Rachel Bush and Jordan Poyer attend Shaq's Fun House Big Game Weekend at Talking Stick Resort on Feb. 10, 2023 in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Views: 25
Rachel Bush, wife of Bills’ Jordan Poyer, says charity golf event was nixed ‘due to the arrogance of others’.
Rachel Bush, the wife of Buffalo Bills safety Jordan Poyer, spoke out Sunday after the NFL star’s celebrity charity golf tournament was canceled when the beneficiary pulled out due to the location of the event.
The event was supposed to be held next week at Trump National Doral. However, Poyer’s representatives, Avalon Sports, said “we were sadly surprised by negative comments by some individuals to make this a political battle and continue to divide our community.”
Jordan Poyer, #21 of the Buffalo Bills, warms up prior to a game against the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC Divisional Playoff game at Highmark Stadium on Jan. 22, 2023 in Orchard Park, New York. (Bryan M. Bennett/Getty Images)
Poyer said the ECMC Foundation “decided they didn’t want to take part in my tournament in which they took part in last year because of where it’s at, at Trump National Doral in South Florida.”
Bush explained further on her Twitter page.
“Let’s be very clear. Jordan did not cancel his event,” she wrote. “We will always stand proudly with our beliefs and hold true to them. Publicly. And we can easily spend our own money to fund the tournament. It wasn’t about that. Tournament will be at same spot next year. Trump’s course.
Rachel Bush and Jordan Poyer attend Shaq’s Fun House Big Game Weekend at Talking Stick Resort on Feb. 10, 2023 in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
“The event was cancelled due to the arrogance of others, and then backing out last minute leaving us in a difficult spot to make everything happen properly. Especially while we are on a family vacation.. We want it to be great and next year it will be outstanding! Thank you!
“And huge thank you to Trump & all the amazing sponsors (literally so many!!) that offered to sponsor the tournament. We appreciate you all! As well as the fans and supporters! Right left whatever hopefully next year we can all come together for a good cause! Location aside..love!”
Rachel Bush and Jordan Poyer attend Tao X Maxim Big Game Party: An unKommon events Production at Southwest Jet Center on Feb. 11, 2023 in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for unKommon events)
Poyer has been with the Bills since 2017. He signed a two-year extension with Buffalo in the offseason. He was an All-Pro first team selection in 2021 and a Pro Bowler in 2022. Last season, he had 63 tackles and four interceptions.
Looking. Dershowitz to Newsmax: 65 Project Un-American for Targeting Trump Lawyers.
Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Thursday that the 65 Project, a primarily left-leaning group of lawyers that is trying to intimidate lawyers representing former President Donald Trump in post-2020 election litigation or challenging those election results, “the most un-American group of people I have encountered in all my years of practicing law.”
David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America and a senior adviser to the group, told Axios in March 2022 the group’s method of intimidation is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms.”
Such a move could violate the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a right to “assistance of counsel for his defense.” There is a presumption the amendment provides defendants the right to retain counsel of their choice, although it is not absolute. Such intimidation by the 65 Project could thwart that right, according to Dershowitz.
“These are lawyers who ought to be themselves subject to bar association discipline,” Dershowitz, who was part of Trump’s legal team for his first impeachment, told “Carl Higbie FRONTLINE.”
Dershowitz said after he pledged to defend any lawyer pro bono who was targeted by the 65 Project for defending Trump or anyone in his circle, the group filed a complaint with the bar association in Massachusetts, where he lives. He said so far, nothing has come of it.
“I’ve now spoken to three lawyers who were asked to defend either Donald Trump or his co-defendants, and they all are reluctant to do it largely because of Project 65,” Dershowitz said. “This is McCarthyism, the worst form of McCarthyism. It violates the code of professional responsibility. And in numerous ways, it puts the profession in a bad light.”
Dershowitz said every American is at risk when there is a group of “distinguished lawyers, members of the bar, elite members of the bar, members of law firms, people who have held high office in bar associations, essentially threatening lawyers, threatening their careers, threatening their friendships if they continue to represent people this group doesn’t like.”
