Ferguson Fallout: 3 Things That Need To Happen Right Away

In light of the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson on murder charges in the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of unarmed teen Michael Brown, many of us are left shaking are heads, wondering when race relations are going to improve in this country and feeling powerless to bring about any real change.

The Ferguson case has shed new light on just how far apart blacks and whites still are in the way we view racial issues. Twenty-two years after the Rodney King beating at the hands of L.A. police and the ensuing riots, nearly 20 years after the O.J. Simpson verdict, and six years after the election of the nation's first African-American president, blacks and whites remain worlds apart.

This racial divide is represented in the way blacks and whites view the Ferguson case, with many whites believing there is no cause to believe Wilson acted inappropriately in shooting Brown and the vast majority of blacks believing Wilson should be brought up on murder charges.

However, it's important to note that the protests that have been taking place nationwide since Brown's shooting include people of all races.

However you may feel about the Ferguson grand jury's decision, many would agree that the problem of excessive force on the part of police, especially when it comes to young males of color, needs to be thoroughly examined. The Ferguson decision comes on the heels of yet another incident: on Sunday, Nov. 23, Cleveland police fatally shot a 12-year-old African-American boy, Tamir Rice, who was carrying a toy gun on a playground.

To prevent tragedies like this from continuing to happen, here are three things that need to happen right away, in my opinion:

President Obama should convene a special federal commission to examine excessive force by police, especially in minority communities. The commission could include a diverse group of legislators, community activists and legal scholars such as Michelle Alexander, an Ohio State University law professor and author of the best-seller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

A national law should be introduced to require standardized, intensive cultural sensitivity training for law enforcement. Maybe this is something the Congressional Black Caucus could take up.

A cultural diversity curriculum should be introduced in schools nationwide. There's been a lot of talk lately about the pros and cons of the "common core" method of instruction, but there should be a national, standardized diversity curriculum that students of all races should be required to take.

This diversity curriculum should increase in levels of complexity each year, like language learning. Students should be tested in cultural competence at certain stages, such as upon graduating from elementary school, middle school and high school.  

Preparing children to enter a diverse world and get along with different people is the only way the future is going to be better than the past or present.

Adventures In Social Media: What To Do When Tragedy Strikes... Someone Else

The timing of this blog post is totally accidental, although it's very timely. Is that a tautology?

Last week when I was concluding the latest installment of my "Adventures In Social Media" series, I randomly picked a topic from a long list of ideas I've been squirreling away. It was just by chance that I decided this week's topic would be on what to do when you find yourself in the very sticky situation of how to use social media when tragedy strikes - someone else.

 

I mean, is it okay to post good news or some random pop-culture trivia morsel on Facebook when some big, tragic event is in the news? Should you continue with your frivolous post if a friend, family member or acquaintance has posted about some personal tragedy like the death of a loved one?

It's ironic that as I write this blog post, the nation is holding its breath waiting on the decision from the Ferguson grand jury on whether police officer Darren Wilson will be indicted for murder in the Aug. 9 shooting of unarmed African-American teen Michael Brown.

Here's my dilemma: as an African-American male, I would be remiss to not blog about the Ferguson grand jury's decision. But it hasn't come down yet. And if the grand jury announced their decision on Monday, my latest "Adventures In Social Media" post might look like I'm avoiding the controversial Ferguson issue and merrily continuing to blog about silly stuff, oblivious to important things going on in the world.

So, after some soul searching, I decided to proceed with caution and do exactly what I'm doing: mention that I plan to blog about the Ferguson grand jury's decision when it's finally announced.

Now that I've addressed that matter, on to the rest of the topic of this blog: What to do when you're logging onto a social media site like Facebook to announce some good news or post some trivial item, only to see that someone has posted bad news: the death of a loved one, a job loss, a family member or spouse has been diagnosed with a serious illness, etc.

Say you've just seen Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I and are eager to share your review with Facebook friends and get their reactions as well. But when you log on, you see that a friend has posted that his grandmother has just been admitted to the hospital with some kind of serious condition. Is it insensitive to go ahead and post about your moviegoing experience?

I don't think so. I'd say the proper etiquette would be to comment on your friend's post, letting him know you're thinking about his grandmother, and go ahead and post about Mockingjay. In general, I think people understand that life is not going to come a grinding halt for everyone around them just because they're experiencing a personal hardship.

