Mediaboss Marketing

The Best Guest Stars of All Time on 'Law & Order: SVU': Cameo DetailsAcceptWe allow third parties to collect information which we use for business purposes, for more info read CCPA section in the privacy policy page.AcceptBrowsers may block some cookies by default. Click accept to allow advertising partners to use cookies and serve more relevant ads. Visit our privacy policy page for more information.Source: Virginia Sherwood/NBCBy Pippa Raga

3 days ago

Over the years, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has had a veritable whos who of famous guest cameos.

Some of the industrys biggest stars got their start on the show and the long list includes Oscar winners and famous musicians, as well as actors from your favorite movies and TV shows.

But with 21 seasons and over 450 episodes, even the most die-hard SVU fans can forget some of these more memorable performers.

So to refresh your memory, heres a list of the best guest stars on SVU, some of whom commit heinous crimes and others who have the crimes committed against them. Dun dun!!

You would think that a show would need to establish its credentials before having the pull to get a cameo by none other than Reverend Al Sharpton, but Law & Order: Special Victims Unit came out swinging for the fences with their Season 1 guest stars.

The reverend plays himself in the episode as Benson and Stabler investigate a female students murder at a local college.

Before she became a household name, Hayden was a guest star on SVU as little Ashley. In the episode, Benson and Stabler investigate two famous singers for parental neglect after the mysterious death of their young son.

Upon further investigation, Benson also realizes that their daughter Ashley has fallen into a pattern of self-harm in an effort to gain her parents' attention. Its a sad episode for sure, but Hayden shows that her talent has been with her from a young age.

A decorated actress whose career spans seven decades, Lois Smith is known for her roles in movies like Fatal Attraction, Minority Report, and most recently Lady Bird. This character actress stars as the mother of a girl with Downs syndrome, who becomes pregnant after a rapist takes advantage of her naivet and innocence.

However, the episode takes a turn when the daughter wants to keep her baby but the mother wants her to get an abortion, and the detectives have to get involved.

The legendary Pam Grier steps up to the plate as Agent Claudia Williams, determined to protect a father-son duo as they go into witness protection and testify against the Russian mob.

Pam also reprised her role for a Season 15 episode and won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her work on the show.

By Season 5, SVU was pulling in some big names for guest stars, but Jane Krakowskis performance as Emma was a favorite.

The actress stars as a young nurse who may be responsible for the death of several older women in her care, including her own mother. Jane always brings warmth and lovability to the lunatics she plays, but this time she adds a cold-bloodedness to the role that weve never seen from her before.

Night has not one, but two notable guest stars! Bradley Cooper plays a sleazy lawyer who handles the finances of a wealthy family. The detectives get involved when they suspect the son is preying on illegal immigrants who are less likely to report their crime.

Topping off the guest cast list is none other than international icon Angela Lansbury as the mother and matriarch of the wealthy, connected family who does all she can to shield her clearly guilty son.

In a season that includes young Keke Palmer, Rooney Mara, and Norman Reedus, it was hard to pull a favorite, but that title deservedly belongs to Chris Ludacris Bridges.

Luda plays Darius, the nephew of Detective Fin Tutuola (played by fellow rapper, Ice-T) who almost gets Fin's son Ken taken down for a murder that Darius committed.

While Darius is smart enough to have his confession thrown out, he vows his revenge on the Tutuola family, allowing for Ludacris' character to return in Season 8.

It might be weird to see Danny Tanner playing a murder suspect in SVU but Bob Saget makes for a convincing duplicitous husband. While investigating the murder of a woman found in Central Park, the detectives discover a complicated case that involves infidelity, sex, and drugs: a deadly combination.

While Season 8 is a little light on A-list guest stars, Season 9 ramps it up with appearances by Cynthia Nixon, Melissa Joan Hart, and UFC fighters Forrest Griffin and Renzo Gracie.

But the best Season 9 appearance by far is Robin Williams,' who plays an engineer trying to teach the public to not trust authority, using some strange and extreme methods.

Robins chilling performance garnered critical acclaim and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.

None other than Lizzie McGuire, aka Hilary Duff, guest stars in Season 10s Selfish, in which she plays a fictionalized version of the infamous mother who killed her own infant child, Casey Anthony.

