The Republic of T.

It’s funny, what memories come back to you, just from reading a news story. I finally read, this morning about Cullen Jones and his Olympic win.

Bronx-born swimmer Cullen Jones didn’t just help power the U.S. relay swim team to Olympic gold - he just may have shattered the stereotype that blacks can’t swim.

Although Jones isn’t the first African-American swimmer to make the Olympic squad (he’s the third), or the first to win a gold medal (he’s the second), he figured in one of the most exciting races in sports history.

And that thriller will be replayed on Olympic highlight reels for generations to come. “I hope this exposure from the race today, a kid can see this and say, ‘Wow, a black swimmer - and he’s got a gold medal,’ ” Jones, 24, said. “The stigma that black people don’t swim ended today.”

…Jones was 5 years old and living in Irvington, N.J., when his parents took him to a Pennsylvania water park to cool off. His mother, Debra, didn’t want him to go down a slide in an inner tube because he couldn’t swim.

Jones should have listened to his mother. When the inner tube flipped over, he panicked instead of letting go and then passed out.

It took CPR to bring him back to life. The next week, his mother sent him for swimming lessons at a YMCA in nearby Newark and then the John F. Kennedy Aquatic Center, which is also in Newark. Jones took to the water immediately, but wasn’t a standout at first, his coaches said. “At first he was an average swimmer and he progressed,” said Elliott Bradley. “The more he progressed, the better he got at it. I never thought he would go this far. I’m very proud of him.”

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One of the things that surprised me after starting the LGBT Hate Crimes Project is the amount of email I get. Much of it is from people who knew, or were related to the victim. Sometimes I’ve heard from family members who didn’t know the outcome of their loved one’s cases. Sometimes it’s from people who want to let me know about cases that they think should be on the site.

In the latter case, I usually take them and research them, unless they’ve been covered in depth elsewhere. If, for example, they’re already covered in depth on Wikipedia I may decide not to duplicate efforts. I started this project on Wikipedia, by the way, but stopped posting entries on Wikipedia when it became clear that their notability guidelines would cause many of the cases I was writing about to get deleted, because one editor or another didn’t think they were noteworthy enough. In one case, one person asked me “What makes this different from any other crime story?”

I thought I’d scream, but it got worse.

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I don’t remember how old I was the first time it happened. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old. We were in Philadelphia — my mother, my younger sister, and I — visiting my great grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. For my sister and me, it was our first time traveling that far from home, and our first time in a city like Philadelphia. Everything amazed us, from the size of the buildings, downtown to the narrow little houses on my great great-grandfather’s street, with no yards to speak of and no space between them; so different from our suburban home back in Augusta, GA.

Even going shopping was different. Instead of driving to the store, my mom pushed her grandfather’s folding cart a few blocks to a store a few blocks away, and we followed her. The store was a wonder unto itself; on the outside a rowhouse like the one my great grandfather lived in, but on the inside there were long, narrow shelves holding food, toys, and other items we’d never seen before.

Our mother had told us time and time again not to touch anything whenever we went shopping, but we couldn’t help it this time. We picked up toys and candy and other items, exclaiming to each other to “come look at this.” Until it happened.

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I guess I have to admit that I have been drawn in by the Washington Post’s series on the 2001 disappearance/death of Chandra Levy. I’ve been reading each installment as they are published. It’s likeI can’t help it. Before Natalie Holloway, before Elizabeth Smart, before Kristin Smart, before Laci Peterson, before Laurie Hacking, before the Runaway Bride, there was — at least here in D.C. (I don’t know how the story played elsewhere)— there was Chandra Levy.

It’s long since turned into a syndrome. It has several names, and one rather of them popular. I have my own name from it, taken from a scene in Scary Movie.

White Woman in Trouble!

A pretty high school student, knowing the killer is close to breaking through her bedroom door, calls 911 on her PC. Her eyes wide and her heart pounding, she types in her message: “White woman in trouble!” In an instant, her suburban driveway is crowded with cruisers, sirens shrieking and lights flashing, and her wouldabeen slayer is beating a hasty retreat.

And Eugene Robinson has the best working definition.

Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st century and identify the era’s major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq. Economic dislocation. Bioengineering. Information technology. Nuclear proliferation. Globalization. The rise of superpower China.

And, of course, Damsels in Distress.

But of course the damsels have much in common besides being female. You probably have some idea of where I’m headed here.

A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as “petite,” and it also helps if she’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t really mind being called “petite,” a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality. She must be attractive — also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: Lynch).

Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment. Since the Holloway story broke we’ve had more news reports from Aruba this past week, I’d wager, than in the preceding 10 years.

The damsel— the “White Woman in Trouble” — thanks to the Post, is back.

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Not sure if this is going to be a series or not, but sometimes I wonder why — when someone says something with so much obviously wrong with it — no one seems to ask the obvious question. For example, Bill O’Reilly:

On Saturday, former Vice President Al Gore made a surprise appearance at the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, TX. In his speech, Gore praised the gathering of progressives, saying that they are part of an effort to “reclaim the integrity of American democracy.”

While the attendees of Netroots Nation received Gore with enthusiasm, his appearance has caused Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly to declare that Gore has “gone off the deep end.”

On his radio show today, O’Reilly claimed that Gore was now associating himself with the most “hateful group in the country.” “And I’m including the Nazis and the Klan in here,” said O’Reilly.” He then claimed that attending Netroots Nation was “the same as if he stepped into the Klan gathering.”

I haven’t seen anyone asking the obvious question: How exactly does Bill O’Reilly know what a Klan gathering looks like, let alone what it’s like to step into one?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Anyone who thinks the injustices of the past remain in the past is living in a “post-racial” fool’s paradise. There are black folks in this country who are just now getting justice for decades of discrimination. Like the black neighborhood in Ohio that was denied public water for decades, for no other reason than racial discrimination.

Residents of a mostly black neighborhood in rural Ohio were awarded nearly $11 million Thursday by a federal jury that found local authorities denied them public water service for decades out of racial discrimination.

Each of the 67 plaintiffs was awarded $15,000 to $300,000, depending on how long they had lived in the Coal Run neighborhood, about 5 miles east of Zanesville in Muskingum County in east-central Ohio.

The money covers both monetary losses and the residents’ pain and suffering between 1956, when water lines were first laid in the area, and 2003, when Coal Run got public water.

The lawsuit was filed in 2003 after the Ohio Civil Rights Commission concluded the residents were victims of discrimination. The city, county and East Muskingum Water Authority all denied it and noted that many residents in the lightly populated county don’t have public water.

Coal Run residents either paid to have wells dug, hauled water for cisterns or collected rain water so they could drink, cook and bathe.

From 1956 to 2003? You know, then, that means that several people, over long periods of time — well after the age of Jim Crow had officially passed — knew this was going on, and were either alright with it or didn’t see fit to put a stop to it.

From 1956 to 2003.

[Pic via -ReRod- @ Flickr.]

Well, that didn’t take long. Just this morning I asked:

I’m just wondering if it’s too far-fetched to suggest that we’re probably not too far from the day when someone — a gay couple who gets married, or the person who officiates — does get arrested and locked up. What happens then?

I guess I have my answer.

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I really should learn to let stuff like this go, but…

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I did a double-take when I read this on CNN. It’s been a while since I read Fire in a Canebreak, an account of the last mass lynching in the United States, which took place in my home state in 1946. Apparently, there’s new evidence in the case.

State and federal investigators said Tuesday that they spent the past two days gathering evidence in the last documented mass lynching in the United States: a grisly slaying of four people that has remained unsolved for more than six decades.

In a written statement, the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said they collected several items on a property in rural Walton County, Georgia, that were taken in for further investigation.

On July 25, 1946, two black sharecropper couples were shot hundreds of times and the unborn baby of one of the women cut out with a knife at the Moore’s Ford Bridge. One of the men had been accused of stabbing a white man 11 days earlier and was bailed out of jail by a former Ku Klux Klan member and known bootlegger who drove him, his wife, her brother and his wife to the bridge.

The FBI statement said investigators were following up on information recently received in the case, one of several the agency has revived in an effort to close decades-old cases from the civil rights era and before.