“It is the worst abuse of the legal profession I’ve seen in 60 years of practicing law, and this is one lawyer who’s fighting back,” he said.
Said Eddie Vale, communications director for the 65 Project, in an email to Newsmax: “Talk is cheap and if Mr. Dershowitz actually believes it he is more than welcome to file a complaint that we would be glad to litigate in addition to ours against him.”
Looking. No Rachel you’re not a news organization but an outlet for racism, bigotry, and hate speech. The other day Maddow spoke about MSNBC being a news organization and it would taint their view of the news. Funny that she would say that.
MSNBC thought it news to cover the court proceedings and charges against the former President, but found it not news worthy to cover his response. Remember that this is the same loon who carried on for what? Years about a Russian connection between Trump and the Russians. I rest my case.
Rachel Maddow alerts viewers that newly indicted ex-president Donald Trump has begun an address to supporters at his Bedminster golf club but in light of the expectation that the speech will be a “litany of lies and false accusations” MSNBC will not broadcast the speech live but will instead report any news that comes from it.
Maddow: We do not intend to carry Trump’s remarks live. As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things. pic.twitter.com/MVv5LgDzc9
Denver City Council Member Who Wanted to Tax White Owned Businesses and Give Money to Minority Owned Businesses Loses Reelection in Blowout.
So how did the campaign of this loon turn out? She wanted a special tax on white owned businesses. Then give that money to Minority owned businesses. Well she got beat. And beaten badly.
In her concession speech she claimed her crazy statements helped other candidates. That makes no sense. Somehow her craziness was a help to others but a hinderance to her?
SMH
Denver City Council member Candi CdeBaca, who is running for re-election, says white owned businesses should be taxed extra and redistributed to black owned businesses. pic.twitter.com/s9JhSdAmtj
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., appeared on ABC's "The View" on Monday and called out the hosts for their "offensive, disgusting" comments about race. (Screenshot/ABC)
Views: 21
What race baiters like Sunny Hostin and white progressives don’t get about people like Senator Scott, Justice Thomas, and other successful Conservative Blacks about being exceptional.
Folks who think like Hostin think that just because a person of color is successful that has to be a rare occasion. They think that the only way for a person of color to make it is to just rely on the government for help.
Sadly white progressive Democrats think that besides the government, a person of color has to also rely on a white person to get ahead. They have thought like that since the days of slavery.
White folks don’t have a free pass to being exceptional. Everyone who puts their own best effort can make it. It’s just harder when you expect someone else to do the lifting.
Couldn’t happen to a better city. Undocumented dumped on Sacramento. Does my heart good to see that California is getting some of the undocumented. But like the other leftist cess pools, they’re complaining. And they only less than 40.
Now the top notch AG and Governor are looking into kidnapping charges. Somehow I don’t think anyone was forced on those planes. Let’s see if sections like East Sacramento open their doors.
Don’t be surprised if the Feds show up and take them someplace that’s not rat infested or has a dirty river flowing through it. Remember that THESE ARE CRIMINALS AND NEED TO BE TREATED AS CRIMINALS..
LOS ANGELES, CA - AUGUST 10: (Editors Note: Image has been processed using digital filters) Rapper Ice Cube attends the premiere of "Straight Outta Compton" at Microsoft Theater on August 10, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
Views: 22
Ice Cube Slams Black Americans’ Support for Democrats: ‘Nothing Has Changed’. But you have to admit that white progressives got more fried chicken joint choices. Plus don’t forget ll the different sweet fruit drinks whites also made available for the brothers and sisters. But Ice Cube isn’t buying it.
“I don’t know what’s going on in the African American community when it comes to that. I mean, black people have supported Democrats overwhelmingly for fifty, sixty years. And nothing has changed. So, something’s gotta change,” Ice Cube replied.