However, the episode veers into an unexpected direction and the cases actual perpetrator (spoiler alert!) turns out to be a mother who inadvertently caused the childs death by not vaccinating her own son.

While this season has some very strong performances by guests like Sarah Paulson and Rosie Perez, one of the best episodes stars Kathy Griffin as fiery lesbian rights group leader, Babs Duffy.

Little known fact about this episode: Babs and Detective Benson were slated to share an on-screen kiss (!!!) and despite it being filmed, the kiss did not make the final cut.

Instead what we see is Babs going in for a kiss and getting rebuffed by Olivia. Steamy!!!

Season 12 boasts appearances by Rose McGowan, Debra Messing, and Rita Wilson but one of the strongest guest performances in SVU history comes from Jeremy Irons.

Jeremy plays Dr. Cap Jackson, the father of a rape victim with a sordid past who now works as a sex therapist. He plays the character with such nuance and empathy that Jeremy was asked to reprise his role later that season in "Totem."

Season 13 features cameos by stars like Andre Braugher, Natasha Lyonne, and Adam Driver, so it's hard to pick a frontrunner, but "Learning Curve" wins simply based on the number of amazing guest appearances.

The episode has Martha Stewart (no introduction needed) as a private school headmistress, Tony Hale (from Arrested Development and VEEP) as a teacher accused of inappropriate behavior with a student, and Dylan Minnette (Clay from 13 Reasons Why) as said student.

Martha has since mentioned that the role hit a bit too close to home. "It was frightening work because the women detectives were very threatening," she said. "It brought back bad memories!

While perhaps not the best guest appearance of the season, Mike Tyson's cameo is still the most controversial casting choice of the entire series.

Mike plays rape victim Reggie Rhodes, and fans and assault survivors alike were quick to point out the hypocrisy of casting a convicted rapist to appear on the show.

Billy Porter plays a popular singing coach who trains young girls to perform on talent shows la The Voice.

However, the coach's career comes to a crashing halt when a 4-year-old accuses him of sexual abuse. Surprisingly, Rollins is the only one who urges the team to tread lightly before dragging the reputation of a black gay man through the mud.

"Dissonant Voices" also features cameos by Ashanti, Clay Aiken, and Taylor Hicks as judges on the singing competition show.

Marking her return to television after the series finale of Desperate Housewives, Marcia Cross plays Charmaine, the much younger, sixth wife of famous author Walter Briggs.

When he suffers a series of heart attacks, Walters daughters from a previous marriage accuse Charmaine of giving him Viagra without his knowledge, so that she could sexually abuse him and become pregnant with his new heir.

Marcia delivers a terrific performance that will keep you on the edge of your seat. (Fun fact: That's Curb Your Enthusiasm's Susie Essman as her lawyer.)

Whoopi Goldberg stars in an episode that examines institutional failures within the child protective program at the social services office.

The EGOT winner gives an impassioned speech about the taxing work that social service workers do every day while being under pressure from their superiors to reach quotas and clear cases.

Season 18 does include a quick cameo by none other than presidential candidate and ex-vice president Joe Biden, but our favorite guest appearance was Anthony Edwards, for sentimental reasons.

Anthony is best known for his role as Dr. Mark Greene in the seminal ER and in Season 4 of ER, none other than Mariska Hargitay guest stars as his love interest, Cynthia Hopper.

We love a good reunion, and this episode gives viewers exactly that, plus a ripped-from-the-headlines case based off the Brock Turner sexual assault case.

SVU blesses its Season 19 viewers with a recurring guest role from actress and model Brooke Shields.

Brooke plays complicated character Sheila Porter, Noahs maternal grandmother, who she longs to connect with but not with the purest intentions.

Like his BFF Martha, Snoop also guest stars on the show as rapper R.B. Banks, who gets pulled into a murder investigation when a rival rapper's girlfriend is killed.

Mariska has said that while she's usually able to keep her cool around celebrities, Snoop's cameo had her absolutely star-struck. She confesses to have teased Snoop on set, singing "D-O-Double-G in the 1PP" whenever she got the chance.

Season 21 is still going strong, but for now, our favorite celebrity appearance is Margaret Cho's cameo as Mama-san.

