Cincinnati Racism
From 9/02 - 6/03, Cincinnati was my home, so I know a little about the area. Let me state my biases right away, which are perfectly summed up in a column I wrote last Febuary:
...Cincinnati isn't a conservative area. Cincinnati is a Republican area.
A white Republican area. It's important to make this distinction, because of the rampant racism that I discovered out here. Yes, Cincinnati is a city where you hear about race riots taking place. And no, I do not want to be an apologist for antagonizers on the other side of the race fence, I don't believe in every single black cause that is floated down the pike. But I refuse to be an apologist for members of my race whose egos and general lack of common sense let them morph into racist jackasses who beat the drums against anything that any black civil rights activist says. These are the same people who demand that all immigrants learn the "culture", ie: speak english and become good little christians.
When I first read the columns in the Cincinnati Enquirer and heard the talk radio programs in this city, I was shocked. I continue to be shocked. Save for one good radio station that's run by black people, which I find to be very thoughtful and journalistically sound, the media out here is lily white and full of race baiters. All I am waiting for is one of these media sources to come out one day and say, "Well, the problem with these goddamn niggers..", because you KNOW that's what they are thinking in the back of their minds.
Of course, no matter how lily white Republican it is around here, if a member of the media came out and started a sentence with, "Those goddamn niggers", they would be fired. I just think that that is what they are thinking. That's what some members of the media out here wish they could say.
Then again, police officers can kill black people out here and not be thrown in prison for murder, so I could be incorrect.
Now I'm not going to say that that the Cincinnati cops were racist and beat a black man to death, especially after the tape shows the police trying to subdue a 400+ man taking swings at them, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the mainstream media has not told us the full story.
Unfortunately, that's the only side of the story I know so far.
I talked with a friend about this last night, she told me that the cops should be punished. I told her that they won't be; in fact, if they don't stay on the Cincinnati force, they'll probably just get a job at a suburban police department elsewhere in Greater Cincinnati or Hamilton County, which is exactly what hapoened to Cincinnati cops who shot and killed an unarmed black man a couple of years back. She was shocked, surprised, and disappointed when I delivered this information.
I wasn't surprised with her reaction. Unless you have lived in Cincinnati, you really don't know what the city is like. You really don't know how racist it is until you read Cincinnati Enquirer or listen to talk radio in 700 WLW 'The Big One'. You really don't understand the attitudes that most white residents of Cincinnati will simply assume that the police are innocent in every case involving a black suspect and cops taking the law into their own hands. These residents will not question the cops, and they are not reasonable. They will not listen to reason and they will not take the facts of a case into account before coming to their racist conclusions.
This mindset is madness, but unfortunately that's just the way things go in Cincinnati.
Whether or not this latest victim started the violence of if the cops took out their nightsticks first, we will probably never know. The only thing we can be certain about is that the cops will not lose their jobs, and the residents of the city will continue to cheer for them in the most racist of manners.