What the Durham Report is and isn’t. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the Durham Report is out and both some on the right are upset and most on the left continue with the misinformation. Let’s review.
The report isn’t a document that asked for or atgave indictments. Durham after all is a Democrat who’s been in the government service for years. It also isn’t a whitewash of the FBI, DOJ, and the Obama administration.
And it isn’t a tell all or vindication of all the rumors from the left and right in reference of what it would contain. It is a document of facts. Let me explain. It’s a report of just the facts.
It’s a vindication of not just Trump, but of Conservative talk show hosts and Conservative media. They for three years were saying that there was no Russian interference on Trumps side.
It’s a report that fills in the blanks for all. It confirms that Clinton was the one who used Russian misinformation to smear Trump. It proves that Obama, Biden, and heads of the FBI and DOJ knew that Clinton was using Russian documents that were false.
What’s really daming is that it confirms that Obama had Trump wired. It proves that the FBI and DOJ went to the FISA courts without real intel.
Finally on what is. The Durham Report released on Monday highlighted that in 2016, McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director, and Strzok, the agency’s deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, beghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSXhRKA_XIEan the probe — dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane” — without “ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.
In other words, Obama and his party -- via the DNC -- really did have Trump's "wires tapped."
The media also owe Trump a massive apology. I'm sure they'll get right on that, and the story. https://t.co/bdwBAxIUxo
Edward Smith outside his home. (Jason Franson for The Free Press)
Views: 9
Edward Smith didn’t think the color of his skin had anything to do with it.
He was 23, and he’d come to Canada in 2005 from West Africa. Now, he lived with his mother and sister in Edmonton, the capital of the western province of Alberta.
Racism—overt or systemic—didn’t make him take part in an armed robbery of an Airbnb in July 2019, he said. He’d decided on his own to help his cousin, who had told Smith that the people staying at the Airbnb had robbed him and that he was trying to get his money back. Smith agreed to help, but he didn’t want any guns involved. So they compromised: they’d bring a gun, but it would be unloaded.
Things didn’t go as planned, and Smith was arrested. At his trial, Smith pleaded guilty to the two charges—theft and robbery with a firearm—filed against him.
Since Smith is black, he also submitted an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment, or IRCA—a presentencing report in which “Black and racialized Canadians” can demonstrate how systemic racism led them to commit their crime.
The logic behind Smith’s IRCA was clear: as a black man, it was assumed that he had been subjected to a great deal of hate, and that that hate had limited his job opportunities, housing opportunities, opportunities to build a meaningful and law-abiding life.
Dunia Nur, the activist who wrote Smith’s IRCA, told me the report was meant to help the judge appreciate the convict’s “background” and “history.”
I obtained Smith’s IRCA from Smith himself. Oddly, the four-page report cites no concrete instances of racism—no violence, no untoward remarks, no employers or schools that turned Smith down because of his skin color. Not even any microaggressions.
It also fails to mention that, in a separate incident in January 2018, Smith was arrested and charged with theft, robbery, and kidnapping.
What it does say is that Smith had a rough childhood and adolescence—the refugee camp in Ghana, his father’s absence, immigrating to Canada, his early run-ins with the law. It further notes that “Edward identifies as an African Canadian” who is of “Liberian heritage,” and that he has “a feeling of disconnection with his culture.”
The judge apparently sympathized with Smith. In February 2020, after six months in prison, he was allowed to go free with court-appointed supervision. If he’d been white, he would have been looking at eight years behind bars.
“I didn’t face racism,” Smith admitted to me in a recent phone call. He’s now a sales representative at a debt-collection company. Referring to the IRCA, Smith said, “It was my only way out of this situation. I took full advantage.”
Canada’s first official IRCA was submitted in the now-famous case of R v “X” in 2014—a case in which a 16-year-old black boy in Nova Scotia was charged with attempted murder after shooting his 15-year-old cousin in the abdomen with a rifle. This was not long after Black Lives Matter was formed, in 2013, to protest the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida.
