Mixed Race Studies

Bill de Blasio, Chirlane McCray are now empty nesters as daughter goes to college

The New York Daily News
2015-09-17

Jennifer Fermino, City Hall Bureau Chief

Chiara de Blasio, seen here with her mom, First Lady Chirlane McCray, left for college on Thursday. David Wexler/New York Daily News

The city’s First Family is officially empty Gracie Mansion-ers.

Chiara de Blasio left for college Thursday, marking the first time in 21 years that Mayor de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, won’t have one of their kids living under their roof.

Chiara’s younger brother, Dante, left for his freshman year at Yale in late August.

“In a few hours, I will be experiencing the empty nest for the very first time,” a bittersweet de Blasio told the Daily News.

He said it’s the first time they haven’t had a child at the house since Dec. 6. 1994 — Chiara’s birthday…

Read the entire article here.

James Blake doesn’t want NYPD cop who tackled him to ‘ever have a badge and gun again’

The New York Daily News
2015-09-12

Wayne Coffey, Special Reporter

Rich Schapiro, Staff Writer

Retired tennis star James Blake said Saturday the NYPD cop who brutally wrestled him to the ground should be served his walking papers.

“I want him to know what he did was wrong, and that in my opinion he doesn’t deserve to ever have a badge and a gun again, because he doesn’t know how to handle that responsibility effectively,” Blake, 35, told the Daily News. “He doesn’t deserve to have the same title as officers who are doing good work and are really helping keep the rest of the city safe.”

Blake called on the NYPD to can Officer James Frascatore a day after the department released disturbing video showing the WWE-style takedown outside a Midtown hotel Wednesday…

…Blake initially said he believed race was a factor in the rough arrest. But asked Saturday whether he thought white tennis stars such as Andy Roddick or Mardy Fish would have been treated the same way, he demurred.

“I don’t want to say that at all because I think that muddies the issue at hand,” said Blake, who was born to a black father and a white mother. “In this incident it was the excessive force that’s really the issue, because it was a nonviolent crime.”…

Read the entire article here.

James Blake and the Myth of an Unarrestable Black Man

The Daily Beast
2015-09-10

Tomás Ríos

Bill Bratton said race ‘had nothing at all to do’ with tennis star James Blake’s wrongful collaring and arrest. The numbers tell a different story.

What does a non-white person have to do for the police to leave them alone? The ready answer is that you have to be more famous than former tennis star James Blake.

Blake was leaving his Midtown Manhattan hotel to make corporate appearances at the U.S. Open when five white, plainclothes New York City police officers tackled and handcuffed him on Wednesday.

The real answer, of course, is that not being white means there is no escape from the consequences of not being white.

Among those who buy into the mythic moral righteousness of our police forces, there is a belief that people of color need only be perfect little humans to cancel out the realities of a racist society. Go to college, smile, pull up your pants, don’t smile at white women, and the prescription for transcending race goes on and on.

It seems not even James Blake—who attended Harvard, overcame scoliosis and a broken neck to become a world-class tennis player, and is now a cancer research philanthropist—can be that perfect. The numbers on incarceration make that much clear…

Read the entire article here.

The twisted irony of the NYPD wrongly assaulting and detaining black tennis star James Blake

The Daily Kos
2015-09-10

Shawn King

Yeah. This really happened.

Retired black tennis star James Blake, in an NYPD double-fault, was slammed to a Manhattan sidewalk and handcuffed by a white cop in a brutal case of mistaken identity.

The 35-year-old Blake, once ranked No. 4 in the world, suffered a cut to his left elbow and bruises to his left leg as five plainclothes cops eventually held him for 15 minutes Wednesday outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

“It was definitely scary and definitely crazy,” Blake told the Daily News. “In my mind there’s probably a race factor involved, but no matter what there’s no reason for anybody to do that to anybody.”

Of course, Blake is right. This absolutely should not have happened, but that much is a obvious to all of us. There are questions we should be asking, though…

Read the entire article here.

Police Tactics in Harsh Glare After Arrest of James Blake

The New York Times
2015-09-10

Benjamin Mueller, Al Baker and Liz Robbins

A New York Police Department officer was stripped of his gun and badge as Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton issued swift apologies on Thursday for the rough arrest of James Blake, the retired tennis star, after he was misidentified as a suspect in a fraudulent credit card ring.

