Black Lives Matter

The erasure of black life

By R. T. Andrews

It’s no surprise that the phrase Black Lives Matter remains contentious six years after it sparked a new movement for social justice. Two murderous vigilantes are in jail and the public eye today because they denied a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, his life. Their community was complicit in that denial until the uproar of a larger community made that silence and denial untenable.

At home here in Greater Cleveland we have been studying the denial of black life through another lens: our disappearance from the communal record. 

I came of age as the son of a minister and a choir director. I came to love and appreciate literally hundreds of people through my church, most of them black. These people were a core part of my identity, although I certainly didn’t think of it that way as an adolescent.

Both my parents died when I was in my twenties. I still remember many of the details of their funerals, notwithstanding my numbness at the time. The kindness of church members and others was a great source of comfort as I processed my grief. The deaths of my mother at 51 and of my father at 61 were noted in the daily papers, acknowledgments of their contributions to the community.

"Obituaries have disappeared without last rites."

Not long after my Dad died, I became a deacon. I began to attend a lot more funerals. I learned more about the grieving process. As I listened to eulogies and read obituaries in funeral programs, I was routinely surprised to learn details about the rich lives of people I had grown up around and whom I thought I knew.

I came to understand that we all have stories. I also came to regret my superficial attention to some of my predecessors and their stories, which I learned only belatedly and often incompletely. I was late to recognize that I had grown up amongst pioneers, world-class scholars, Tuskegee Airmen, everyday heroes and sheroes.

The world has changed in many ways since my adolescence and my deacon days. One critical way is the loss of common sources of basic information. In Greater Cleveland we are down to less than half a daily newspaper and a diminished crop of community newspapers. Obituaries have become a casualty of the relentless economics of corporate publishers. When your newsroom has been reduced by 90%, the economies of publishing declare that obituaries are an unaffordable luxury.

So, obituaries have disappeared without last rites. Their only surviving relatives are death notices, paid announcements of a loved one’s passing. The cost of such notices, which are now renamed as obits, will give you sticker shock: they run in The Plain Dealer at a cost of hundreds of dollars.

I spoke earlier this week with a funeral director who told me that because of the cost, only about one in ten families chooses to purchase a death notice.

Our community has been reduced to announcing loss of life on Facebook. This seems inadequate to me. Moreover, it seems wrong.

I have written a few obituaries in my life. I have talked to obit writers. The Plain Dealer once assigned a friend of mine, Dick Peery, to the obit beat in seeming punishment for being an outspoken employee and union activist. Another obit writer, Jim Sheeler, who now teaches at Case Western Reserve University, won a Pulitzer Prize for his excellent work in memorializing the dead.

If we do not treasure the lives of those who preceded us and those who have led the way, how can we say we value black lives, or for that matter, any life?

For perspective on that question we reached out to Rev. Marvin McMickle, pastor emeritus of Antioch Baptist Church and president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School until he retired and returned to Cleveland last year. Via email, he addressed end of life rituals from the experience of one who has preached over a thousand eulogies in churches, funeral parlors, at grave sites, and in mausoleums where bodies had already been cremated:

  “It is part of our African DNA to remember and honor our ancestors. In honoring them at death we remind ourselves of the things that link the past, the present, and the future.”

Exactly! The failure to link our past, present and future, leaves us adrift as a community, without understanding, direction or vision.

Over the past few months, we have written and posted some obituaries here. The responses we  received have been deeply moving. They speak to the sense of community that we still have, even as we grieve independently over the fact that physical distancing means we cannot grieve collectively. The messages have reinforced the fact that there is a cost when we do not provide appropriate remembrance and closure.

In some ways, our sense of community has been reinforced by the COVID-19 crisis that is laying siege to our values. We are feeding each other, checking up on one another, being more patient and solicitous with one another. Millions of us are masking up for one another, in open defiance of leaders who are ramping up their efforts to divide us. And some elected officials, business leaders, and groups like Ohio Minority Leader Emilia Sykes, D-Akron, State Senator Sandra Williams, D-Cleveland, businessman LaRese Purnell and the United Pastors in Mission, have stepped up in their respective lanes to provide information, resources, and prod those in power to respond with a greater sense of urgency.