At the time, it was mostly confined to progressive circles in Nova Scotia, which has a higher concentration of African Canadians than any other province. Now, it’s taken for granted among Canadian criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and law professors that the assessments are a necessary tool for curbing the “overrepresentation” of black and indigenous prisoners.
Danardo Jones, a University of Windsor law professor who has written extensively on criminal justice reform, said that when it comes to IRCAs, there is “institutional buy-in.” For now, there are no statistics on the number of IRCAs being filed nationwide or on a province by province basis. Criminal defense attorneys in Ontario estimated that IRCAs run up to $4,500 and that there’s a nine-month waiting list to obtain one.
Canada is at the forefront of a broader movement that seeks to reimagine police, prisons, and the nature of justice—a movement that gained much greater momentum and cohesiveness in the wake of George Floyd’s May 2020 killing in Minneapolis.
“The protests of 2020 marked the new way in which many people thought about criminal justice,” Daniel Fryer, a University of Michigan criminal justice law professor, said. “The thing about the protests of 2020 is that they reached a global audience. Although the problem was at least ostensibly domestic, everyone in the world was watching.”
In the United States, the new thinking was reflected in the push for “decarceration” and the rise of progressive district attorneys—Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascón in Los Angeles, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and others. Central to the progressive prosecutor movement, Fryer said, was a rejection of “the gladiator, adversarial model.” Instead, he said, “the prosecutor’s role should be to seek justice in society.”
On top of that, a handful of states sought to impose justice from the top down: Virginia and Washington barred police from using choke holds and no-knock warrants. Minnesota adopted a law meant to make police more accountable. California, the country’s progressive laboratory, enacted the Racial Justice Act, which enables anyone convicted of a crime to challenge that conviction on the grounds of racial bias.
But Canada has gone further, insisting that judges explicitly consider race when meting out justice.
As far as Nadia Robinson was concerned, there is nothing fair or just about that. The father of her two boys was killed eight years ago by a driver in Ottawa, and he had gotten off with a lighter sentence because he was black.
“I’m not trying to be a ‘Karen’ in any way, shape, or form,” Robinson, who is white, told me. “I believe that when you do something wrong, you stand up and say you did something wrong.”
I suggested IRCAs were an effort to undo decades, even centuries, of racism that had been baked into the criminal justice system. “You can’t rewrite the past,” Robinson said. Then, she added: “We’re all equal.”
Nadia Robinson. (Dan Aponte for The Free Press) Race-based sentencing in Canada did not emerge in a vacuum.
It started in 1996, when Canadian lawmakers, upset that so many indigenous people were in prison, amended the Criminal Code, hoping to prod judges into considering indigenous people’s history of colonization—and dispensing less punitive sentences. In 1993, aboriginal peoples accounted for 17 percent of prisoners even though they were less than 4 percent of the total population.
In 1999, in R v Gladue—the first case to make its way to the Supreme Court following the amendments to the Criminal Code—what started as a suggestion became the law of the land. The Criminal Code, the Court ruled, “mandatorily requires sentencing judges to consider all available sanctions other than imprisonment and to pay particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders.”
In the wake of that case, courts started to require so-called Gladue reports when sentencing indigenous defendants. Gradually, the idea of building on Gladue reports to acknowledge African Canadians’ history started to gain traction.
Fast-forward to the mid-2010s and the rise of the IRCA. The whole point of the IRCA, Robert Wright, a social worker and early pioneer of IRCAs, told me, was to level the proverbial playing field.
“Some people think we’re trying to get a race-based discount for people,” said Wright, who wrote the first official IRCA, in R v. “X.” IRCAs, he said, are “real tools” that enable judges to “be more thoughtful” and “sentence black people more appropriately.”
Ryan Handlarski, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, added: “How can we pass judgment on a person without at least trying to understand what led them to that place?”
Judge Anne Derrick, who presided over R v “X,” was apparently persuaded by this logic.