Margaret plays a Korean madame who gets swept up in a raid, much like real-life Li "Cindy" Yang, who managed the Orchids Spa that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft frequented.

"Of everything I've done in my career, playing a Korean sex trafficker on your mom's fave show is probably the highlight," the comedian said.

New episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit air Thursdays at 10 p.m. on NBC.

Link:
The 21 Best Guest Stars to Appear in Every Single Season of 'Law & Order: SVU' - Distractify

Almost to the day CNN paid out a notable cash settlement to Nick Sandmann, the Covington High School kid it defamed as a racist pup for grinning at a Native American whilst supporting President Trump, the network was one of a gaggle of MSM outlets out to spin the killing of an Iranian generalinto another Orange Man Bad. As with Sandmann, the facts never support the heavy metal screeching, but the facts also matter little. The anti-Trump agenda rules no matter the price.

You remember about a year ago, when Sandmann and his Catholic school classmates traveled to Washington, D.C., to join the annual March for Life rally on Capitol Hill. Sandmann was photographed smiling at a Native American. With one mighty flatulent blast, outlets like CNN imagined Sandmann, wearing his MAGA cap, as the distillation of everything evil, some redneck from Kentucky a-protestin them abortions and rubbing his smug grin in the face of a noble Native American supposedly trying to defuse a tense situation. The Native American was also quickly (but wrongly) glorified as a Vietnam vet.

Blue Check Twitter suggested Sandmann be punched in the face, and veiled suggestions of mob action led to threats. Sandmanns family was temporarily run out of their home. Disciplinary action included coerced apologies. Progressive media gleefully piled on. It was right out of Orwells 1984, the Two Minutes Hate.

But not only was everything CNN and the others said absolutely wrong (Sandmann was never an aggressor, and alongside his peers, said nothing in return to those taunting him), it wasnt even news. Nothing really happened. Students on a field trip. But the media appointed Sandmann their racist oberfuhrer, fashioned the others into props, and had the entire white nationalist anti-Trump agenda in one handy snapshot.

Most agenda journalism victims are expected to disappear in shame. But this time it was different. Sandmann sued a range of journalists, including Maggie Haberman, Ana Navarro, and Shaun King, for slurs they threw at him on Twitter. Included in the swath of additional lawsuits by Sandmann were CNN, MSNBCs parent company, the AP, Gannett, HuffPo, Slate, and The Washington Post. In the words of the suit, they brought down the full force of corporate power, influence, and wealth on Nicholas by falsely attacking, vilifying, and bullying him despite the fact that he was a minor child.

The suits charged that journalists maintained a well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Donald Trump and established a history of impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the president. They asserted that CNN and the others would have known the statements to be untrue had they undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication. In other words, they should have committed journalism, the finding of facts, in lieu of packaging what was actually nothing at all into a steamy piece that fit an existing agenda.

Sandmann beat CNN (the other suits are pending), which settled and paid rather than risk a trial. Assuming credibility and self-respect are worth about zero, we now know that the price tag for the agenda journalism CNN practices is reportedly $25 million. That amount is probably half of what the network spends on botox for Anderson Cooper, but as Coopers aestheticians are prone to say, its a start.

With a win in Sandmanns pocket and as his cases against the other media outlets work their way through the courts, others also appear ready to challenge agenda journalism via the defamation laws. Ten more Covington students are now suing various media. Elsewhere, writer Peter Brimelow is suing the New York Times for labeling him an open white nationalist. Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Donald Trump, filed suit against Fox a month ago, claiming defamation. George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, filed a defamation suit against HarperCollins, the Martin family lawyers publisher. Trump critic and Harvard prof Lawrence Lessig is suing the New York Times, accusing them of publishing false and defamatory information about him. Representative Devin Nunes sued CNN last month, claiming the network defamed him with false reports that he traveled to Vienna to meet with the Ukrainian prosecutor Joe Biden helped oust in 2016.