We know the black community is suffering disproportionately from this virus. While the disease is no respecter of persons, ethnicities, or classes, the results are foreordained to be unequal when unleashed in unequal spaces.

Even as we wrestle with that fact, and work to mitigate negative outcomes, we must continue to honor the lives of our deceased while we protect and support one another.

We will be reaching out to area funeral directors and clergy to see how we might work together to ensure that every life lost, whether to COVID-19 or some other cost, is appropriately honored as a part of the chain that links our past to our future.

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Editor’s Note: As we prepared to post this story, one of our readers sent us this link from the Washington Post describing how the pandemic is tragically unfolding in the northern Italian province of Bergamo. This screenshot illustrates how that community is suffering and how the lives lost to the disease are being recognized in their local news.

RELATED POSTS:

Building Community Across Cuyahoga

Giants in Our Midst

Repetitive "Disgraced ex-judge" characterization is troubling

I am wrestling with the fact that The Plain Dealer has apparently renamed former judge Lance Mason as the “disgraced former judge”.

I offer no defense for Mason, who is properly being held on $5 million bail, charged with the murder of his estranged wife in brutal fashion, four years after he viciously assaulted her in almost incomprehensible anger in front of their children.

Following that first assault, Mason fell from grace: he pleaded guilty to assault, was sentenced to prison for two years, resigned his judgeship, and lost his law license.

It was a sudden and complete fall from grace. In 2014. What he's accused of doing last month stands alone in its depravity, evidence of a frightening but unfortunately not rare state of mind. I suspect it has little if anything to do with any job or honor Mason ever had.

So, what’s my issue? I have an uncomfortable sense that Mason’s status as a black man may have subconsciously factored into editorial coverage decisions.

Headline, caption, and first sentence each refer to Mason as disgraced. 

I do not recall that former county commissioner and Democratic Party chair Jimmy Dimora was so regularly characterized, although he fell from the county’s top electoral spot in the county for his participation in ongoing public corruption schemes. Likewise for former county treasurer Frank Russo, former judge Bridget McCafferty, and a host of other once-respected public servants turned intentional malfeasants.

Is this over-sensitivity or hyper-vigilance on my part? Some may certainly think so. But when the term "disgraced" is pounded relentlessly via headline, photo caption and lead sentence, it seems more than mere click bait, reportorial laziness or editorial indifference.

Words have power. When repetitively combined with images of a black man in an orange jumpsuit in this highly politicized environment, it seems that intentionally or otherwise, a subliminal message is being sent.

I welcome your comments.

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Read The Real Deal Press every week for reporting on the interplay of race, class and power in the civic, business and cultural spaces of Northeast Ohio and beyond.

Choices and Consequences Highlighted by Fatal Chase, Commentary

I really didn't intend to write about The Plain Dealer for a third consecutive day. I wanted to write today about something light and pleasurable, in particular some of the live music I have enjoyed lately and some performances that I look forward to hearing as we head into the holidays.

PD columnist Phillip Morris

But Phillip Morris’ column in today’s PD demands response. 

Morris apparently wants to take a balanced look at police procedures, and he approves the public stance of Cleveland’s mayor and police chief in supporting the use of independent investigators. But in asserting that the driver who led the police on a high-speed chase “is the primary reason he is dead”, Morris lets the police off the hook before a whole host of troubling questions are answered.

Timothy Russell made a decision to disobey police orders to stop. We will never know how or why he came to that choice. What we do know is that when he finally did stop — because he was trapped and had no exit — his car was shot at 137 times by more than a dozen police officers, and both he and his passenger, Malissa Williams, were killed.

Once he could no longer elude the police, was he given a chance to surrender? What precipitated the first shot[s] and all those that followed? Why did the police shooters place so little value on the lives of the car's occupants? Why didn’t the police simply lay siege to the vehicle and give the driver and/or his passenger opportunity to surrender? Why did at least some of the officers disobey clear and unequivocal orders to end their pursuit?

There was a series of decisions made by Russell and by numerous police officers that preceded and led up to the Russell and Williams’ homicides. Unless one argues that the inevitable outcome of fleeing the police is to die in a hail of bullets once you stop, then Russell’s decision to run was but one of many hasty judgments made on that fateful night.

At this juncture, it seems clear that the primary reason Russell is dead, and Williams as well, is that a heavily armed contingent of police officers shot at his car with intent to kill.

