Earn:// Part Time Jobs - Part Time Jobs Simplified Online Data entry job seekers and providers brought together on a Unique platform called Earn:// Part Time Jobs. Founded in 2002, Blue Sombrero is the leading provider of websites, registration, and league management tools for youth sports organizations. We are proud to partner. How will I be paid the backdated money? Whether you apply online or by phone, any money for previous tax years will be sent to you as a cheque. Smith Cinema Journal 41.1 (Fall 2001) 127-134. Introduction Nothing left to chance. Sometimes police brutality happens without anyone outside the community knowing about it; it's on the back page of a newspaper, if it makes the newspaper (if the town. Your Phone Number xxx-xxx-xxxx Send Text. GET EVENT SHOWTIMES Choose an Event. Different rules apply . The multiple TVs in the diner were all showing cable news coverage of the Ferguson situation. On the way out, we passed an African American mother talking to her son, a child around my boy's age, seated in a booth near the front door. The boy asked his mother, . Some people say you should just kneel or lie down, don't ask questions, just get down on the ground. I recognized the exhaustion in that . After my son and I left the restaurant, though, I was disturbed by a mental image of this small boy dropping face- down on the ground at the sound of a cop's voice. I thought of Oscar Grant, who was detained by police on a BART platform on New Years Day, 2. Get down on the ground? He'd heard about Ferguson. It was everywhere. I said, . Some police want you to put your hands up. Some don't ask you to do that. I guess the main thing is to just do what the police officer tells you to do. Don't make any sudden moves. He seemed genuinely worried. Sometimes mistakes happen and people who shouldn't get shot do get shot. And there are other times when.. That's what that woman was telling her son about. Why didn't I say this out loud to my son? Something was holding me back. Maybe it was the fact that my son has friends of different races and ethnicities, and I didn't want to burst what I thought was an idyllic bubble, if indeed he lived in one, which he probably doesn't. I wasn't protecting my son from anything. I was protecting my son's image of his father, or what I imagined that image to be. And I was protecting myself from myself. I was lying to myself about myself. I was reminded of something my best friend, a skinny Irish guy from Bay Ridge, told me. He was hanging out with his dad one afternoon. Out of the blue his dad told he should always be grateful for the greatest gift his dad and mom ever gave him. You get more second chances. That's the gift your mother and I gave you. But he was also being honest about white privilege. I believe that there's a difference between knowing something and understanding it. You know how you'll try to communicate something very important to you to another person and sometimes they'll wave you off with an impatient, ? That's knowing: I got the gist, filed it away, I don't need to think about it again. Knowing is comprehension; understanding is deeper because it comes from empathy or identification. All of which is a wind- up to say: having grown up in a mostly black neighborhood near Love Field airport in Dallas, and having been a diligent liberal for most of my adult life, I already knew there was such a thing as white privilege, and was properly horrified by it, but I didn't truly understand what it meant, on a deep level, until one summer night in 2. I was spared arrest or worse thanks to the color of my skin. The incident happened about eight weeks after my wife's death from cardiac arrest caused by a previously undiagnosed flaw in her heart. I was at the lowest point of my life. I was angry, and I was drinking too much. I'd been a tremendously angry person when I was younger, my wife made me not angry anymore, and then when she was gone all at once the anger returned, and alcohol made it active. I channeled my anger away from my kids and my coworkers and my friends. But I needed an outlet for all that rage. So one or two nights a week, instead of drinking at home, I'd go out and get drunk at bars and then wander the streets looking for trouble. I drank a few glasses of red wine while I cooked and at some point realized I was short a couple of ingredients. I turned off the stove, told the kids I'd be back in five minutes, asked my brother, who lived upstairs, to watch them, then went to a deli a couple of blocks away. It was drizzling. I was carrying a cheap umbrella that leaked. Outside the deli leaning against a pay phone was a Hispanic man in his late twenties or early thirties insulting people as they passed by. His words were slightly slurred. When I came out of the deli, this man said something about my shoes and my hat, and because I was looking for a reason to hit somebody, I put my grocery bags down and confronted him. We cursed at each other for a while, puffing up our chests and barking threats, and then he poked me in the chest with his index finger. But I hit him in the face anyway. He stumbled backward, turned around in an attempt to regain his balance, tripped and fell face down on the sidewalk. I jumped on his back and put my forearm around his neck and locked it, to keep him from getting up again. It was a chokehold. I don't know how long I was down there, but it was long enough for the owner of the