Brooklyn Ron

Brooklyn Prep Football Hero (and Tragic Figure) Joe Paterno Dies.

Joe Paterno attended Prep some years before me. He was 85 at his death today, and I'm 62.

But he was a special guy for Prepsters of all generations. The Jesuit high school known as Brooklyn Preparatory closed in 1972, and Medgar Evers College then set up shop in the grand old Crown Heights school complex.

Word is that those running the Prep knew they would have an increasingly difficult time drawing the Irish and Italian students who had been its core.

For all of my four years at Prep, I was the only black kid in the class.

Prep was an old-fashioned, all-boys college preparatory that opened in 1908.

It prided itself on the training of the mind and the body as integral parts of one entity.

I had dozens of medals in track, and the school's former track coach - Bob Giegengack - went on to coach the U.S. Olympic track team and then the team at Yale, which I attended and graduated from in 1970.

At Prep, I studied, pretty intensively - and at the same time - Latin, ancient Greek and French, in addition to the other standard courses.

Thoughts of the Prep have waltzed through my head in recent weeks as I'b read about Paterno.

His story is a classic tragedy, a tale of one who rose to the heights and then plummeted (in a mental/psychological sense anyway) into the abyss.

After a day of false reports about Paterno's demise, the Washington Post is now saying he is in fact dead.

The Post is putting it this way:

"Joe Paterno, the former Penn State football coach who was among the most admired figures in the annals of collegiate sports but whose reputation was shattered in the wake of a child abuse scandal involving one of his longtime assistants, died Sunday morning of complications from lung cancer.. He was 85. The death was announced by his family."

I'm on Long Island Railroad train to Stony Brook now. Will have more to say another time.

Rev. Al Sharpton Makes Buddy-Buddy With Stop-and-Frisk Bloomberg. The People React.

We thank Susie Q FitLife for doing the original video, which we edited down.

On Martin Luther King Day, Bloomberg Booed for Stop-and-Frisk and for Closing Schools.

The Daily News reports that Mayor Michael Bloomberg had a rough time today at BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music), where he received "boos from the crowd and even calls of 'You suck!' from protesters critical of the mayor’s policy of closing schools."

Later, introduced by the Rev. Al Sharpton in Harlem, Bloomberg faced similar disgust with his policies, including his and police chief Ray Kelly's policy of stopping and frisking Black and Latino men around the city.

(Read.) 

SOPA Pits Out-of-Touch Congress Against the Young and the Literate.

SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act.

Mainstream media supports it, as do dumb members of Congress. (Yes, 'dumb' here is synonymous with 'most.')

But Netsters like us (and almost all literate folk under 30) are repulsed by it.

David Carr of The New York Times takes this topic on and concludes with these words:

"I like my movies (and music and television) as much as the next couch potato, probably more.

"And I wouldn't steal content for any reason, in part because I make a living generating a fair amount of it.

"But it's worth remembering that the film industry initially opposed the video cassette recorder and the introduction of DVDs, platforms that became very lucrative businesses for them and remarkable conveniences for the rest of us.

"Given both Congress's and the entertainment industry's historically wobbly grasp of technology, I don't think they should be the ones re-engineering the Internet.

"The rest of us might have to just hold our noses and learn enough about SOPA to school them in why it's a bad idea."

(read here: http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=888507 )

After a Year of Insulting Bed-Stuy Blacks, The New York Times Offers an End-of-Year Gesture: A Middle Finger.

This "Crime Scene" column in The New York Times is surely, if nothing else, persistent.

It is a throwback to yesteryear, when poor but hopeful whites from across the pond -- from Ireland, Italy and the Jewish ghettos of Europe -- came to this city of hope seeking freedom and (even they would concede) lots of money.

The one thing they found in their new land that gave them a feeling of haute privilege was an underclass of blacks, who were forcibly contained within ghettos through policing patterns that made criminals of black males.

These patterns are documented in the book "Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America," written by Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research into Black Culture.

"Condemnation of Blackness" was published last year by Harvard University Press.

We now sadly find that many of those old race-based patterns of the city police department (and, yes, of New York City's newspapers) are alive and functioning.

Take the New York Times. We wrote earlier this year about the urber gentry tendencies of that broadsheet, a broadsheet with a cold and narrow perspective when it comes to people of color in the city it claims to serve.

Earlier this year, The Times column called "Crime Scene" wrote bafflingly hostile articles about Blacks of Bedford Stuyvesant, effectively saying they were not worthy of treatment as crime victims and that they were, in fact, largely the perpetrators of crimes.

Only whites could be defended as victims and cried over, the writer Michael Wilson suggested time and again in articles.

The tone and content were a throwback to a time (the 1800s to the 1960s), when Irish reporters and cops ran the battleground of crime-fighting in New York, and decided who merited empathy and rescue.

This mentality today churns against time and exists still at the self-denominated newspaper of record. I have a friend (a former top editor at a New York newspaper) who told me -- agreeing with my posts about the Crime Scene -- that The Times should relinquish local coverage, that it should just give it up -- to bloggers and others who seem to truly understand and care for the neighborhoods of the city, neighborhoods vast in socio-economic makeup and complexion.

