Jarrett-Carter.com

Maybe not loves, I doubt if he even likes him just from being a FOX News pundit. But he respected the moment of Barack Obama’s election enough to repudiate this asinine remarks from Ralph “Mr. Irrelevant” Nader during this interview.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from Gadi Dechter, a reporter/editor for the Baltimore Sun newspaper. He didn’t know I was no longer a public relations executive for Morgan State University, which was the basis for our relationship over the past three years.

And I didn’t know that his phone call was for yet another article in his repeated attempts to discredit Morgan State University.

See, the thing you have to know about Gadi Dechter is that his journalistic integrity is wrapped up in how much he can break down the integrity of a subject. He made a nice name for himself by getting former Sun columnist Michael Olesker fired in 2006; the kind of work that can move an aspiring young reporter up the ladder.

But it would only be a step ladder, as Dechter moved on to the flailing, shrinking rag that is the Baltimore Sun.

And onto a new subject. Morgan State University.

It started harmlessly enough. A piece on if historically black colleges are still relevant. He must feel really good about that one, too, as it made his blog’s hot list with several other pieces that subtly scream, “Black Colleges? For What?”

But while that may be beside the point, it’s not beside the personal, which is what Gadi’s body of work against Morgan is to me. Personal not only in the sense that I attended the school, but personal in the sense that Dechter, and the Baltimore Sun as a news outlet, can make it their mission to embarrass and discredit an institution that by its mission, does the state a solid on education for minorities.

To be fair, I have to credit Dechter with being a fine journalist. He’s a supreme jerk, and cares not whom he offends if they are in the way of his stories. That’s what it takes to chase bylines for a living, and damned if he doesn’t track them like a stalker.

To be balanced, I can say that Gadi Dechter doesn’t know the meaning of the word. In his tenure with the Sun, he has had an allergic reaction to any and all positive news emanating from the corner of Cold Spring Lane and Hillen Road. Any text following a Dechter byline on Morgan State is likely to contain reporting on scandal, deceit and not-so-subtle hints at mismanagement. Are these things going on at Morgan State? Absolutely.

But is Morgan State the only institution guilty of such reprehensible actions? Of course not.

And yet, Dechter and the Sun would have you to believe otherwise. He told me as much in a conversation some months ago, when I pulled him to the side to ask him about his obvious slant against the university.

Amidst lines like “these stories come to me,” “taxpayers deserve to know what’s happening,” and other latent right-wing bailout talking points, I found myself getting angry. Angry that print journalism deserves to die, because it has created editorial boards that feed on inflammatory and unbalanced reporting. I became angry that he held racist tensions against my school, and despite the proof in black and white, would defend to his grave that he did not.

But what made me the angriest in our brief exchange, is that I wanted to yank him by the pet-hair covered collar of his blue blazer, and growl through gritted teeth, “this is the place that built me to be more than a man who would like nothing more than to break your face right now.”

And then I realized that it was not Gadi Dechter after all. It was the system that makes Gadi Dechter necessary, even in a post-race world. Because if you don’t have a Gadi Dechter, you lose focus on how far America needs to go, and how little time contemporary journalism has left.  If you don’t have a Gadi Dechter, you can be lulled into a false sense of hope about institutions who have been against you far longer than they have been for you.

If you don’t have a Gadi Dechter, you will never see it coming.

In a strange way, I admire Gadi Dechter. I would imagine that there is a certain amount of liberation in perpetuating chaos, because it minimizes the discord in your own life. Maybe one day, his chaos will get him a Pulitzer Prize, and I’ll give him a call.

Interestingly enough, he’ll never know that my purpose will be to boast about how Morgan State University launched yet another superstar into the stratosphere.

Now you know how to get under Kanye West’s skin. He can’t stand those pictures in airports.

You would think that Kanye, with his semester or so of college education, would know that paparazzi want nothing more than to catch him or members of his entourage storming towards them. Mouths wide open, nostrils flaring, chains swinging wildly about and hurling profanities in their direction. You think he would know they set up just for that one money shot.

After all, there’s a reason why he hates them more than the Nazis.

Maybe Brother West can take a lesson from the Senator of his home state and realize that everyone falls into a circle of existence when it comes to stardom. The trade off for making millions of dollars and living a life people can’t imagine must be balanced against people that make no money and want to see those millions come their way.

Annoyingly or otherwise.

I’ll admit, I’ve been out of the loop for a couple of days regarding black popular culture. Between starting my second year of graduate school and getting a new job, things have been kind of hectic on the homefront.

Not to mention the fact that I’ve got like 39 other blogs that need tending to.

So maybe I’ve just been away from the T.V. too long, and Rev. Al Sharpton has been spitting game that I haven’t heard about. Between the Republicans trying to call Sarah Palin a pig on the low, and Kwame Kilpatrick surpassing Kwame Brown as the most despised man named Kwame in America, I figured Rev. Sharpton would be front and center on these hot button issues.

If you’ve seen my boy, tell him I’m looking for him. I’ve come to rely on his blustery brand of rhetoric, dipped in thick and rising sermonic tones, and served hot over pissed off conservative analysis. He’s got a lot to talk about these days, and while I may be out of the loop, I could sure use a dose of that Civil Rights stuff.

