Time to Name the Names and State the Facts—Racism Is Alive and Virulent

Came across a Facebook posting by a former exec director of a Madison, Wisconsin non-profit praising the cop who hugged a young black man at a protest against racism on the west coast.

Couldn't resist noting that a simple act of kindness and decency by a white cop treated as extraordinary indicates much about our political culture and it isn't good.

Certainly hugging young black and brown men is eminently preferable to shooting them to death or throwing them in prison but that this 'let's move forward' reaction to the murder in Ferguson gaining currency in some white liberal circles is appalling.

As Natasha Hakimi Zapata writes in The Guardian and Truthdig: Why That Moving Photo of a Cop Hugging a Boy at a Ferguson Protest Is Bullshit.

Writes Zapata:

Like a supermarket Christmas ad, this photograph taken at a Ferguson protest in Portland, Oregon, feasts on a moment of truce and peace amid the anger. What nonsense. It is one moment among many, and the choice to look at it and celebrate it is clearly a choice to be lulled by cotton candy. It has got more than 400,000 Facebook shares. Each one of those shares is a choice of what to see and what not to see. In the context of the completely unresolved and immensely troubling situation, not just in Ferguson but across the United States, where Ferguson has opened wounds that go back centuries, this picture is a blatant lie.

This is a lie.

But there is truth in the 100s of protests across the United States.

In arguably the most brilliant piece on a political news show, the Lawrence O'Donnell Show, I have ever seen. The St. Louis district attorney's office has two prosecutors who should be investigated for misconduct for their affront to justice and law during the grand jury proceedings.

In Ron Kuby's piece in in the New York Daily News.

From the U.S DoJ and White House.

And in the hearts and minds of 10s of millions of Americans, not among them the Republican Party that relies on racism as a foundation.

Racism is an American as apple pie and its staying power over the bodies and lives of minority Americans remains an outrage.