“I find that when ‘X’ shot ‘Y’ he was an immature, dependent 16 year old caught up in the dysfunctional dynamics of his community,” Derrick wrote. She sentenced “X” as a minor, giving him two years in prison and another year of supervision at home. Had he been sentenced as an adult—as the prosecutor requested—he would have received a life sentence.
While R v “X” influenced thinking among judges, attorneys, and prosecutors, its impact was limited because it took place on the local, trial court level.
But in 2017, Derrick was promoted to Nova Scotia’s Court of Appeal—where her future rulings would have an automatically binding effect on lower courts across the province.
And then, in 2021, she got her chance—with the case of R v Anderson—to make race-based sentencing the standard across the province.
During a traffic stop in Halifax three years earlier, Rakeem Rayshon Anderson was found carrying a .22-caliber handgun. He was charged and convicted of five offenses related to possession and transportation of a loaded weapon.
Prosecutors asked for Anderson to be given a prison sentence of two to three years. Being African Canadian, Anderson filed an IRCA—co-authored by Robert Wright, who had written the IRCA for R v “X.” The trial judge who heard Anderson’s case gave him a lesser sentence—house arrest and probation—based, in no small part, on the IRCA. (Judge Pamela Williams said as much, adding that the dearth of “Afrocentric services” contributed to her ruling.)
Prosecutors appealed to the Court of Appeal—where now-Justice Anne Derrick was presiding.
Derrick was unsympathetic to prosecutors.
“Even where the offense is very serious, consideration must be given to the impact of systemic racism and its effects on the offender,” Derrick wrote in August 2021, upholding the lower court’s decision.
Brandon Rolle, senior legal counsel at African Nova Scotian Justice Institute and one of Anderson’s attorneys, called the decision “historic,” adding that “this decision will directly impact every African Nova Scotian being sentenced from this point forward.”
I asked Mark Scott, the lead prosecutor in Anderson, what he made of Derrick’s ruling. “People’s culture and background are something that is essential to recognize when you’re looking at a just result,” Scott told me, sounding like a defense attorney. “If you’re going to say that justice has to be colorblind, I think there are people who would disagree with that.”
Chris Rudnicki, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, told me: “If Justice Derrick’s decision in ‘X’ can be seen as opening the door to systemic considerations in Canadian sentencing, then her majority opinion in Anderson—now sitting as a judge at the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal—can be seen as leading us all through it.”
Since Anderson, federal authorities have tried to nudge the rest of Canada to follow Nova Scotia’s lead. In April 2021, the Department of Justice announced $6.6 million to subsidize IRCAs. Since then, the sense of urgency has grown, with everyone from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger saying more must be done to combat the “overrepresentation” of minority inmates.
This urgency is fueled, in part, by an awareness that over the course of the first two decades of this century—from the first Gladue reports in 1999 to 2020—the percentage of indigenous prisoners has jumped, from 17 percent to more than 30 percent.
To Nadia Robinson, the idea that the man who had killed her partner should be given a lesser sentence because of his race felt “surreal,” she said, as if the people in charge were speaking one language, and she were speaking another.
Robinson’s partner, Andy Nevin, had been riding his bike on the morning of June 28, 2015, when he was killed in a hit and run.
In court, the driver, Deinsburg St.-Hilaire, testified that he’d been out all night at a wedding. It was almost six a.m., and he was speeding home—going almost 20 miles over the limit—when he nodded off. He came to when he heard a thud. He didn’t see anything in his rearview mirror. He said he thought he’d hit a mailbox.
Except that when he got home, St.-Hilaire covered his Ford F-250 pickup truck in a tarp, and, within a few days, he had the hood and side panel changed.
It seemed as though he knew what had happened.
This was what Nadia Robinson couldn’t accept. “If I knew it was my son who did something like that, I’d be like, ‘You need to come forward, you need to tell this family—you don’t hide,’ ” she told me.