“The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn’t ignore with respect to this case,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead said.

Of course, there are people who’d rather they did ignore it.

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With my morning pretty much sewn up with work and meetings (and since I’m no longer taking my laptop to meetings) at work, it’s hard to say whether I’ll get around to writing or posting much at all today. I’ve got something almost written, and a couple of things I’ve been wanting to write for weeks now. But they will have to come after everything else.

In the meantime, I might as well do here what I spend most of my time doing anyway: promoting the writing of others who have time to write, whereas I don’t. Granted, it’s not so much writing, on my part, as just copying-and-pasting, but it fills this space. And if you came here looking for something to read, the least I can do is help you find it.

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Via Ex-Gay Watch. This doesn’t surprise me at all.

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) sent out a mailing today titled “NAACP Rocks,” referencing a 2006 letter of appreciation from the organization to PFOX. According to the attached copy, PFOX held an exhibit at the NAACP annual convention that year. It is not yet known if they participated in 2007 or if they will be there this year, but the email suggests they plan on participating in 2009.

The PFOX exhibit displayed useful information on unwanted same-sex attractions and tolerance for the ex-gay community. We distributed many brochures, flyers, stickers, and buttons. The attendees were enthusiastic about our booth and our ex-gay volunteers staffing the booth were well received. Many people remarked at how glad they were to see us and took extra handouts to distribute at their church back home. Gay groups like the Human Rights Campaign have exhibited at the NAACP for many years, but PFOX was the first and only ex-gay booth there.

We would like to exhibit there next year. Please make a love offering at http://www.pfox.org/donate.htm or send a gift to the address below so we can pay the exhibit booth fee.

Thanks and see you at the NAACP convention next year!

Here are examples of the brochures PFOX might have circulated.

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I read about this foolishness over at Jack and Jill Politics, but I just break off a piece for myself.

Well.

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Image details: Obama Holds Final Primary Night Event In St. Paul served by picapp.com

I can only think of one moment in my memory that compares to this. It was when I stood in front of my television and watched the Berlin wall come down, live on CNN. I’m not yet sure that another wall has come down now. In fact, I’m more certain that significant portions of it still stand, and some may have been reinforced.

But there’s an opening now. It was there before, but it’s much, much wider now. Through it, we can just see the other side, and even have more hope of reaching it.

I only wish my father had lived to see this moment. After all he saw and experienced in his lifetime, I’m sure it would have done his heart some good. If I actually get to go to the convention and cover it, now that I’m credentialed along with the rest of the bloggers at Pam’s House Blend, I’m sure I’ll be thinking about him. And maybe again at inauguration. Maybe I will have the chance to take Parker to downtown D.C., to the inauguration, to witness the moment. He may not grasp the significance then, but he will when he remembers. And he will remember. I know I will.

But tonight, when I get home, I’ll take down from the shelf a project Parker and I have been working on for a while now. It started around the time that my son finally started to notice race, and perhaps he even perceived more about the differences made between people based on race than he had words to express. Wanting to pass on to him an idea of his heritage, and what people who look like him have and can accomplish, I decided we would start a photo album.

First, we put in family pictures, and I explained to him who each person in each picture was. Then we moved on to African Americans who are famous for their accomplishments. I tried to pick people whose accomplishments matched his interests — a black race car driver, because at the time Parker was into race cars; a black astronaut, because for a minute he wanted to be an astronaut; a black composer whose songs are among those I sing to him at night, when it’s my turn to put him to bed. We paste the pictures into the book, and then a short paragraph about that person, which I would read to him.

It’s our little history book, I guess. And tonight we’ll put Barak Obama’s picture in that book. For both of us, it will be an example of what he can accomplish. I will look my son in the eye and say to him what my parents said to me: “You can do anything, and be anything you want if you work hard at it. You could even be the president.” The difference is that when my parents said it to me, it was a dream — perhaps a belief in what the future and their country could be.

Tonight, when I say those words to my son, it will still be a dream just this side of reality; but a dream within reach, where it has never really been before.

And, after a long period of neutrality during he primaries, I guess it’s finally time to finally declare myself. From this point on I’m an Obama supporter.