[For one past BrooklyRon reflection on the Crime Scene topic, you can click here. For the first Crime Scene column that ticked me and many other Black New Yorkers off, click here. Note: Other BrooklynRon articles about this issue have appeared in The Amsterdam newspaper and a Central Brooklyn publication called Our Time Press.)

 As for a quick description of Crime Scene, let's say it uses an us-versus-them Walter Winchell style; it appears to follow an ancient calls from within, howling about white victims and black perps; and for some reason, it is at is most repugnant when it comes to Bedford Stuyvesant (a neighborhood that, I confess, I love).

And now, lo, at the end of the year, the Crime Scene pats itself on the back for the articles it has done over these months. It singles out, in obnoxious arriviste fasion, the very stories it did portraying Bed-Stuy as a place where Blacks run wild robbing and killing Whites.

Clearly, the writer Michael Wilson has like-minded editors at his back. I say this because (by admission of the paper's top editor) The Times is like a religion, a very top-down religion, we might add, where such raggy sIandering of an entire people would not be allowed without the tolerance of the paper's college of cardinals and its pope.

If you want to read the Times articles that I refer to, you can Google them. I really don't feel like feeding the paper's advertisers or sullying this page with its links.

Post Script: 

Ok. I was lazy. Friends have asked me to cite some of the New York Times Crime Scene columns. I’ll give you a few here.

(Please note that there are others from 2011 that I’ve written about because I’ve found them to be arrogantly out of touch with life as experienced especially by young black men in the city.)

The first one is the Crime Scene article that finds an interracial group of young men and singles them out as victims of runaway crime committed by blacks in Bed-Stuy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/nyregion/saved-by-the-cops-band-nearly-loses-everything-in-bed-stuy.html

(My answer to this one on the interracial musicians is here: http://www.brooklynron.com/2011/07/nytimes.html)

The below Crime Scene column singles out a European immigrant who made the unfortunate mistake on 9/11 of ending up in Bed-Stuy where he became victim of an assault, it seems, that was fatal. (Crime Scene has a pattern, I should tell you, of writing about white victims and black perps such as when Michael Wilson,  the consistent writer of Crime Scene, as when he got a black murderer to talk about his killing of his white Staten Island girlfriend decades ago, with the purpose of the article being -- so it seemed to me – to make sure the black killer was not released after a coming Parole Board hearing.  Once again, it’s the old 1950s tendency to see only whites as true crime victims and black males natural criminals. I know this because I used to be a reporter 30 years ago for The New York Daily News.

Here’s the immigrant piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/nyregion/brooklyn-murder-on-sept-11-2001-remains-unsolved.html

What led to write most recently was Michael Wilson’s end-of-year wrap-up essentially spitting in the faces of those many black people over the year who have told me they totally agree with everything I’ve written about this.

Here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/nyregion/diverging-paths-of-victims-can-hit-dead-ends.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=crimescene&adxnnlx=1325164021-PSNsW4gOUv9QR9njxhhFJQ

Brooklyn Should Be a Technology Center. Where are Our Elected Officials on This Issue?

[Photo: Borough President Marty Markowitz, left; Councilmember Tish James, right.]

On Dec. 21, Borough President Marty Markowitz and a number of elected officials effectively made this demand:

Bring Game-Changing Center for Urban Science & Progress to Downtown Brooklyn!

The few elected officials who were there were supporting the New York University and Polytechnic Institute proposal for an applied sciences campus at 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn.

The rally occured as Mayor Bloomberg announced that a proposal by Cornell University and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology was selected as the first winner in the Applied Sciences NYC competition. The city, at the same time, made it clear that the competition is not over.

Markowitz said that with the announcement of the Cornell decision, Brooklyn should “now look ahead to the new year and make the case that New York deserves more than one first-rate applied sciences school and that serious consideration be given to New York University’s partnership with Polytech proposed for 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn—home to more college students than Cambridge, Massachusetts—as well as Carnegie Mellon’s plans for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which along with DUMBO, is part of our borough’s emerging new Silicon Valley."

Where are the other elected officials on this? Are they even in New York City at the moment? Is this on their list of things-to-do in the coming year?

Here are comments from some of them, as released by Markowitz's office:

I must say that the one that stands out for me is from Councilmember Tish James, who said:

“With all due respect to Cornell University and the Israel Institute of Technology, it is important that a City-based institution get a fair chance to utilize this space,” said Council Member Letitia James. “We have an opportunity to develop a state-of-the-art science and technology center in Downtown Brooklyn, building on New York University and the Polytechnic Institute’s existing partnership—that proposal deserves serious consideration.”

Meet the Guy Who Called Ray Kelly a Racist Abuser, and Was Not Arrested! (Of Course, He's White.)

You really have to see and spread around the world the video of Matthew Swaye following Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, trying to get Kelly to accept the "Bull Connor Award."

Swaye follows Kelly and Kelly's bodyguards, shouting thanks to the commissioner for letting him (Swaye) live in the city without ever being stopped and frisked by police.

Thank you, thank you, he tells Kelly, for letting white male heterosexuals know they can live in peace in New York City without being harrassed by police.