This experience actually happened to me recently. I had planned to blog about a road trip with my grandmother to a cousin's wedding in, of all places, St. Louis, not far from the ongoing protests in Ferguson. I posted about the pending trip on Facebook and let everyone know to look for my blog posts.

Unfortunately, the trip was unexpectedly cancelled when I had to rush my grandmother to the hospital with a severe headache. My Nanaugh Pearl is doing just fine now, thankfully, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone who continued posting about anything and everything on Facebook after I announced my grandmother's hospitalization.

As much as I love my Nanaugh Pearl, I realize that the world doesn't revolve around me, my family and whatever issues I choose to disclose on Facebook. And so should everyone else who uses social media.

In the next installment of my "Adventures In Social Media" series, which I plan to publish on Monday, Dec. 1, I'll explore the dangers of fishing for compliments - and comments - on Facebook.

 

The NaNoWriMo 'Write-In' That Never Really Was

This past Wednesday, Nov. 19, I ventured to a library branch near my home on the east side of Columbus, Ohio. The occasion? An evening-long "write-in" for National Novel Writing Month, which challenges participants to write every day in November until they have a complete - or mostly complete - manuscript.

I'm not currently writing a novel, but I am co-authoring a nonfiction book with Chicago businessman Raymond Lambert about his legendary Chicago comedy club, All Jokes Aside.

I figured being among other writers in an environment filled with books would spur my creativity. Unfortunately, when I got to the library, there were two only people in the room that the library had set aside for  the write-in. And rather than aspiring novelists, both of them looked like students toiling away on homework.

Despite the absence of my fellow writers, I fired up my laptop and got to work. But after a half-an-hour, any sense of motivation I had when I walked in had long since disappeared.

It wasn't so much the fact that I was the only writer in the room that got me, it was   fatigue from not getting much sleep the night before. 

I guess I was a fool to believe I could be productive in such an exhausted state. But at least I got a little bit done. To quote the classic Doobie Brothers song "What a Fool Believes": "What seems to be is always better than nothin'..."

Author Zadie Smith: On Race, Writing And Parenting

Zadie Smith, the award-winning, Afro-British author who is known for bestsellers like White Teeth, spoke about her literary influences, being a mom and race relations during a Nov. 13 appearance at The Ohio State University’s Mershon Auditorium.

White Teeth portrays contemporary multicultural London, told through the story of three ethnically diverse families. The book has been translated into more than 20 languages and was adapted into a movie for British television in 2002.

Smith’s second novel, The Autograph Man (2002) won the 2003 Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction. Smith’s third novel, On Beauty (2005), won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.

Smith was born in North London in 1975 to an English father and a Jamaican mother. She graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree and is now a tenured professor of creative writing at New York University.

Smith has two children with her husband, Irish poet Nick Laird.

You can read complete coverage of Smith's Ohio State visit in the current edition of the Call and Post, Ohio's oldest and largest African-American newspaper.

Here are some "outtakes" of Smith's insights that we didn't have space for in the newspaper article:  

On why it's important as a writer to read the classics but develop your own writing style: "If you're going to write, you need to do something new. ... I thought, 'I'm going to write [stories that were influenced by the classics], but I'm going to insert my people in them."
 
On her diverse literary influences: "It's great to read Jane Eyre, but what's she got to do with me? .... I tried to find [literary] models [to emulate], particularly Kafka, whose writing seemed more like reality in a strange way."

On trying to pass on her feminism to her 4-year-old daughter: "[My daughter tells her friends], 'I don't have any Barbies, my mother doesn't believe in Barbies.' ... I'm not like my mother. I wear makeup and heels. That's what parenting is, realizing you're a hypocrite every minute of every day."

On her fascination with Jewish culture when she was growing up - even though she has no Jewish heritage: "I was preoccupied with other people's cultures ... [My brother and I] had a preoccupation to be of a different faith or a different culture."

On racial segregation in America: "I thought of my own neighborhood in England as more easily mixed."

On how the concept of social class in America compares to England: "One advantage of American life, it's not this kind of complicated history [of royalty and nobility]."

On how to bridge the gap between rich and poor: "You can put your kids in the same schools. ... Not private schools, schools where kids have a mixed experience."

On the history of slavery in the United States: "At the moment, I'm reading a lot of slave narratives... The thing I feel is that it is a miracle that you're all sitting here, given this total horror. ... It's created so much complexity between black women and white women, between black men and white men. ... It's as if you abused a child, you would expect that abuse to carry on for six, seven generations. It will take a very, very long time [to heal]."

