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Race and racism stayed in national spotlight in 2014

Yawu Miller
Yawu Miller is the former senior editor of the Bay State Banner. He has written for the Banner since 1988.... VIEW BIO
Race and racism stayed in national spotlight in 2014
Public defenders, bar advocates, attorneys, interpreters, investigators, social service advocates, law students and allies gathered in front of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last week for a Black Lives Matter protest.

More than 12,000 worshipers took part in the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center’s observance of Eid al Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.

At the dawn of 2015, issues of race and racism are front and center in the national conversation. Demonstrators are taking to the streets and taking over shopping malls with Black Lives Matter protests that echo the Civil Rights Movement, whose urgency has been revived by a black director in the film, Selma.

A December Gallup poll found that 13 percent of Americans say racism and race relations are the most important challenge facing the United States, up from 2 percent a year ago — progress in a nation that has long downplayed its own legacy of racist policies from slavery, to segregation, to redlining and unequal schools.

Black resentment at unequal treatment by the law was still simmering from the 2012 murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin and the Florida criminal justice system’s unwillingness or inability to secure a conviction in his case, when demonstrations boiled over in August following a Ferguson, Missouri cop’s killing of an unarmed 18-year-old.

Images of police wearing riot gear while training assault rifles at protesters and reporters and parading military vehicles through the predominantly black suburban St. Louis community made national and international news, the nation’s broken criminal justice system under the spotlight.

Solidarity rallies were held in cities across the United States and around the world. Those rallies became more frequent and more widespread in December, when a St. Louis County grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown. “Black lives matter” became a mantra, asserting the value of black life in a national climate where many see it devalued. Athletes and entertainers spoke out against police shootings of blacks and perceived acts of racism in various facets of American life.

Earlier in the year, longtime Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned from the NBA, after his secretly recorded pleas to his girlfriend to stop being seen in public with blacks, including former Laker Magic Johnson, were leaked to the press.

Actor and comedian Chris Rock penned a scathing essay, criticizing Hollywood studios for their failure to hire blacks and Mexican Americans. “You’re in L.A, you’ve got to try not to hire Mexicans,” Rock wrote, describing Los Angeles as a “slave state” where people of color are relegated to the lowest-paying jobs.

Black actors are getting top roles in the handful of movies directed by blacks. Selma, a movie about the Selma-to-Montgomery, Alabama march of 1965, is drawing accolades not only for its portrayal of pivotal moments in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, but also for casting black actors in the lead roles.

Boston activists staged a die-in on Congress Street as part of a demonstration following a New York grand jury’s refusal to indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.

The casting is not surprising, given that the film’s director, Ana DuVernay, is African American. But it marks progress in light of Hollywood’s ongoing fixation with casting white men in lead roles. Look no further than Mississippi Burning, a 1988 Hollywood film on the Civil Rights Movement that cast the FBI in a heroic light and Gene Hackman and Willem DaFoe as lead actors.

Hollywood’s racial revisionism went back a few thousand years with the December release of Exodus: Gods and Kings, a film portraying Moses, Ramses II and the nobility of Egypt as European, and relegating black actors to roles as servants and thieves.

Hacked emails from the Sony Corporation shed some light on Hollywood’s unfortunate casting choices. In one email, screenwriter Alan Soorkin casts doubt on the commercial viability of a story about an Asian American Wall Street trader: “The protagonist is Asian American… and there aren’t any Asian movie stars.”

In another email, a producer advised against using Denzel Washington as a leading man in films distributed internationally, arguing that viewers in other countries are racist.

The whitewashed reality coming out of media giants like Sony, where 89 percent of all lead roles go to whites and all 17 of the top-earning executives are white, was cited as a factor in a study released in March in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology concluding that whites are more likely to pre-judge black children as guilty of committing crimes.

“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” one of the study’s authors, Phillip Atiba Goff of UCLA, told the American Psychological Association. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”

Stanford University social scientist Jenifer Eberhardt, who this year received a McArthur genius grant for her study of Americans’ attitudes toward race, called blacks’ association with crime in white America’s imagination, “one of the strongest stereotypes of blacks in American society.”

In addition to being 21-times more likely than whites to be shot by police — not in a study, but in real life, according to an analysis of police data by ProPublica — blacks are also three times more likely than whites to be suspended from pre-school through high school, according to data released in March by the U.S. Department of Education. And for girls, the suspension rate (16 percent) is eight times that for white girls (2 percent).

While social scientists have been studying race for years, there’s nothing like video recordings of police violence to demonstrate the real-life consequences of race bias. Whether it was the police violence against non-violent protests in Ferguson or the heart-breaking cellphone footage of NYPD officers killing Staten Island resident Eric Garner by chokehold, those images have been in abundance in the latter half of 2014.

And with the Black Lives Matter movements across the United States keeping up the pressure with sit-ins, die-ins and marches, it’s likely the national conversation on race will continue into 2015.