deli to call the cops. A squad car pulled up sometime later. Two patrolmen got out and pulled me off the guy and tossed me on the sidewalk. Then one of them ran over and put his knee on my back, but did not cuff me. The cop on me asked for my driver's license, looked at it, looked at me, and said, . When I finished he said, . He poked me in the chest. He was talking to me warmly and patiently, as you might explain things to a child. Wisdom was being imparted. I was seeing things in a more clinical way. The violence I had inflicted on this man was disproportionate to the . And then it dawned on me, Mr. Slow- on- the- Uptake, what was really happening: this officer was helping me Get My Story Straight. Understanding, at long last. I also need to mention that while this conversation was taking place, not ten feet away the other guy was face down on the pavement, handcuffed. I got in a fight with a stranger, the cop asked me a few questions, and now it was done and I was going home to my kids. I have no idea what ultimately happened to the other man. Maybe they took him in for questioning. Maybe he spent a night in jail. Maybe they took him to a scrapyard and beat him. Maybe they ran his name through the computer, maybe they didn't. Maybe he had a criminal record, or maybe he was just a guy like me, a law- abiding citizen with issues. We know what would've happened. There's a much slimmer chance that either of those cops would have patiently listened to the sob story of a drunk brown- skinned man about how he'd ended up on the pavement with his forearm around a white man's neck, and an equally slim chance that they'd have talked to him for a few minutes and sent him on his way and put the white man in the squad car. Maybe the other guy was in a bad place, too. Maybe he had kids, too. Maybe he had a sad story, too. That's white privilege. White privilege sent me home to my kids. White privilege is the reason I've never told this story publicly. Extenuating personal circumstances, aside, I did something that I should not have done, and I escaped the consequences of my actions by accepting a benefit that never should have been bestowed. Sometimes police brutality happens without anyone outside the community knowing about it; it's on the back page of a newspaper, if it makes the newspaper (if the town has a newspaper; increasingly few do). Sometimes, as in the case of Ferguson, it snowballs into something bigger. And when that happens, somehow the nation riles itself up in a paroxysm of outrage for a week or maybe a month, deepening already fathomless left wing/right wing divide, until finally everybody just collectively shrugs and shakes their heads and says, . And then it happens again, and the process repeats. The lock- 'em- up- or- run- 'em- over backlash. The macho racist blustering. The transparent bureaucratic face- saving tricks. The commissions and panels and trials. The forgetting. We have to stop the cycle long enough to realize that what we are really shrugging off is racial inequality. The full truth must include the acknowledgement that if you're white, different rules apply. So much of the crosstalk, the shouting, the debate over Ferguson stems, I believe, from an inability to admit this fact of life, which was illustrated so plainly to me that night in front of the deli. I've never been profiled. I've never been stopped and frisked. I've never experienced anything of the sort because of the gift that my parents gave me, and that my son's parents gave him: white skin. I've had encounters with police, mostly during my youth, in which I'd done something wrong and thought I was about to get a ticket or go to jail but somehow didn't, because I managed to take back or apologize for whatever I'd said to a cop in petulance or frustration; these encounters, too, would have likely gone differently, perhaps ended differently, if I hadn't been white. Again, I already knew this stuff. But after that night in front of the deli, I understood it. More details will emerge about the shooting of Michael Brown, and there will be investigations, maybe trials, related to the aftermath. Cops will get suspended, a few may lose their jobs. And throughout, there'll be a steady chorus among law- and- order types that if only Brown had done this, or that, or not done this, or not done that, he'd be alive. It's all denial. My son already knows about the deli incident. It's a part of family lore now. But as far as he was concerned, the takeaway was, . But there's another lesson to draw from the incident, and it's more disturbing, because it illuminates the flaws in a larger society, as well as the fact that complicity in racism is mostly passive: if you're not fighting inequality every day, in ways both large and small, and if you accept the benefits of white privilege without questioning their rightness, you're part of the problem, too. Even if you think you're enlightened. Even if you think you know. I've been thinking about what, exactly, to tell my son when we finish our conversation. I might as well just tell him the truth: that different rules apply, that the different rules are part of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow that are among this country's great sins, and that it's part of his job as a human being to fight against it. Hopefully understanding will arrive faster for for him than it did for his dad.
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