After repairing his truck, St.-Hilaire decamped to an airport hotel, hoping to evade the cops. Nine days after the accident, he was arrested.
Later, when he tried to explain why he hadn’t turned himself in, St.-Hilaire noted that he had emigrated at age 7 from Dominica, in the Caribbean. “Being the only black child in his class, and not speaking English proficiently, resulted in Mr. St Hilaire being bullied at school,” according to a court document.
At the trial, Judge Catherine Aitken said she believed the defendant “wanted to do the right thing but did not have the confidence to do so out of fear.” She added: “I also accept that this fear was likely heightened as a result of Mr. St. Hilaire’s experience with racism as a black person growing up in this community.”
Ultimately, Aitken found St.-Hilaire guilty of obstructing the police investigation into the collision but, parroting the defendant, added that his “experiences earlier in life when he was subjected to racism and bullying in the school context” as well as “experiences more recently when he did not feel fairly treated by police officers during traffic stops” were mitigating factors.
It seemed not to matter to the judge that St.-Hilaire, 39, didn’t provide any details about the racism he had suffered: names, dates, comments that were made, pain that was inflicted. Nor did he say how it had affected him over the years.
St.-Hilaire could have wound up spending two years behind bars. Instead, he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and left the courtroom, in November 2018, a free man.
St.-Hilaire hadn’t even filed an IRCA. All that was required to get a lighter sentence was to bring the defendant’s race to the judge’s attention—to obtain “judicial notice,” Danardo Jones, the University of Windsor law professor, told me. “Failure to consider race and anti-Blackness,” Jones said in an email, could lead to a sentence being overturned on appeal.
The Ottawa police chief, Charles Bordeleau, was furious about the sentence and issued a terse statement voicing frustration—something he almost never did. “It’s unfortunate that these comments were made putting into question the professionalism of our members during this difficult investigation,” he said.
Nadia Robinson told me the court’s judgment made her feel like Andy Nevin’s life didn’t matter. Did anyone care that on the morning of his death, he was biking to the new apartment they planned to live in? They were moving out of the dump they’d been in, starting a new chapter. The boys were so excited, she said.
“Are you kidding me?” Robinson said. She was crying. She felt as if she were living a parallel life, a life that wasn’t supposed to happen. Her sons, now 26 and 24, she said, have had a lot of trouble since their father’s death: alcohol, drugs, a seemingly bottomless grief. “My kids are devastated,” she said.
Among prosecutors and even some criminal defense attorneys, it felt as though the country were crossing the Rubicon.
“The judge basically calls the system out for being systemically racist even though the system bends over backwards to be reverse racist,” a prominent defense attorney in Toronto told me.
The attorney, who asked me not to publish his name out of fear of backlash, found it galling that the judge had portrayed St.-Hilaire’s actions during the course of those nine days between the hit and run and his arrest as a “momentary lapse of judgment.”
“The idea that somehow this cover-up had anything to do with racism or this never-demonstrated canard of systemic racism is patently false,” the attorney said. “To use language we’d normally associate with murder, this was not a momentary lapse in judgment but planned and deliberate. That’s what makes the judge’s ruling so egregious, and the idea that the defendant gets some kind of break because of something that happened years ago, something completely unprovable and possibly untrue that has nothing to do with Andy Nevin’s death—that’s absurd. Actually, it’s offensive.”
He added: “This is the scam of scams.” He said that lots of people knew it, and no one would say it openly. Including him. “Criticizing IRCAs would mean career suicide.”
I asked Chris Rudnicki, the criminal defense attorney, whether the subtext of the whole IRCA phenomenon was that black people from poor neighborhoods have less control over the decisions they make.
He emailed back: “In some cases, yes.” He added, “To the extent that systemic discrimination has a material impact on people’s lives—restricting access to housing, education, and employment, for example—it can render them more susceptible to criminal influences. You are more likely to steal a loaf of bread if you’re poor, for example. Or more likely to join a street gang if your school has expelled you. Etc. So a sentencing court will treat a person who has experienced the material impact of systemic discrimination differently than a person who has not suffered that impact.”