Criticism swirled over the possibility that Mr. Blake, who is biracial, had been racially profiled in the episode on Wednesday. But it was Mr. Bratton’s acknowledgment that Mr. Blake may have been treated too aggressively when an officer threw him to the ground that put a renewed focus on the everyday arrest tactics long criticized by the city’s minority residents.

The incongruity of a Harvard-educated professional athlete being manhandled by six white plainclothes officers on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan quickly became an embarrassment for the Police Department and a headache for Mr. de Blasio, exposing the kind of unprovoked aggression that he and elected leaders across the country have sought to stamp out.

The officer’s decision to throw an unarmed, compliant man to the ground added to the sense that black people are often roughed up by the police out of view, with few resources to bring attention to their grievances. Mr. Bratton said the officers had failed to report the arrest, as they were required to do.

In a sign of the shifting discourse on race and policing, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton moved with unusual speed to contact Mr. Blake to apologize. But the gestures also raised questions about whether they would have moved so swiftly if the encounter had not involved a well-known figure…

…“I do think most cops are doing a great job keeping us safe, but when you police with reckless abandon, you need to be held accountable,” Mr. Blake, whose mother is white and whose father was black, said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”…

…Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers shove Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk.

Mr. Sanders said he saw the officers shove Mr. Blake face-first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Hyatt. With his head wrenched to the side and his hands cuffed behind him, Mr. Blake tried to talk….

Read the entire article here.

New Bill Would Let New Yorkers Identify As Multiracial On Official City Forms

The Huffington Post
2015-05-12

Christopher Mathias (@letsgomathias), New York Reporter

New York City has the largest population in the United States of people who identify as multiracial. Even its mayor, Bill de Blasio, and its first lady, Chirlane McCray, have two multiracial children.

And yet, on the various official city documents New Yorkers often have to fill out, there are only five racial categories: “white, not of Hispanic origin”; “black, not of Hispanic origin”; “Hispanic”; “Asian or Pacific Islander”; and “American Indian or Alaskan Native.”

In testimony submitted at a City Council hearing Monday, a New Yorker named Daniel Reckart explained why this can be a problem.

“You see, my mother is half Jamaican and half British-Caucasian,” he said. “My father is half Mexican, half German.”

“My siblings and I — as siblings do — look both alike and, at the same time, a spectrum of our multiple races,” he continued. “Some of us look more Latino and some of us look more white and some look more black. But the fact is that we have all always identified proudly as multiracial, and to ask us to choose just one box is like asking us to choose allegiance with just one of our grandparents.”

Reckart is one of more than 325,000 New Yorkers who identify as multiracial. His testimony Monday was submitted in support of a piece of legislation that would require “city agencies to amend their official forms and databases to accommodate multiracial identification where racial identification is required.”

Those forms include applications for after-school programs, public housing and taxi licenses, as well as discrimination complaint forms and registration with the Department of Small Business Services — not to mention all the paperwork filled out by the 300,000 or so city employees.

The new multiracial designation, say the bill’s supporters, would help the city collect more accurate demographic data. Such information is important for crafting legislation and policy, and for keeping track of how various policies affect people of different races. In some cases, that data can also help determine how much state or federal funding the city will receive.

Council member Margaret Chin, lead sponsor of the bill, told The Huffington Post that it’s “important for government to recognize multicultural heritage.”

“We wanted to allow individuals to celebrate their heritage and be able to identify themselves as they want to,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Wickham: Silence of NYC’s good cops widens divide

USA Today
2014-12-30

DeWayne Wickham, Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Dean
School of Journalism
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

When Mayor Bill de Blasio stepped to the podium Saturday to eulogize Rafael Ramos, one of two New York City cops killed by a black gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, five days before Christmas, hundreds of police outside the church staged a silent protest that sullied the solemn occasion.

The officers turned their backs to the large televisions set up for the overflow crowd to see Ramos’ funeral. Their pivot away from the screens was meant as a protest against the mayor, whom Patrick Lynch, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, accused of having blood on his hands for not being more supportive of the city’s police officers.

That charge and the lemming-like act of back-turning were cheap shots that came as the city grieved the death of Ramos and Wenjian Liu, who were shot to death as they sat in their patrol car. The officers’ deaths came in the wake of a series of street demonstrations following a grand jury’s decision not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a white New York City police officer who was videotaped using a chokehold to subdue Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, whose death was labeled a homicide. Pantaleo and several other cops were attempting to arrest Garner for illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.

