fact that this video simply does not show the shooting itself – close, but no cigar. That would be an important point in any defense Wilson might make in court. An attorney for the unidentified man who filmed the video told CNN that he began filming about 40 seconds after the shooting.

Bruntrager also says of the video that, "What you have is a conversation that's occurring after the fact," – well after the fact. Well, not quite ... as a matter of fact, the videographer, as noted above, began filming just 40 seconds after the shooting stopped. 

Finally, what Bruntrager doesn't mention is what that "after the fact" conversation between the two white construction workers was about:  the obvious fact that his saintly police officer is likely a cold-blooded child killer. And, from the video, it appears that these two white guys began protesting against this killing even before any black people did. 

References

http://rt.com/usa/187400-ferguson-witnesses-shooting-reaction/

http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/11/us/ferguson-michael-brown-shooting-witnesses/

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/cnn-new-video-shows-eyewitnesses-michael-brown-shooting

http://q13fox.com/2014/09/10/new-witnesses-describe-michael-brown-shooting-scene/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimdalrympleii/new-witnesses-video-offer-details-on-michael-browns-shooting#3s2cjtr

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2751762/He-f-g-hands-air-New-video-Michael-Brown-incident-reveals-witnesses-horror-police-shooting.html

Put Martin Luther King on the Twenty Dollar bill

Put Martin Luther King on the Twenty Dollar bill

“Whatever you think of policy, the mere fact of electing a black man president, sending him to live in the nation's most iconic, so far whites-only house, would puncture holes through the myth of black inferiority, violating America's racial narrative so fundamentally as to forever change the way this country thinks of blacks, and the way blacks think of this country—and themselves." – Thomas Chatterton Williams in Culture 11, 2008

I am no particular fan of Barack Obama. Indeed, I'm betting that his tenure will be adjudged to have set back black “progress” more than any single event since the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

After Obama, all black people will be left with is not even a kind of Jackie Robinson first-ism pride, for Robinson's efforts, his sacrifices, were made with the full knowledge that he was preparing a path for others.

Not Obama. His weak-kneed but eager conciliatory compromises with outright racists, “movement” and Tea Party Republicans, “Blue Dog” Democrats, and above all, the donor class of capitalists have reduced any potential value his presidency once may have contained down to an empty symbolism, empty of any real significance for black people beyond the now historical fact that he is indeed America's “first black president.”

Symbols matter, yes. But the symbolism of Obama as a member of a downtrodden people, as a “black” man, as a representative of of those people, has been missing in him apparently his entire life. (Please don't tell me that Obama is president of all Americans as though I do not understand what “president” means. What those critics do not understand is that blacks are Americans, too).

I suggest, therefore, Obama extend his symbolic presence to its logical conclusion. That is, Obama should get behind a change.org petition which seeks to replace the slave trading 7^th president Andrew Jackson's countenance on the $20 bill with that of Martin Luther King. This should be a no-brainer for a man who loves symbols as much as Obama does.

President Jackson's “Indian Removal” policy, in direct violation of Supreme Court fiat, involved the naked theft of millions of square miles of Indian lands specifically so that they could be reduced to the cultivation of cotton by millions of black slaves whose very lives, like the land, had been stolen.

Jackson's racism was extreme even for the thoroughly racist epoch in which he lived. The forced march of Native Americans (Trail of Tears) from the fertile lands of the southeast to barren and rocky western “reservations” stood unsurpassed in brutality and death until the various forced marches of World War II.

In 1838, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Jackson's "removal" policies that they were “… a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?"

Of course, contemporary Native American communities' problems and issues are anything but “symbolic.” Sitting Bull's, Red Cloud's or Crazy Horse's (imaginary) face appearing on a bill will not materially change their condition any more than Dr. King's or Frederick Douglass' or Harriet Tubman's would for black people. Without citing the dreary statistics for either group, suffice it to say that Jackson’s visage on the $20 would only mean something materially if both groups could actually accumulate not a few bank vaults stuffed with those new bills. 
 
Still, this drive may not be merely symbolic. Symbolism often has a symbiotic relationship with real and practical, if not always progressive, change. The current fight to change the Washington, D.C. NFL team's name is at first blush a symbolic fight. After all, that's what mascots and team logos are, right – symbols? Symbols represent an idea, feeling, intention, historical or current event. And in the case of the “Redskins,” the name harkens back to Jackson's ethnic cleansing of one group and racist enslavement of another. This is the legacy of the man whose visage we carry on our persons every single day, a man whose “policies” continue to affect marginalized communities today.