On whether race relations will ever improve: "I'm both optimistic and despairing. I can't put it any other way."

 

Finally: A Movie That Challenges Stereotypes About Homophobia In TheBlack Community

One of the best-kept secrets in my hometown, Columbus, Ohio, is the Columbus International Film and Video Festival, which is currently going on and continues through Nov. 25.

One of the best aspects of the festival is that it promotes cultural diversity, featuring films from around the world made by and starring people of many different races. The festival also includes films that address LGBT issues, both in the United States and other countries.

The festival even included an evening of screenings this past Sunday featuring short films dealing exclusively with LGBT issues.

My favorite short from that night was Swadhisthana, an uproarious comedy which portrays African-American parents coping with the discovery that their teen son is gay. This film shatters the stereotype that blacks tend to be more conservative than whites when it comes to homosexuality because of religious and cultural factors. 

Rather than reject their son for his sexual orientation, lecture him about the error of his ways or try to "pray the gay away," the parents in Swadhisthana go overboard to show their son that they accept him unconditionally. At one point, the parents even dress up in ridiculous costumes and put on a skit in the living room to educate their son and daughter about tolerance.

With the mother wearing oven mittens on her head to represent a flower and the father wearing a black and yellow hazmat suit to look like a bee, the parents' skit conveys the message to their reluctant children that it's okay for flowers to be with other flowers and bees with other bees and they can still have "a life of honey."

Alessandra Pinkston and Stevie Johnson, the actors playing the parents, have excellent on-screen chemistry and very believably portray the parents' bumbling yet well-meaning antics. The son is played by Tyler Parks, whose understated performance challenges another stereotype: that gay men are effeminate and flamboyant. Parks' character is anything but.

Diana Reasonover, the young actress playing the daughter, is also a standout, delivering each line with the biting sarcasm and disdain for her parents appropriate for a girl her age.

Written and directed by Joel Mahr, the 20-minute Swadhisthana plays like a sitcom episode, but confronts serious subject matter head-on. The title, by the way, comes from a Hindu term referring to the second chakra and is represented in the form of a black lotus flower with syllables written on each petal in the color of lightning. 

I'm not exactly sure what the time means in relation to the plot, but the movie is definitely worth checking out if it ever comes to DVD, YouTube or some other distribution format.

A Little Movie With A Big Message

"I think that's the most healing thing to do, write something personal from your own experiences."

This quote is from acclaimed African-American filmmaker George Tillman Jr. speaking about why he wrote and directed the 1997 landmark movie Soul Food, which starred Vanessa Williams, Nia Long and Vivica A. Fox and went on to become a hit Showtime series. Making Soul Food helped Tillman move on after his first film, 1994's Scenes from the Soul, was shelved indefinitely by a studio that went out of business.

The fact that Scenes from the Soul never found an audience was especially painful to Tillman, since he financed the indie film on a shoestring budget of $150,000 that he painstakingly collected over the course of two years from everyday people who donated anywhere from $500 to $5,000. This was before the days of crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter and Gofundme.

"These investors that we found were not investors who were doctors or lawyers," Tillman said in an interview featured in the excellent book Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk About the Magic of Cinema. "They were investors like plumbers and guys who did regular jobs."

Having been vindicated by the success of Soul Food, Tillman has gone on to direct such critically acclaimed films as 2000's Men of Honor starring Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr., 2009's Notorious (the life story of rapper Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace) and the 2010 action movie Faster starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

I recently came across Tillman's most recent movie, a delightful little film called The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete (2013). It's a simple, well-made, coming-of-age story about two boys of different races whose unlikely friendship endures despite enormous obstacles.

Click here to watch the trailer for Mister & Pete

Mister & Pete tells the story of a street-smart African-American preteen named Mister (Skylan Brooks) and an innocent, baby-faced Korean boy named Pete (Ethan Dizon ). Pete's mom is abusive and he comes to stay with Mister and his mom, but when the police raid the apartment and arrest Mister's mom for drug possession,  Mister and Pete are left to fend for themselves over the course of an entire summer.                  

The movie has powerful performances by American Idol alums Jennifer Hudson, who is almost unrecognizeable as Gloria, Pete's meth-addicted single mother, and Jordin Sparks, playing against her squeaky-clean image as Alice, whose path out of the 'hood is by having an affair with a wealthy married man who showers her with gifts. Jeffrey Wright (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) and Anthony Mackie (The Hurt Locker) have memorable cameos as a homeless man and neighborhood drug dealer, respectively.