(Jason Franson for The Free Press) Edward Smith, who robbed the Airbnb, insisted the problem was never systemic discrimination. It was him. It was his family.
In high school, he’d started stealing candy and clothing from local stores. Partly, he said, this was because his mother, who packed chickens for minimum wage, couldn’t afford to buy him stuff. But mostly, he said, it was because he could. He was a latchkey kid surrounded by other latchkey kids. “It was just me and my friends,” Smith said. “If we were going to make bad decisions, we were going to do it together.”
It was in the summer of 2019 that his cousin asked him to help rob this Airbnb to get his money back. He didn’t ask questions.
So, the three of them—his cousin, some other guy, and Smith—showed up at the Airbnb, and the two other guys had guns, and they robbed the place and got out and drove away before Smith could catch up with them. He got arrested. It turned out his cousin had never been robbed. He just wanted to do some robbing. (He was later arrested, too.)
Smith was happy to have avoided a longer sentence but seemed almost embarrassed by it. “It didn’t have anything to do with race,” he told me for the third or fourth time. (But Temitope Oriola, a University of Alberta sociologist, said it wasn’t uncommon for black victims of racism to deny they had been victims of racism. “They refuse to acknowledge the existence of racism as a particular way of navigating the world and holding onto their sense of self,” he told me.)
Two months after being released from jail, Smith was arrested again, in April 2020, for possession of stolen goods. In September 2022, he was arrested once more and charged with two counts of assault and one count of damaging property, according to court records.
All these charges were subsequently dropped, but that wasn’t the point, the criminal defense attorney in Toronto said. “The police don’t arrest innocent people,” the attorney said. Referring to Smith, the attorney added: “Is he a ticking time bomb and going to keep reoffending? One million percent.”
It seems odd that liberals, who spent decades trying to deracialize society, are now re-racializing it.
Jonathan Simon, a University of California–Berkeley law professor, explained that, when it comes to criminal justice reform, it’s hard to sidestep race.
“The criminal-legal system is the equivalent of a toxic-waste disaster with over decades of institutional focus on communities of color,” Simon said. The public, Smith added, tends to view “crime” and “blackness” as one and the same. “There’s overwhelming evidence from psychologists that blackness and crime are fused in a cognitive way,” he said.
It was necessary to acknowledge that “the criminal-legal system has been jacked up on racism,” so society—in Canada or the United States—can start down the long path of decarceration, Simon said. That was the point of IRCAs, its defenders explained.
John Medeiros, the staff sergeant at the Ottawa Police Department who had overseen the St.-Hilaire case, said he understood why black defendants were skeptical that the system would treat them fairly. There was a long history. There had been discrimination. There had been a great deal of institutionalized oppression.
But he’d been dismayed by the judge’s ruling in the hit and run. According to Nevin’s postmortem examination, the 39-year-old cyclist had been struck from behind and flown into a ditch. He had a laceration on his head, and abrasions on his shoulders, waist, and legs; his spinal cord had been severed, and one of his lungs punctured. The only good news, perhaps, was that he had been killed instantly.
“I don’t think race ought to have been a factor here,” Medeiros told me.
Referring to St.-Hilaire, Medeiros added, “He left a human being on the side of the road, like he drove over a skunk.”
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Her last article, Trudeau’s Battle Against a Free Internet, examined Canada’s effort to curb free expression online.
The comfort food-style restaurant chain Cracker Barrel, known for its overwhelming amount of ornamental knick-knacks and vintage signs plastered on the walls, is in some social media trouble today. Folks on the internet are claiming Cracker Barrel is racist.
What’s the meaning behind Cracker Barrel?
According to Southern Living, “cracker-barrel” was coined in 1916 because of barrels containing soda crackers — a popular item for sale at country stores. Customers at said country stores would hang around the barrels as a kind of ritual (kind of like the trope of employees gossiping near the water cooler). The first Cracker Barrel location opened in 1969 in Lebanon, Tenn., and it derived its name from the cracker-barrel community experience back in the day.