In his first public comments after the grand jury’s decision, de Blasio said he could relate to the pain Garner’s father was feeling and admitted that he and his wife, who is black, have warned their son about how “to take special care in any encounters he has with the police officers, who are there to protect him.”

That’s a warning many black parents routinely give their boys — and one that de Blasio, understandably, would offer his mixed-race son. They could also have reminded him that New York has long been a petri dish for police abuse of blacks. Remember Abner Louima. Amadou Diallo. Patrick Dorismond. Sean Bell…

Read the entire article here.

Is NYPD’s War on Mayor Bill de Blasio Partly War on His Black Family?

AlterNet
2014-12-30

Terrell Jermaine Starr, Senior Editor

The cops’ fight with the city’s progressive mayor smacks of white supremacy.

In September 1992, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association organized thousands of New York City cops to storm City Hall to protest then-mayor David Dinkins’ proposal for an independent civilian agency to investigate police misconduct. The officers trampled on cars, jumped barricades and took over Brooklyn Bridge. Among their grievances was Dinkins’ refusal to give them semiautomatic weapons.

One of their slogans was “The Mayor’s on Crack.” The former mayor has also said many rank and file officers called him “nigger.” He blamed Rudy Giuliani for being in the middle of the rowdy cops and for nearly causing them to riot.

“Would the cops have acted in this manner toward a white mayor?” he asked in his 2013 memoir, A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic. “No way in hell. If they’d done it to Ed Koch, he would have had them all locked up.”

Ironically, the NYPD has come close to similarly disrespecting our current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is white. While police have not quite reached the same level of violent rage toward de Blasio, their fight against him is no less vitriolic. Former mayor Rudy Giuliani, NYPD union president Patrick Lynch and many of the white power elite in the New York Police Department see in de Blasio what they saw in Dinkins: a non-white politician who dares to challenge its good ol’ boy system of policing with impunity.

While de Blasio is not black, his family is. His wife, Chirlane McCray, their daughter, Chiara, and son, Dante, reflect the same population the NYPD has brutalized for decades. De Blasio campaigned on police reform and featured Dante in a campaign ad where the teen declared that his dad would end stop-and-frisk, if elected. Once he became mayor, de Blasio ended the city’s defense of the policing tactic. The rank and file of the NYPD took that personally. He was NYPD Public Enemy #1 from that point on…

Read the entire article here.

Museum Offers Interactive Oral History of Mixed Race Brooklynites

NY1 News
New York, New York
2014-12-29

Jeanine Ramirez, Brooklyn Reporter

A new interactive website offers an interracial, multi-ethnic view of Brookynites. NY1’s Jeanine Ramirez filed the following report.

Deborah Schwartz clicks on the latest resource at the Brooklyn Historical Society, an oral history project about self-identity, showcasing those who are of mixed race and heritage.

“We’re not just telling a sweetness and light story. This is not just that America is kind of the perfect melting pot. But rather that this is something that’s had very powerful impact on people both positive and negative, said Schwartz.

The project, “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations,” offers a view into the lives of Brooklynites who have to balance different cultural worlds. The more than 100 oral histories collected can be listened to online. There’s Park Slope resident Alexander David who started the Half Asian Club at his school…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.

Sleeping with the enemy

Sick Chickens: A blog for enthusiasts of American history and politics
2014-12-23

James Owen Heath, PhD Candidate
University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

I have never been struck by the intelligence of Jon Stewart’s remarks in the past but I have to agree with him that it is indeed possible to be outraged by the execution of two NYPD officers and also deeply concerned by police treatment of black Americans, simply because the two are not mutually exclusive. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio may have committed political suicide by making remarks which suggest sympathy or even solidarity with black Americans as a result of insensitive policing, but this does not suggest that he has betrayed his city’s police force. The very idea that his remarks incited a deeply disturbed man to go out and execute two police officers before taking his own life is just absurd.

This debate is simply illustrative of the dogmatic attitudes which exist at each end of the political spectrum, and how these continue to dominate US politics without any sensible middle ground being in view. But the real reason for the appalling manner in which de Blasio has been scapegoated is quite evident in the photo above…

Read the entire article here.