And for those who are shocked at even the mention of changing the currency, recall that it was just in 2010 when H.R. Bill 4705 called for Ronald Reagan to replace Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Or how about in 2003 when the “Ronald Reagan Dime Act” tried to finally overthrow one of the last vestiges of the New Deal by kicking FDR off the dime and installing Regan...again. Indeed Republicans and conservatives are hellbent on getting Reagan on everything, especially money. There have been at least two attempts other than these.
But if America really wants to go “colorblind,” if it wants to get its racist past behind it, it could start by kicking a documented champion of genocide off its currency. (To get rid of all slaveholders would require a revamping of the entire economic system – not a bad idea actually).

Martin Luther King Jr. is a universally revered icon who led perhaps the most important and effective struggle for freedom and justice in this nation-state's history. A Gallup Poll has King as the “most admired American” of the 20th century and second in the world only to Mother Teresa. 
 

And, speaking of symbols, surely MLK is a more deserving symbol for the Twenty than Old Hickory. King's face, like Obama's presence in the heretofore lily White House, would end the run of all-white currency, which is a shameful and unavoidable reminder of the now broken legacy of “whites only allowed” in positions of power.

And for the reverse side of the new MLK Twenty?

For my money, and again as a symbol of the civil rights era, how about a picture of the Bus in which Rosa Parks was arrested when she kicked off the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956. The bus would follow a timeline hitting key points in the movement – and then stop at the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

References

https://www.change.org/p/secretary-of-the-treasury-jacob-j-lew-and-u-s-bureau-of-engraving-and-printing-please-replace-former-president-andrew-jackson-with-rev-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-on-the-twenty-dollar-bill

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/put-martin-luther-king-on-the-20-bill/372623/

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/03/andrew_jackson_should_be_kicked_off_the_20_bill_he_ordered_a_genocide.html

http://www.removejackson.com/

A "Two-Man" Race?

January 29, 2008

So, former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards has finally seen the light. He has "suspended" his campaign for the presidency, he says, in order not to be an obstacle in the path of history. That is, he, like the rest of the world, recognizes that the worldwide rule of the "gold ole boys" of Europe and European descent is finally, after 516 years, approaching its end. Now a real campaign may begin. Now the real issues and problems facing America and the rest of the world may finally be put squarely "on the table, " addressed and redressed.

However, Senators Clinton and Obama now must confront and successfully navigate a complex, even confounding trifecta of racial, gender, and generational divides. These divisions will intersect, intertwine, separate, and conflate again and again until the nominating conventions this summer; and, depending on which one of them actually wins the Democratic Party nomination, will explode into bold relief during the one-one-one campaign against the Republicans. Thus now we have what is shaping up to be a classic battle: The white woman against the black man.

Interestingly, the last public speech given by 19th century escaped slave, black abolitionist, Minister to Haiti, Washington, D.C. Marshall, and orator extraordinaire Frederick Douglass was before a women's suffrage group -- a basically white women's suffrage group. Douglass, like Senator Obama, was what is today termed "biracial", only in reverse in Douglass' case: white father/black mother.

New Notes Of A Native Son -- Barack Obama And The Key To The Colors

James Baldwin once wrote that Europeans did not name their "whiteness" until they stumbled upon large numbers of chromatically black Africans off the west African coast circa 1444. Europeans had been simply but significantly "Portuguese," or "Frenchmen," or "Englishmen," or "German." Perhaps understandably, first-contact Europeans attributed the striking contrast in skin color between their "light" selves and the "darkness" of the indigenous Africans before them to some supernatural or cosmic force, their Christian god, or more likely, his alter ego, as being the most likely and available sources. Certainly from a Eurocentric point of view, some African populations then and now were and are so outrageously black that their whole bodies appeared to sparkle like diamonds under an unrelenting African sun. The Wolof peoples of modern Senegal come to mind. And until Europeans began to classify them as "black," that is precisely how they thought of themselves -- as Wolof, Asante, Yoruba, Hausa, Mandinka.