• • •

This is kind of a separate issue, but it bears addressing at this time when the future of the Plain Dealer is garnering much local and national attention. Three days ago a forum was held in the inner city to debate whether the campaign by the paper’s editorial staff to persuade the paper’s out-of-town owners to continue daily publication in print. Many of those in attendance questioned the relevance of the paper to the black community.

My view is that the whole community loses if and when the PD goes to a thrice-weekly print publication schedule. I have no idea if that means we will get more or less of Philip Morris. But this is a good time to remind the paper’s powers that be that their urban affairs columnist routinely alienates the vast majority of African Americans in this community with his views. The PD and Morris are entitled to think, write and publish as they wish — the PD buys ink by the barrel — but one cumulative consequence of so many Morris columns is to engender a widespread community feeling that the daily paper is not of, for, by, or about us.

A Personal Look Behind the County's Cancer Rate

I received the following email today from Brenda Malone a friend of long standing and publish it here with her permission.

I was just incensed after looking at the Cancer data rates as graphed by the Plain Dealer today. I am equally amazed at all of the ignorant, uninformed comments that are being made by the readers who are marveling that the more affluent suburbs of Chagrin Falls and Moreland Hills have such “high” cancer rates in comparison to the rest of Cuyahoga County.

What they don’t understand is that the data is actually confirming Environmental/Class/Race bias bestowed on the “rest of” the County.

What they don't understand is that the rates of Cancer in the inner city is actually equally high, if not, logically, much much higher than the rates of suburban people, but the since the inner city, poorer people DO NOT RECEIVE EQUAL LEVELS OF MEDICAL CARE AND CONCERN, their cancer levels are GROSSLY understated.

There should be an immediate investigation to discover WHY the inner city rates are lower than national trends. They celebrate when they should be crying out for equality and justice in the health system in Cuyahoga County, which incidentally, boasts the best hospitals in the country.

The affluent can afford doctor's visits and tests. The struggling inner city resident chooses between food and medicine.

The physicians who care for the affluent leave no test undone to diagnose and prevent any malaise in their patients.

The physicians who are charged with caring for the rest of us, do the barest, passable amount of testing and diagnosing because the insurers have assumed the role of physician to them and are concerned only with the bottom line, not the bottom feeders.

And the Plain Dealer will never tell its majority, uneducated, sheep/readers what the data TRULY reveals.

Will there EVER be equity for us?

This scenario hits especially close to home for me. For two years before my mother's painful death from multiple cancers of unknown origins, we took her to doctors at University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, and several private physicians with symptoms of massive headaches, dizziness and wasting away. They literally gave her no hope, NO MRI TESTS, NOTHING, except to tell her that she was probably suffering from, and I swear to God I am quoting: ". . . .old  person's symptoms."

It was not until 9 months before she died that an Indian doctor in the Cleveland Clinic ER demanded that an MRI be performed because my mother could not hold her head up without vomiting. MRI results showed massive brain tumors, bone cancer and colon cancer. A far cry from "old person's disease."

So, when I see that data, I become incensed. I know the truth behind the data.

Can you write about this data in The Real Deal? I would write a letter to the pathetic editorial board of the Plain Dealer, but come on, you know that would be as useful as a tit on a bull. 

Jesus help us,

Brenda

• • •

Editor’s Notes:

1.    Brenda’s  mother was 63 years old when diagnosed with "old people's dizziness". She died seven months after her 64th birthday.

2.    The Cuyahoga County Board of Health Comprehensive Cancer Report of 2011 can be found here.

BULLETIN: Site of prosecutor campaign debate becomes homicide scene only hours later

BULLETIN:

Site of prosecutor campaign debate becomes homicide scene only hours later

An epochal event in Cleveland political history — an inner-city debate sponsored by community activists that featured four of the six contestants for Cuyahoga County’s top law enforcement job — became a crime scene only a few hours after the event closed.

Preliminary information obtained by The Real Deal indicate that a disgruntled patron had an angry confrontation with owner Mike Nelson over his take-out chicken order at the Kitchen Restaurant, 6816 Superior Ave.

The customer, reported to be a 32-year old Cleveland man, returned about midnight as the restaurant was closing. Nelson grabbed his shotgun as he saw the man approach with a gun in each hand. After or during a further angry exchange, Nelson shot and killed the intruder.