Under current law, most of those suits will fail. Going forward, how powerful a weapon defamation lawsuits might prove to be against agenda journalism will depend on how flexible the courts choose to be. Historically they have given great leeway to anyone, journalist or not, who appears to defame public figures. The idea is that if you put yourself out there, youre expected to take a few slings and arrows and so the standards of proof are higher. This is what allows tabloids like the National Enquirer to get away with making up stories about popular figures. But defamation as a business practice was once upon a time what bottom feeders did for the shock value, not regular practice for the media of record.

The hope is that justice recognizes that a new media environment has emerged, one that drags innocent people onto the national stage unnecessarily in a way that is unethical and exploitativeand that even politicians, never mind the voters who select them, deserve factual reporting. But in the case of CNN and Nick Sandmann, it appears the network would rather pay out millions of dollars than see what a court would say.

That CNN has not made any noticeable changes in its obsessive stream of agenda journalism since the original incident a year ago, or since settling with Sandmann, suggests what they paid out is to them a reasonable price to continue to lie to the American public. Most MSM gave the settlement little or no coverage. CNN itself devoted 29 seconds to the story. Like botox, settlements are just another business expense.

If this agenda-driven journalism was limited to individual acts of defamation, such as the Sandmann case, it would be bad enough. But the MSM extend the same thinking to significant geopolitical events, using their vast resources to convince the public that Donald Trump threatens their very existence.

Remember how Trump was going to start global economic war with China, withdraw from NATO, start a wider war in Syria by bombing Russian bases, start World War III with North Korea, sell out the U.S. to get peace with North Korea, start World War III because he is Hitler, start a war over Venezuela, start a genocide of Kurds with Turkey

The giveaway that journalism is near-singularly devoted to an agenda, frightening the public in service of somehow driving Trump from office, is how the mistakes are always wrong in same direction. Contrast the beatification of the good victims of the Parkland shooting with the Parkland kid who supports the Second Amendmenthe was media-doxxed out of Harvard. Meanwhile none of the people who keep track of the lies Trump tells and who are demanding fact checks before ads are allowed to run on social media seem to spend any time on the other side of the equation. Who would accept a track record this bad from their doctor, lawyer, or even their nail technician (no, seriously, cracked nails are hot this year, it was in the NYT)? Is there any price to be paid for agenda journalism?

In a rare breath of self-examination, one New York Times columnist wrote, Donald Trump is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest. So youd think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would go out of our way to show were not like him that we are judicious, informed, mature and reasonable. The anti-Trump echo chamber is becoming a mirror image of Trump himself overwrought, uncalibrated, and incapable of having an intelligent conversation.

The Founders assigned journalism a specific role to ensure that citizens would be able to carry out informed debates. Truth, they understood, is more than an ideal; it is a perspective. Yet over the last three years, serious journalism has all but been pushed aside in a rush to do away with Trump, not by honest persuasion but by any means necessary. Fear won out, and so objectivity is now #Collusion. Seeking facts before going viral is so 2015. The media gutlessly picks on kids because they cant get Trump. We asked for an informed citizenry and we instead got Mean Girls.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author ofWe Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People,Hoopers War: A Novel of WWII Japan, andGhosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.

Continued here:
The Covington Kids' Revenge, One Year Later - The American Conservative

Donald Trump is scared. The Senate trial following his impeachment for a blackmail and campaign cheating scheme starts next week, and it's driving him to distraction. He was supposed to hosta lame event at the White House on Thursday to bolster fake concerns that white evangelicals are being oppressed, butblew off pandering to his strongest supporters for an hour, likely because he couldn'tpry himself away from news coverage of the impeachment trial's kickoff. After ending the event swiftly, Trump then tweeted angrily, "I JUST GOT IMPEACHED FOR MAKING A PERFECT PHONE CALL!"

(As with most things the president says, this was untrue he was impeached weeks ago, in December.)

Trump's cold sweats are significant, becauseeveryone who has been following this case knows that the Senate will acquit him. Not because he's innocent no one who has actually consulted the evidence is foolish enough to believe that but because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who control the Senate decided long ago that they wouldcover up for their shamelessly corrupt president no matter what he does. With such an assured outcome, Trump's fears seem overblown and silly, even for someone crippled by sociopathic narcissism and its accompanying paranoia.

But it's also true that high-profile travesties of justice, such as the oneSenate Republicans are currently preparingto commit, can often provoke major political backlash. Getting a jury to acquit the obviously guilty can, as history shows,cause a public that's already outraged about the crime to get even more furious. That, I suspect, is what Trump is sweating.