In her 2004 book, The End of Blackness, Debra Dickerson asserts that whiteness is not a particularly complex phenomenon. For her, whiteness at bottom is best understood as a simply but deadly color-coded system of classification and hierarchy invented by Europeans to explain group-based physical differences -- a "codification of hierarchies." The erection of a socio-political hierarchy based on superficial physical differences supplanted the previous nation-based hierarchical system and inexorably led to race-based explanations of different cultural practices, of different cultural practices, of different economic strategies and of different political structures. And, in keeping with an almost uniquely European worldview that competition rather than cooperation drives human "development" or "progress," darker hued peoples' cooperative and communal lifestyles rendered them as less "developed," even regressive. Perhaps, nay, indeed it was quite probable, that these darker peoples were not quite "human" enough for full membership within the "human" family. It is here that color, hierarchy, race and power intersected for the first time. It is here that white "racism," or more precisely, white supremacy was born.

Barack Obama's "blackness" has been questioned at least since he first surfaced on the American national political landscape in the summer of 2004. For so-called black Americans, the question has been: Is he black enough? His black American bona fides, and thus his authenticity are questioned because his black roots skip over the tortuous 246-year history of American chattel slavery and the subsequent and continuing 145-year history of Jim Crow-ism. For black Americans and their not-too-distant ancestors this is a lived history, a history that for better or worse defines and identifies them.

Without having had to experience the horrors of the Middle Passage, Obama's paternal line reverses and retraces its route -- back across the Atlantic to the Old World and further east across the entire African continent itself. There, in the heart of a tiny Kenyan village Barack Obama's father was born. There his paternal grandmother still holds forth as a matriarch of her clan. Barack Obama's African-ness is authentically African -- in a way that only a very few native-born "African" Americans can be.

Obama's mama is also deceased. A so-called "white' woman from the very white state of Kansas, some of her American antecedents held a significant number of slaves. Thus was conveyed Obama's authentic "American" identity, and importantly for presidential eligibility purposes, his American citizenship. During slavery, and in accordance with white America's color-coded racial hierarchy, Barack Obama would have been subject to the "One Drop Rule": One drop of "black blood" would have rendered him totally "black." He would have been further "classified as a "mulatto" or half-breed" and thus subject to enslavement for life just as were most other "American Americans."

Here is the sometimes conscious, but always subconscious concern of many contemporary Americans who think of themselves as white: Obama may ultimately be too black. Do his black African Kenyan roots ultimately trump his cosmopolitan background, his Harvard pedigree, his soaring oratory, his high intellect, and even his "white" ancestry by concealing an inevitable, surreptitious blackness, a vengeful militance that must surface once he is ensconced in the hallowed halls of white America's heretofore lily "White" House?

For a growing number of Americans who think of themselves as white anointing a "black" man as president, regardless of his African-ness or his American-ness, provides an opportunity to finally, completely and forever purge white America's second-most damning original sin. An Obama presidency allows whites to finally bury a 400-year old, blood-soaked consciousness of guilt. It would justify and legitimize their schizophrenic, hyper-hypocritical history. It is Obama's "non-whiteness" rather than his "non-blackness" that has positioned him to absorb white guilt, to whitewash their consciousness, to absolve them, to forgive them. Obama saves whites without shaming whites. They need not even acknowledge out loud their contemptible past because Barack Obama has saved them from themselves.

Of course, he can never be "white" in any "American" sense. He has denied both his blackness and his whiteness, but not his American-ness. Thus he has become, in the Boertrekker sense, an "honorary white."

Obama's color and lack of color, his mixture of the colors, allow these selfsame whites to engage in willful denial of continuing, institutionalized, even historical, white supremacy. The "end of racism" has arrived, they alternately roar in triumph or sigh in relief. Sadly, they have convinced no one, not even themselves. Their urgent pretensions to a faux "color blindness," as first espoused by the reactionary right wing racist icon Ronald Reagan, has also lost its currency. Their denials and pretensions have been exposed as fraudulent during the daily course of the preceding eight years of the George W. Bush regime.

Barack Obama's blackness and his whiteness must be understood within the context of America's long interaction with "colored" peoples, beginning, of course, not with Africans or African Americans, but with with America's "treatment" of America's only true "natives." The immediacy of that history, the urgency of that past runs right through to the citizens of Iraq today.

THE END