According to Dictionary.com, “cracker-barrel” means “of or suggesting the simple rustic informality and directness thought to be characteristic of life in and around the country store.”
But some Twitter users have also pointed out that the term “cracker” might have another, more racist connotation. According to NPR, the term “cracker” was used in the mid-18th century to refer to poor white people in states like Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia.
“It is suspected that it was a shortened version of ‘whip-cracker,’ since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip,” historian Jelani Cobb told the outlet.
But in the late 1800s, writers from the northern USA region referred to some southerners as “crackers.”
Oh, Please!
“[Those writers] decided that they were called that because of the cracking of the whip when they drove slaves,” historian Dana Ste. Claire told the outlet, though he noted those the term would be applied to weren’t typically wealthy enough to own slaves.
Users on Twitter also claimed that a “cracker barrel” was the barrel used to hold whips, though there is currently no historical evidence to back up that claim. [See the above screenshot from a Twitter post.]
Back in 2015, someone named Ryan Koch, who lived in Iowa, started a petition to change its name because he believed Cracker Barrel to be “racist” toward white folks. Per the Change.org petition, Koch wrote, “I say all European Americans start protesting C****er Barrel. It uses an offensive slur, and it is deeply offensive and mocks our long and proud heritage.” He later clarified the post was “satire.” Ummmmm, OK.
In a tweet, one user claimed you can even see a whip in the logo, going from the first R in “barrel” to the K in “cracker.”
While it’s currently unclear whether or not there is any historical evidence to that claim, the company has since removed the connecting line from the R to the K in the logo.
Cracker Barrel’s PR team reportedly told Pop Icon that the logo was meant to “invoke nostalgia,” and was inspired by “an older gentleman who sat on the front porch during the summer.”
Has Cracker Barrel ever been racist?
So, while it seems like the name of Cracker Barrel isn’t inherently racist, it sounds like a lot of Black customers have experienced racism at the restaurant locations, which is horrifying.
In 2004, there was a filing and settlement of a racial discrimination lawsuit against Cracker Barrel after finding evidence of racist behavior and discrimination in at least 50 locations across the U.S. According to CBS News, 21 people filed a $100 million federal lawsuit against the chain. At the time, a spokesperson for Cracker Barrel stated, “ Our mission is pleasing people, and that means all people. We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”However, evidence suggests that Cracker Barrel definitely knew what was happening and wasn’t doing anything about it. Attorney David Sanford stated, “It can’t be the case that Cracker Barrel doesn’t know about it. We have enough evidence right now to suggest that Cracker Barrel, to the very highest level, is responsible.”
According to CBS News, the lawsuit includes statements from Black customers who stated they were forced to wait while white customers were seated right away. One specific person said that she arrived at Cracker Barrel at 9:48 p.m. and was told that she couldn’t be served because the restaurant was about to close. However, she then saw four white men were allowed in. “We had hungry children, and he still refused to serve us,” the person said.
“There are perhaps thousands more African-Americans who have been denied service, treated rudely by servers and hosts, and subjected to racial slurs at Cracker Barrel restaurants,” attorney Grant Morris said.
Hopefully, the chain learned from their (sic) mistakes and has implemented a zero-tolerance policy among their (sic) staff. Nobody deserves to go to a restaurant and be discriminated against — period.
If you are looking for ways to donate your time or money to Black Lives Matter and other antiracist organizations, we have created a list of resources to get you started. [bolded in original]
Well, that last paragraph lets you know where this clueless white woman who posted this on DISTRACTIFY stands on the political spectrum.
It would seem she is so far gone that she doesn’t proofread her articles before submitting them. A number of commas are missing and misusing their for its. I left those in with the notation hat they are in the original.
Chapman is located 30 miles from LA. A private Liberal Arts school.