Both Brooks and Dizon are skillful beyond their years, making their characters and the predicaments they find themselves in seem very believable. Brooks especially stands out in portraying Mister, who is unfortunately wise beyond his years because he's been exposed to way too many adult things.

Mister wants to be an actor and is convinced that he's going to be cast on a TV show that's shooting in Beverly Hills and he'll be able to rescue his little family from their hellish New York housing project.
 
One of the most touching scenes is when Mister is trying to make breakfast, but there's not enough cereal or milk. He looks momentarily depressed, but soon perks up when he notices the Eddie Murphy/Dan Akroyd movie Trading Places on TV. He recites every line by heart. This scene shows pop culture is the great equalizer, providing normalcy even when you're starving.

Another poignant scene is when Mister sees his mother shooting up and angrily tells her, "You're disgusting. I wish you would just die already."

Gloria looks hurt, and after a long pause, replies, "At least we got that in common."       

Mister & Pete is a bit depressing at times, but it has an inspirational ending and an important message: no one can make it on their own. It's a movie every filmmaker - especially filmmakers of color - should see.
          

Adventures In Social Media: Monitoring The Metrics Can Drive You Mad

Since I resumed regularly blogging on this site in August after more than a year of inactivity, this blog has logged more than 2,000 visits, for a total of more than 5,200 visits since I started the blog in 2011.

When I say "visits," I should clarify that I haven't yet figured out how to distinguish between "unique visits" and "page views." For example, one person could log onto the site and click through a dozen different posts. When the person first logs onto the blog, that's a "visit," and each time they click onto a different post, that's a "page view."

Figuring out how to use social media metrics such as these is one of the hardest parts of blogging. As with any creative endeavor, the act of creating is the fun part, while marketing what you've created is the hard, scary part.

I use Blogger.com to create this site and when I log into my account, the first thing I see is a number and a graph indicating the number of visits since I last logged on. I always close one eye and try to overlook these metrics, because I find it distracting to have numbers swimming in my head when I'm about to create a new post.

I've worked at newspapers for many years, and I can't imagine how any reporter would be able to do his or her job effectively if, when they walked in the newsroom, they were immediately bombarded with how many copies the paper sold the previous day. If the number was low, it would be depressing and make you wonder if all your hard work was in vain. If the number was high, it might give you a false sense of security and cause you to become a bit complacent.

I also recently discovered that when I log into my Blogger account, each post has the number of page views it has received listed beside it. I also try to ignore this number, which is sometimes embarrassingly low.

If I paid attention to the page views, it may discourage me from continuing to blog. Was it really worth the hour of my time and effort that I poured into writing that movie review if only five people clicked on it?

Another "metric" that I have decided to overlook, for the time being, is whether readers leave comments to my posts or not. So far, the only post that has generated a significant number of comments is the one I wrote on July 17, 2013, after a jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the death of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin.

Obviously, the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case is an emotional topic that a lot of people have strong feelings about. I felt compelled to express my views about the case, but in general, I tend to steer clear of controversial subject matter. I tend to think it's far too easy to blog about hot topics just to drive traffic to your site and get people to leave comments.  

It takes at least 100 readers to generate just one comment for a given blog post, according to Problogger.net, an excellent site that offers tips for bloggers. Most people are passive readers, myself included, and usually don't comment on blog posts or news articles they read. 

So, obviously, if only five people read one of my blog posts, the odds of one of them leaving a comment is pretty low. The solution is, of course, to write posts that attract more readers and/or better market my existing posts. Easier said than done... 

I know savvy users of social media are supposed to constantly track how many hits their posts get and tailor their content to attract the highest response. But I've found that monitoring the metrics can drive you mad.

So I've adopted the mindset that, like the age-old tale of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race. I'll continue blogging as a way to steadily build a readership over time.

I'm hoping those who enjoy this blog will also be interested in my various long-form projects, including my novel, The Chloe Chronicles (currently available on Amazon - shameless plug!), the documentary Lady Wrestler I made about little-known African-American female wrestlers (currently putting on the finishing touches), and the book I'm co-authoring with Chicago businessman Raymond Lambert about his legendary comedy club, All Jokes Aside.

This blog post is part of a series on "Adventures in Social Media." In the next installment, which I plan to publish on Monday, Nov. 24, I'll explore the very sticky situation of using social media after some tragic event has occurred - to someone else.