What the Senate is about to do is akin to the practice of jury nullification. That's where a jury decides that either they don't think the crime should be a crime at all, or that they believe people like the defendant should above the law, and so refuse to convict no matter how guilty the defendant is. This something thatin theory, and sometimes in practice, canbe used for good as when a jury refusesto throw someone in prison for a low-level drug offense, or refuses to enforce a law restricting free speech. Buthistorically in the U.S., jury nullification has tended to be used to uphold injustice and reinforce racist or sexist systems of power.

In other words, exactly what Senate Republicans are planning to do. Thatbecomes more obvious every day as more evidence of Trump's guilt comes out, from the revelations byRudy Giuliani's former associateLev Parnas to the Government Accountability Office declaring that Trump broke the law by withholding military aid to Ukraine.

The most disturbing and frequenthistorical examples of jury nullification come from the Jim Crow South, where it was normal for all-white juries to acquit Klansmen and others who committed racist murders not because they genuinely believed they wereinnocent, but because they believed it should be legal for white people to murder black people in cold blood.

The most famous of these cases was that of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two white men who murdered a black teenager named Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. That the men had committed the crime was not in doubt they described the murder in great detail to a reporter for Look magazine. But the all-white, all-male jury refused to convict, and didn't really bother to hide the fact that they did sobecause they didn't think white men should be punished for killing black people.

Unfortunately, this problem of white jurors refusing toconvictin cases where the victimsare black has not gone away. For instance, in the 2012 Florida killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, a nearly all-white jury votedto acquit Zimmerman, even though Martin was apparently just walking home after buying some snacks and Zimmerman had been warned by a 911 operator not to pursue him and even though Zimmerman's only basis for suspecting Martin of anything was his race.The one woman of color on the juryhas since publicly lamented the process and describes what sounds a lot like bullying from the white women in the room.

The defendants in those cases walked free, but the outrage that followed had political ramifications. Till's murder helped draw national attention to the evils of the Jim Crow South and helped bolster support for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Martin's murder, decades later, helped build support for what became known as the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sometimes the backlash to injustice can be earth-shaking, as happened in 1992, when Los Angeles was torn up by riots in the wake of the acquittal by a majority-white juryof four cops who were caught on video severely beating Rodney King, a black motorist they had pulled overfor speeding.

These are all racially loaded cases, of course, which sets them apart from Trump's impeachment overhis efforts to cheat in the 2020 election and his cavalier willingness to use government resources to force foreign leaders to help him do so. Trump's inevitable acquittal in the Senate won't bequite the gut-punchso many people feel when white men get sprung for committing racist crimes.

Still,the social circumstances of Trump's upcoming acquittal go straight back to those same forces of white supremacy that have led to so many other travesties of justice in the past. After all, the main reason Senate Republicans are averse to taking what seems to be an easy way out convicting the obviously guilty Trump and letting his Republican Vice President, Mike Pence, take over is because they fear crossing the notoriously loyal Trump base, who represent their only possiblechance of holding onto the Senate or retaking the House this November.

And the reason that base is so loyal, as with many things in this country, relates to racism. Trump's base is motivated by what sociologists delicately call "racial resentment,"which is a nice way of saying that these white people see changing demographics in the U.S. and growing challengesto white domination, and they're angry about it. Furthermore,they see President Trump, a blatant and shameless racist, as their best weapon to fight to preserve a system of white supremacy.

As long as Trump keeps delivering on the racism which he has donein a myriad of ways his base doesn't care what crimes he commits. After all, Trump committed his crime to hang onto powerso he can continue to inflict cruelracist policies on our entire nation.In that sense, this case shares a common root with thosemore explicitly racist acquittals of the past. They're allpart of thelong and ugly American tradition of letting white people get away with crime, so long as they do it in the name of white supremacy.

But watching obviously guilty people get away with it can also have a galvanizing political effect, and not just when the crime itself is racially provocative. As the #MeToo movement and the Women's March demonstrated, Americans have also been roused to outrage when men commit sexual assaults and get away with it. And the ongoing fascination with gangsters who finally get caught after evading justice for years Al Capone, Whitey Bulger, John Gotti suggests areal hungerto see bad guys pay for what they do.

That'swhat Donald Trump fears: That hisacquittal will not be read as an exoneration, but as yet another famous miscarriage of justice that leads to outrage across the nation. Let's hopehis worst fears come true.

See the article here:
Why the Senate's impeachment trial has way too much in common with the Jim Crow past - Salon

TV host Piers Morgan recently blasted Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as being the "most woke, over-sensitive, woe-is-me couple in the world".

But what does the term "woke" actually mean? Here's what we know:

3

According to the Oxford English Dictionary "woke" is defined as: "Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice."

The Urban Dictionary, however, simply says: "Being woke means being aware

knowing whats going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice)."

To summarise: woke means a person is consciously awake.

The word first came into circulation in the 1800s when it simply meant the state of not being asleep.

And it started emerging in Black English at least by the 1940s, according to dictionary.com.

An "Atlantic" article from 1943 reportedly quoted a black United Mine Workers official from 1940 playing with wokein a metaphor for social justice:Waking up is a damn sight than going to sleep, but well stay woke up longer.

By the 1960s, woke was still used in the context of political awareness, especially regarding the Civil Rights Movement in the 195060s.

3

The term even prompted a 1962 New York Times article commenting on black slang, titled If Youre Woke You Dig It".

A 1972 play about the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Garvey Lives! by Barry Beckham, used woke for awareness of racial injustice in the black community.

A line reads: I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr Garvey done woke me up, Im gon' stay woke. And Im gon' help him wake up other black folk.

3

In 2012, unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was shot dead in Florida by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.

The shooting sparked the Black Lives Matter movement amid a public outcry over the gunman's controversial acquittal.

Many in the black community issued calls to "stay woke" to the discrimination and injustice black people face in the US, particularly in the form of police brutality.

Under the hashtag #staywoke on social media, the term took off again in 2014 after the tragic shooting of two other young, unarmed black men by police officers.

Read more:
What does woke mean? Definition and meaning explained - The Sun

Sean Bell, above, one of the many Black victims of racist American policing.

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book "The Roots of Racism in American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Stop-and-Frisk." Over the next few weeks, the Black Star News will be publishing selected portions from the book. This excerpt is from the book's preface.

Over the last several years, especially since the killings of Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, in Staten Island, New York; and that of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri; the everyday brutality Black America receives at the hands of police has been nakedly exposed for all to see.

In the weeks and months after the deaths of Garner and Brown, we witnessed an ongoing orgy of unjustified killings and murders of Black men, and women, perpetrated by police. The ubiquity of video and cellphone technology revealed outrage after outrage.

That trend continueswith police killings like that of 26-year-old St. Lucian native Botham Jean, on September 6, 2018, in Dallas, Texas; and the more recent killing of 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson. Both Jean and Jefferson were killed inside their homes.

Racist American policing brutalizes all types of Black peoplenot just those who are characterized as criminals and thugs. Weve seen well-to-do and rich Black Americans being harassed as like everyone else. We should remember when Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was manhandled and arrested by police on July 16, 2009, at his Cambridge, Massachusetts home after someone thought Dr. Gates must be a burglar and couldnt really live in such an affluent neighborhood.

Comedian Chris Rock has also complained about being profiled several times as he was driving while Black. And, on August 26, 2017, Seattle Seahawks football star Michael Bennett (who everyone agrees is the kind of role model for kids to emulate) had a gun pulled on him, by an Arizona policeman, while he was face down on the ground. According to Bennett, the officer told him if he moved, he would blow my fucking head off.

From Black men and women, to Black boys and girls, old and young, none are immune from the viciousness of White Americas institution of racial policing. The bad apples argument police apologists parrot, to excuse police barbarisms, that are primarily perpetrated on Black folk, have been debunked by the sheer regular frequency of these atrocities.

The real truth, as it relates to Black Americans, is that: the police represent a domestic terrorist organization that is sanctioned by Americas White political structure to control Black people. This has always been so.

Black Americans must realize that anything good done by police to Blacks, in Black communities, is merely incidental or accidental. Good deeds by police towards us are anomalies that happen primarily because of the conscience and humanity of some copsand not because of America's institution of policing. Police are not there to protect and serve Blacks. There are there to oppress us.

This is why police who brazenly kill, and murder Blacks, are protected by this racist system. This is why there is a Blue Wall of Silence, which facilitates the cover-up culture of cop corruption and allows for its continuance. Why dont more good cops speak out and expose the bigots, brutes, and killers amongst them?

When some cops try to do the right thing by speaking out, they are called rats and snitches and are ostracized, like former NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft and NYPD Officer Adhyl Polanco. Some, like former NYPD Detective Frank Serpico, nearly lost his life (on February 3, 1971in Brooklyn) after he was left without backup as he tried to arrest an armed suspect, who shot him in the face. This was done because Serpico dared to speak out against the corruption he saw in the NYPD.

Even worse, with a wink-and-nod, bigoted police behavior is blessed by corrupt, often grandstanding, American politicians and those in the American court system. Indeed, they assist the abuses of their police partners in crime and are complicit in their atrocities against African-Americans.

Why does the White American political system permit police to treat Black people this way?

Well, some will say, or insinuate, that Black Americans commit an inordinate amount of the crime in America. Indeed, former Secretary of Education William Bennett, who served under President Ronald Reagan, once opined on his radio show, that "If you wanted to reduce crime, you couldif that were the sole purposeyou could abort every Black baby in this country and the crime rate would go down." No doubt, many White Americans, and even some Black Americans, have been indoctrinated into this warped racist view of crime as it relates to Blacks, and believe it.

But, we must remember this: White America has always demonized and criminalize those they have wronged and exploited. Native-Americans were called savages and portrayed despicably in Hollywood Western movies (with racist frauds like John Wayne often playing the role of the valiant White savior) to justify the genocidal actionsand the land-theft of White-Europeans. Similar methods, like the American minstrel tradition, where White actors wore blackface, were used to denigrate African-Americans.

D.W Griffiths 1915 silent film Birth of a Nation did much to criminalize African-Americans in the minds of Whites. One of the films main charge is portraying Black men as the serial rapists of White women. The historical records show us that White men are, in fact, the main serial rapists in American societywho got plenty of practice raping Black women over the centuries.

President Woodrow Wilson, one of Americas most racist presidents, gave a viewing of this contemptible piece of propaganda in the White House. Reportedly, (some contest this) he said, of this character assassination movie, "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

In terms of the contemporary criminalization of Blacks by White America, we must understand this: the statistics these folks use to justify the bogus claim, that Blacks commit more crime, is largely manufactured and manipulated to create the desired results. Dr. Amos Wilson, in his book Black-on-Black Violence: The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in Service of White Domination, pointed out that these crime statistics are used to create the false and scandalous impression that African-Americans have some sort of monopoly on crime and are inherently more criminal than are White Americans. Over the years, weve heard much talk about Black-on-Black crime. This malicious characterization seeks to give the deceitful impression that Blacks commit crimes against Blacks at higher rates than other racial groups do against their own. Of course, this is false stereotypingand is an example of the racist mindset of those who have always criminalized Blacks, by finding devious ways to promote prejudice.

Relevant statistics show us that crime, in America, happens, largely, within all racial groups. The segregated nature of American society has much to do with this reality. Some also like to insinuate that Black-Americans are prone to attacking White-Americans at high rates, a claim white supremacist killer Dylann Roof (who murdered 9 Black parishioners on June 17, 2015, in South Carolina) made. However, the reverse is true: Blacks are more likely to be the target of vicious racist attacks by Whites.

From the days of Slavery, to the days when KKK nightriders went around lynching Blacks, thru the Jim Crow Era, to the present where police murder us with impunity in 21st Century America, Whites have always had an obsessive penchant for shedding Black blood. Indeed, murdering Black people was a rites-of-passage for White men and boys.

Today, we now have other traditionally non- White people deciding they too can arbitrarily kill Black people. Such was the case when wannabe cop, George Zimmerman, killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida.

Read more from the original source:
THE ROOTS OF RACISM IN AMERICAN POLICING: FROM SLAVE PATROLS TO STOP-AND FRISK (BOOK EXCERPT #1) - Black Star News