A 150 pound African American high school science teacher in Brooklyn suffers a heart attack and requires open heart surgery because of police brutality after (dare I say it?) driving while black:
When the violent encounter was over, Lester Jacob, 50, suffered a heart attack and was left on his own in the street by cops, who accused him of “acting.”
In July he underwent open-heart surgery. […]
Jacob, an earth science teacher at James Madison High School in Midwood, heard a siren, looked in his rear-view mirror and dutifully pulled over for the radio car behind him.
He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Two officers rushed up to Jacob’s vehicle and pointed their guns at his head, according to a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Cursing at him, they ordered Jacobs out of the car and roughly cuffed him.
“One officer crushed his knee into Mr. Jacob’s back,” the complaint states. “They then repeatedly slammed his head onto the car and then pressed his head against the car for some time.”
Additional officers arrived on the scene with a witness to the earlier accident. The witness told them Jacob was the wrong guy.
Jacob told the cops he was experiencing chest pains and began coughing uncontrollably.
A female cop said, “Nice acting,” according to Jacob, and then drove off. Jacob said he struggled to drive home, stopping to vomit on the side of the road.
His wife rushed him to the hospital, where doctors determined he had suffered a heart attack.
This wasn’t Jena, La. people, the new symbol and standard bearer of white racism in our society. This happened in that bastion of do-gooder liberals and political correctness, New York City. The place Red State America loves to disparage for its “multiculturism” and immorality. Except, many parts of America, even the big urban centers where racism is officially supposed to have vanished aren’t that different from small towns in the Deep South, now are they?
Ask yourself this question? Would Mr. Lester been treated this way and left to potentially die in the street if he was a white school teacher driving an Infiniti? Indeed, would he have been treated this way if this had happened in Jena? Would the law enforcement officers of Jena have ignored his statements that he was having chest pains? I wonder.
The Jena incident captured the media’s attention recently because of the perseverance and coordinated efforts of the black blogosphere to bring it to our (i.e., White America’s) attention, and because of the massive protest march and rally that was held there last month to protest the unequal treatment received by the Jena 6 defendants. Yet, this type of everyday, commonplace racism happens all across the country. It’s happening in your city and mine, and in a thousand other towns and cities, big and small, North, South, East and West, even as I type these words. It’s happening to Blacks, Latinos, Gays, Asians, Native Americans, or anyone else who is perceived as different, as “not like us.”
The march in Jena and the media attention it garnered was a nice first step toward making civil rights a major issue again in our society, but that’s all it was. And we will rightly be seen as fools and hypocrites if we ignore the demons in our own communities while decrying the racist attitudes of small town whites in the South. Because racism, bigotry, prejudice, is a problem for all Americans. Liberty and Justice for All, is a nice slogan, but it doesn’t mean much if we don’t match those words with our actions. And the first place we can start is protesting the violations of anyone’s civil rights, especially those that happen in our own backyards.
And we will rightly be seen as fools and hypocrites if we ignore the demons in our own communities while decrying the racist attitudes of small town whites in the South.
As a Southerner, I couldn’t agree more. For most of my lifetime (I was born in 1970), the major racial events that hit the news have happened outside the South, the horrors of the Katrina response being the major exception.
By no stretch of the imagination do I wish to suggest that there isn’t any racism in the South. There is, and it’s pervasive. I have however lived outside the South on and off for half of the last two decades, and my impression is that it is pervasive everywhere else, too. Easily the most racist city I have ever lived in is Portland, Oregon, which is more thoroughly segregated than many Southern cities in the 1950’s and in which the police aren’t even required to warn a suspect before opening fire on them. You don’t hear much about it because it’s not news if the police shoot a black teenager in Portland the way it’s news if they shoot one in Birmingham. So far as I can tell, the only difference between Portland and any randomly selected Southern city is that fewer white people would say “nigger” out loud. And a whole lot of Portlanders feel that their city isn’t the paragon of institutionalized racism that it in fact is for that reason. And yet driving while black is a serious offense in Multnomah and the surrounding counties.
Portland was a real eye-opener for me, as a Southerner, in a lot of ways, but the major lesson I learned from living there was that defeating open racism isn’t even half the battle. If anything, the absence of open racism makes it a hundred times harder to fight the not-very-subtle but generally invisible underground racism. The other lesson it taught me is how incredibly important it is to ensure that neighborhoods and schools are integrated, by court order if necessary. White Portlanders generally don’t even have to see black people, and out of sight is out of mind. For all the way we have yet to go, and for all of the backsliding that has occurred under Republican misrule, I firmly believe that the South has progressed farther than the rest of the country because, unlike the rest of the country, you can’t ignore the issue of race here. What you can ignore, you don’t have to deal with.
We had lunch this weekend at a small seaside takeout place during our visit to Cape May. Seated outside amongst a large group of individuals who had just pulled in on their motorcycles, I and my family became unwilling witnesses to some of the most blatant racist remarks since Archie Bunker held sway over the airwaves. I won’t repeat them here. Nothing against motorcyclists of course, but these individuals were just plain sickening.
what the police were rushing off to when they left him to suffer his heart attack.
a couple problems here: first, it seems the cops were administering a little street-justice. They were punishing a cooperative-at-the-time potential criminal for his alleged priot actions. NOT THEIR JOB!
Second: How freaking dumb are these cops? If a potential alleged hit-and-run driver–one who by definition is more likely to run than cooperate–is cooperating, shouldn’t that set off some alarm bells? Wouldn’t they wonder, “gee, this guy pulled right over, which doesn’t fit the MO of the driver for whom we’re searching. Let’s at least get a positive ID before we rough him up.”
Freakin’A. You’d think the cops would at least put their own interests in play, even if they don’t care about roughing up some perp.
There is a video on the internet that I saw the other day, of about a dozen Sheriff’s Dept officers man-handling a black who can be heard to say “I can’t breathe – please, don’t kill me”.
These officers, 270 lbs to a man -pin him, crush him, taze him, all the time chanting the mantra “Stop resisting” & within a minute the man is dead.
There is something fundamentally wrong with their training if this the result.
When Rev. Yearwood was attacked by the Capitol Police a few weeks ago, it was clear to me that an officer applied a painful hold to his arm & when the Reverand pulled away from that source of pain, that was the excuse for those thugs to pile on, all the while chanting “Stop resisting” while they broke his leg.
How should we, the people, respond when the Capitol Police exhibit this degree of … what, evil??
the above should have read “a black man” not just “a black” – my apologies for sloppy typing & even sloppier proofreading.
This goes beyond race. There is a failure on the part of a majority of the public to understand the fundamental principle that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and as a result, the police are given carte blanche to abuse people. Add to this a system in which police misdeeds are investigated by the police themselves, and you end up with a bunch of armed thugs beyond the reach of the law.
This isn’t to say that all police are socipathic thugs — though in my experience, most of them are — but if you create an environment in which the worst aspects of human nature are not only tolerated but encouraged, those aspects will grow to fill the space that has been made available. People remain civilized only so long as the pressure of civilization is continuously applied to them.
“driving while black” says it all. Racial profiling just isn’t a thing of the past, afterall.
Dammit, this is BULLSHIT. These guys needs their badges pulled and their asses sued.