Abdur-Rahim Jackson is a dancer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe, which is currently touring through Israel on a six-nation tour to celebrate it’s 50th anniversary.

Upon his arrival in Israel, his Muslim-sounding name provoked Israeli security forces to ask him to dance to prove his identity.

Jackson said he was pulled aside from other members of the troupe when they arrived at Israel’s international airport on Sunday night. He said he was taken to a holding room, where he was asked about the origins of his name. When he explained he was part of the dance group, he was asked to perform.

“I stood up. I asked what type of dance?” he explained. “He said, “Just do anything.’ I just moved around.”

Minutes later, he said a female officer put him through a similar interrogation and asked him to dance again.

I could see if he only had the name Abdur Rahim, but that Jackson? Even Jewish folks know that Jackson means entertainment, and they should’ve backed up off of him. Michael Jackson, Curtis Jackson, Freddie Jackson, I mean, how many examples do you really need?

Amy Goodman, a world-renowned journalist and host of syndicated radio broadcast Democracy Now! was arrested today outside of the Republican National Convention while attempting to secure the release of two of the show’s producers from detainment by St. Paul police. Goodman and the producers, Nicole Salazar and Sharif Abdel Kouddous were arrested on suspiscion of rioting.

You be the judge.

To be clear, the same kind of thing was happening en masse in Denver as well, so we ought to be careful to not assign blame for this horrible exhibition of police authority on a political party or candidate. What it is, however, is another demonstration of paramilitary impropriety, and intimidation tactics against the independent media.

Visit the Democracy Now! website to get involved with the release of the Democracy Now! crew, and you can always check in at Jarrett-Carter.com for the latest developments on this case. Bloggers, journalists, and everybody seeking the truth, this is the kind of B.S. we can longer afford to let ride.

There is a movement growing in Chicago for children attending underfunded urban public schools to skip the first day of class in protest. It wouldn’t just be hooky, but a widespread political and social statement against systematic discrimination in funding and resourcing:

Comparing Marshall’s 46 percent graduation rate to New Trier’s 99.8 percent rate, Rev. Marshall Hatch of New Mt. Pilgrim Church denounced disparities in which students on the North Shore have thousands of dollars more spent on them than Chicago schoolchildren.

“Money does matter,” Hatch said. “The funding disparity, of course, brings not only unequal investment but obviously unequal outcomes.”

Here in Maryland, you know we know the same thing. I’m torn on the issue of skipping school, because the kids won’t truly grasp what their actions are other than getting out of class. But something has to be done to draw attention to the achivement gap in American education, and it might just take something as extreme as this.

The hip-hop mayor has taken a DMX-styled path to infamy, after a trip to Canada violated terms of his bond and forced him to pay the full $75,000 bail or go to jail.

Reporters are mad about it, which means that the national press will be getting a strong whiff of this any minute now and will be ready to pounce.

Just another instance of why black folks can ill afford to be buffoons. If not for themselves, but for our entire race.

In what may become one of the most stereotypically-charged moments of 2008, a man pleaded guilty to a murder in exchange for Popeye’s chicken and other fast foods and desserts.

Durham agreed to plead guilty to murder — but only if he could get a break from jail food. The judge agreed and granted Durham a feast of KFC chicken, Popeye’s chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, carrot cake and ice cream.

So a man kills another man over an ice cream truck, gets a life sentence and goes ballistic with his “last meal?” I know a lot of people love that chicken from Popeyes, but gosh.

A white Ohio police officer that shot an killed an unarmed black woman while she held her one-year-old son during a drug raid has been acquitted of negligent homicide and negligent assault charges. Protests have been launched, Jesse Jackson and local black leaders in Lima, OH have spoken out against police and their “low value on black lives.”

Should we mourn the death of the mother and the rough years ahead for those children? Of course. Should we be upset that a better protocol was not present during a drug raid? Maybe, maybe not. I’m not a police officer, so I won’t venture into how that officer felt in the heat of a tense moments with gunshots being fired around him.

But should the target of this entire fiasco get much more blame than he is getting? Absolutely.

At the very bottom of the linked news story, you see that the man who brought the police to his family’s front door was arrested and pleaded guilty to drug trafficking. I wonder how much time Jesse and dem’ spent talking about this brother and his choice to sell drugs and raise a family in those conditions.

Don’t get me twisted, as a PG County native, I have no endearing trust of police officials. But I don’t believe in taking this case and lumping it in with all the other cases of police brutality and aggression against black folks all across the country. We deserve equitable treatment from police officials. We deserve respectable due process, and we deserve answers when these things don’t happen.

But if we don’t start holding ourselves accountable at some level for being knuckleheads that invite this kind of drama into our homes, what are we genuinely addressing? Police treatment is an unwanted symptom of law breaking, plain and simple.

If you were walking down the street and got scooped up by police, that’s different. If you are pulled over while going under the speed limit with your seatbelt securely fastened, that’s different. We shouldn’t make the mistake of putting under the same umbrella of Evil Police Officers vs. Harmless Black Folks.

We’ve got a long way to go in fixing the relationship between black citizens and police officials, but without appropriate analysis on a case by case basis, only the development of that relationship will have an accurate arrest record.