The rear of the storefront restaurant is home to the Lil Africa Party Center, where only a few hours earlier, community activists and candidates for county prosecutor — including former city law directors Subodh Chandra and Robert Triozzi, former suburban prosecutor James McDonnell, and attorney and police officer Stephanie Hall — engaged in a remarkable discussion about law enforcement.

As we have come to expect, The Plain Dealer has early coverage of the crime but did not deign the community-organized debate newsworthy. Only when they read this will they learn the significance of the crime scene.

Our report on the debate itself will appear here this afternoon.

Writing Off Readers

Plain Dealer Circulation Continues Decline

Today’s Plain Dealer carries the legally mandated annual statement of ownership, management and circulation. Total paid and or requested average daily circulation for the period ending September 15, 2011 fell last year below 260,000 to 259,993, or barely half of what it once boasted. This year’s figure represents almost an 11% decline in circulation since March 2009 when its reported circulation was 291,630.

Daily newspaper circulation is of course declining across the country, but as in other arenas, the implications for Greater Cleveland have special impact. Newspapers have traditionally served as a common denominator for the reporting and discussion of community news. The Plain Dealer has had this role almost exclusively since the demise of The Cleveland Press in 1982. Although it often performs the task abysmally, typically by what it fails to report — either fairly or at all — its continued decline as a common springboard for discussion is not healthy for northeast Ohio.

Editorial and publishing decisions made by the Plain Dealer’s parent company, Advance Publications Inc., which also owns the Sun Newspapers suburban area chain, have compounded this misfortune. Advance has effected the virtual journalistic redlining of every municipality in Cuyahoga County where the African Americans comprise forty percent or more.

The only literal exception to this redlining may be Richmond Heights, where, incredibly, this little blog has arguably done more independent, and accurate, reporting of key issues there in the past six months than either the Plain Dealer or the Sun Messenger.

Plain Dealer showing bias in news report of proposed amendment [We know that's not a real attention grabbing headline…]

Today’s Plain Dealer carries an article with the headline that “10% of Ohio's judges will be forced to retire in next 6 years if Issue 1 fails this fall”.

The Plain Dealer’s lack of objectivity in what should be a straightforward news account about a proposed constitutional change on this November’s ballot calls to mind Luke 16:10, the favorite scriptural verse of my good Jehovah Witness friend.

“He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.”

If slanted headlines and thinly veiled arguments are going to be the norm in discussing what is hardly an urgent or major issue, what level of trust can we have that our daily paper is going to present the facts about the much more important and urgent issues  — SB 5 or the federal healthcare reform — that will accompany this constitutional issue on Ohio's ballot come November 8?

• • •

As to the substance of what will be Issue 1 on the statewide ballot this fall, the proposed Constitutional amendment raising the mandatory retirement age of judges to 82 seems a solution in search of a problem.

A judge who performs well up until her constitutionally mandated retirement can continue to serve almost as fully by virtue of judicial appointments.

The proponents of constitutional change cite the late George M. McMonagle as Exhibit A. I knew George McMonagle. He was a fine judge well up into his latter years. What the slanted PD piece fails to admit is that McMonagle was able to continue serving because his colleagues regularly appointed him as a visiting judge. Had the judge shown diminished capacity at any point, those appointments could have stopped instanter, as judges like to say, leaving neither litigants, attorneys, or the public to endure his jurisdiction until his term expired.

Ohio is suffering no shortage of competent lawyers who aspire to be judges. We also have some sitting judges who have never been bench-worthy, notwithstanding their having been elected at thirty-, forty-, fifty- or sixty-something. Age is but one criterion in determining suitability for judicial office.

The current constitutional prohibition that precludes running for re-election past age 65 could be seen as providing a safeguard against judicial ossification. Should we have an octogenarian jurist ruling on business matters who has no appreciation of email correspondence, or social media, or the latest in other technologies? Will he comprehend cyberbullying?

A modest extension that permitted judges to serve until age 73 or 74 might have been worthy of consideration. But the proposed amendment is too drastic a change to meet a need that does not exist. 

And the web and blogs like The Real Deal notwithstanding, the Plain Dealer remains too important a part of our local public conversation to stain its news accounts with partisan hubris.