Kelly says nothing the whole time.

I suspect it was because of this encounter that police three days later (on Friday, Dec. 2) did not arrest any of the protesters in Manhattan demonstrating against the Stop and Frisk policy.

(See the Bull Connor award here.)

We reached out to Swaye, who agreed to answer in writing some questions we put to him (My questions are edited):

BR: Tell us how this happened and about yourself.

Swaye: Several young members of Stop & Frisk asked me to present Commissioner Kelly with his certificate of achievement - a redress of grievances. Although I’m bookish and educated by Quakers and Buddhists, volume is necessary because powerful men walk with armed guards.

BR: What made you sensitive about this issue of Stop and Frisk and its impact on Black and Latino males?

Swaye: I once sat on a narcotics grand jury and in a month not a single white defendant was brought before us. I’m driven too by my time as a teacher in a charter school where the business model is applied so aggressively that test scores soar and the children are data.

Bloomberg and Kelly fraudulently presented the capture of a “terrorist” on 137th street, a man the FBI says was not capable, or even very interested. Bloomberg says he commands the world’s 7th most powerful army. Ray Kelly calls the mayor the “C.E.O”. The Senate passes a bill that says we can be detained without charges, indefinitely, and in undisclosed locations.

Bull Connor was Alabama’s Commissioner of Public Safety whose attack dogs bit children, and his hoses pinned children to walls.

Commissioner Kelly’s officers are violating the constitutional and God-given rights of the citizenry through Stop & Frisks driven by his quotas. He is an efficiency expert, a non-elected official.  He’s mechanically aloof; “I keep you safe from the terrorists, get off my case, get a suit, get a job.” The same old get-a-haircut nonsense they always trot out. If Ray Kelly advocates militarizing every aspect of life, that’s a public debate we’ll win.

As for the Stop & Frisk policy, white New Yorkers are - the NYPD numbers do not lie - above being put up against the wall, above being disgraced and injured in public and detained by armed officials of the State.

The world’s 7th most powerful army is training its troops at Base Brownsville and at Fort East Harlem. Basic training in Jamaica Queens and the LES.

BR: Tell us about your connection to Columbia University, where this episode occurred after Kelly had spoken to a class.

Swaye: I hold an MFA from Columbia University. (One of the biggest land-owners in the city keeps sending me alumni envelopes asking for donations!)

BR: Please describe what you saw in the reaction of Ray Kelly.

Swaye: He seemed calm, a very dignified presence, removed, not rushed on his home turf, steady and handsome, recipient of the 2011 Bull Connor Award, an expert who knows he’ll be our next mayor.

Call to Support 'Freedom Riders' Trying to Stop `Stop-and-Frisk'

This from the group "Stop Mass Incarceration:" Please call help those who have been arrested in prior campaigns to stop New York City's practice of detaining and frisking hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino young men in neighborhoods through the city. Stand with them at the respective courthouses on the dates indicated.

After Receiving the Bull Connor Award, Ray Kelly Backs Off and Orders No Arrests at Today's Protest.

​About a hundred people gathered outside Pace University this afternoon to protest stop-and-frisk, the NYPD policy under which, over the last eight years, more than three million innocent New Yorkers -- overwhelmingly black and Latino -- have been stopped, questioned, and searched on the street.

The protest was originally scheduled to march to One Police Plaza, but a late change of plans instead sent it south, around a virtually empty Zuccotti Park and back up to Central Booking.

A large contingent of police on foot and on scooters escorted the march, but unlike previous anti-Stop-and-Frisk protests in Harlem, Brownsville, and Jamaica, Queens, this one featured no civil disobedience and no arrests.

(read the Village Voice account.)

 

 

Ray Kelly Receives Bull Connor Award as City Waits to See if He Orders Arrests of Protesters Today

The 2011 Bull Connor Award was delivered to NYPD's Ray Kelly at Columbia University.

On Tuesday afternoon, November 29th, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly spoke in the seminar class, Urban Public Policy at Columbia University.

This occasion attracted students, along with protesters from Occupy Wall Street and New Freedom Fighters against the New Jim Crow carrying out non-violent civil disobedience, in the movement to Stop "Stop & Frisk."

This group greeted Ray Kelly inside the School of International Policy and Affairs (SIPA) to present him with the "Bull Connor Achievement Award" for outstanding service to the white community.  

The certificate stated: Congratulations: Raymond Walter Kelly. Thank you for following the inspiring example set by Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor in never relenting in hounding Blacks and Latinos, persecuting Freedom Fighters, and keeping the city safe for upper class White Men.

The award was delivered by a Columbia University student who thanked Kelly for the special privileges his administration affords him as a "heterosexual white male." The student remarked "my wealth feels very secure here as well as my privileges."

Although Ray Kelly was unable to accept at this time he will have another opportunity to accept this award TODAY at the December 2nd Citywide Day of Student Action to Stop "Stop & Frisk". 

Today students from schools and colleges throughout New York City will rally at Pace University's downtown campus at 3 p.m. and march to One Police Plaza in protest of the NYPD's "stop and frisk" policy.

See here video of Kelly being given the Bull Connor award: