“Black-ish” on (Black) Men and a Lost Little Girl

I was recently at Disney and I noticed a small child, maybe 2 or 3 years old, just sobbing, and he didn’t appear to be with anyone. I went over to him and tried to talk to him, asked him where his mommy and daddy were, but he just kept sobbing and would not talk or even look at me. I stayed with him for about 3 minutes, hoping someone would come looking for him, but nobody came. I picked him up, he was still sobbing. Nobody stopped me, I assume people probably thought he was my kid having a meltdown. I was heading off to find security or a lost child area when the frantic parents showed up, looking for the kid. My husband, who was a few feet away from me, heard them, said ‘We found a kid!’ and yelled for me. I turned around, gave the kid to the parents, and all was well. They were so relieved. I am a middle aged white female. I wonder what might have happened if I were some other demographic.

“I am a middle aged white female. I wonder what might have happened if I were some other demographic.”

if you’d been a man of any skin colour you’d have been arrested for child abduction and placed on several pedophile watch lists, never to be taken off of them even though a court MIGHT let you off.
After changing your name, moving to another country, and serious plastic surgery to change your looks, you’re finally free from the “concerned citizens” harassing you, vandalising your property, and sending your anonymous death threats regularly, only to have a mayor announce your presence as a “pedophile” in his city and having it all start again from scratch.

Great clip from Black-ish. The great thing about it: it’s funny because it’s true.

That is PRICELESS!!!

Black folks do get more petty ticket stops than white folks. Black boys can’t have half the dumb harmless mistakes that white ones get. Black girls get called prostitutes even if they dress nice. White girls only when dealing with the fashion police. I think it goes back slavery.they can’t be people because then no free labor and animals work for free. But then the law said they are not going to be slaves anymore and treating animals like their people is a problem.

I’ve helped a toddler who was lost by picking them up and looking for the parents as well but as another commenter said it’s much safer for me to help bc I am neither male nor a minority. I hope if my kids ever need help they get help, from anyone!, instead of being ignored and left to fend for themselves bc of paranoia, racism and idiocy.

I was under the impression that this fear of helping little kids was a male thing rather than a black male thing, so I was surprised that the white men apparently didn’t understand the problem. (So why didn’t THEY help her?)

(Kinda ironic that I saw some familiar faces from series like CSI and Law & Order… :-X )

I don’t remember if this story was covered on this blog, but apparently interracial families can catch some heat, too. http://www.alternet.org/how-racism-turned-interracial-familys-trip-walmart-kidnapping-investigation

In Lenore’s clip, the man could at least run away. What if the little girl had been his step-daughter? What would people assume any time he took her out in public?

We could make a whole game out of these race-and-gender scenarios. Using my link above, let’s pull a gender bender. A white woman married to a black man taking her kids to Walmart wouldn’t get that kind of harassment. Only men are perpetrators, after all.

A woman of a minority race taking white kids who “don’t match” to Walmart would be presumed to be a nanny before anyone considers that she may be a step-mother, foster mother, adoptive mother, or even rogue kidnapper. After all, look what happened when people assumed that this Korean mom with a white husband was a nanny. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robert-kelly-wife-not-nanny_us_58c5c53ee4b0ed71826d54fc

Let’s speculate: What racist and/or sexist assumptions would emerge if we replaced the black man in the video with a Korean woman? Ah! That irresponsible nanny lost track of her client’s daughter! If the adult were a white woman? You horrible mother! How dare you let your child out of site in an elevator where an evil black man could get her?

I double-checked my calendar. It is indeed 2017, 43 years after the Civil Rights Act. Yet we still find ourselves explaining interracial families. And that penis-bearer =/= child abductor.

“Robin, in the parable of the Good Samaritan […]”

Any secular discussion of the Parable of the Good Samaritan should include a reference to “Lost in Non-translation”, an essay on the subject by Isaac Asimov.

The short version: To Jesus’ audience, there was no such thing as a “good” Samaritan. Opinions varied from “we should kill them all” to “I guess we should let them live, as long as they stay out of our way”.

@lightbright: “After all, look what happened when people assumed that this Korean mom with a white husband was a nanny.”
Hah, I thought so too, though she was probably described as such in the description? Don’t remember.
Anyway, now that I see it again in a similarly tiny screen without pausing, I could just as well say I’m biased to believe that slender women with ponytails who storm into rooms like that are likely in their twenties or so > therefore at a glance half the age of that man > therefore likely not his wife.
And sure, those are biases too, but just to say that not *everything* is race.

On a related note, I once turned on the TV in the middle of a scene in the interrogation room of a police station. Two men were there, one on each side of the table, one black guy in casual/gym clothes, one white guy in a suit. I was very surprised when the *first* guy turned out to be the policeman. Now, don’t tell me I’m the only one who’d assume the detective would be the one in the suit!

If the black man also owned a white van he would have been in even more danger!

@Theresa Hall

It did fail in several situations. Many innocent people were in prison for years after the Day Care Ritual Sex Abuse Hysteria. There were 7-8 Daycare cases in California (ground zero) alone before the Hysteria spread to the rest of the country.

Unfortunately several “experts” (therapists, doctors, feminists/advocates, etc) were a large part of the problem. The woman hired to do the physical exams & look for signs of abuse at McMartin Daycare (Astrid Something or another…) had never conducted an exam of that nature before. She ended up saying 360 some of the 400 kids she had examined showed signs of physical abuse. When other doctors later reviewed he work they found only a couple did, and the abuse was at the hands of their parents. None of the kids were being given therapy by the large number of therapists that descended upon the daycares either. They were being interrogated and told to go home and practice saying things the therapists had told them.

Teens were targeted as well. I rewatched Paradise Lost parts 1-3 last weekend. People might remember the name Damien Echols. He and 2 of his friends were arrested for the horrible assault and murder of three 8 year old boys in 1993. That was near the end of the Hysteria but it was still horrible.

People were convinced it was a Satanic Ritual Killing and Damien was a teen who listened to metal and wore black. That’s the exact reason why 5 of my friends were expelled from high school 2 years prior to this case. The principal told them they were Devil worshippers and threats to other students because of these things. There were numerous self proclaimed experts telling parents that your kid wearing heavy metal, punk, black clothes and converse meant they were slipping into the occult and needed to be reprogrammed.

Anywho, they were railroaded. Damien was sentenced to lethal injection at 19 and his 16 & 18 year old friends were given life. The documentaries are (graphic) good. They are filmed over several years (17) of appeals.

When it comes to blind parental hysteria everyone is screwed.

P.S… Not that blind parental hysteria was the only thing involved. It was absolutely a large part, but there were also several groups and people involved that had agendas. The media attention alone was enough for some to push it and try to win. It was a 3 ring circus that ranged from reasonable sounding accusations of abuse to children being flushed down toilets to secrecy rooms where they watched Satanic rituals. Most of those were made by mentally ill people.

It’s often surprising to people that many involved were not really religious. One of the best ways I heard it explained was that the panics had a lack of God and a clear devil.

I don’t know much about the other cases just the Keller one. It a Shane those poor people can’t fully move on because the DA won’t say innocent. She admits that there is no proof of guilt but won’t just say they were wrong in the first place. I still wonder how a doctor could graduate medical school without knowing what little girls look like downstairs. I hope someday those poor people are fully free.

“take action against crazy parents and feminists in self defense”

Feminists? The people who want equality for males and females, so both genders can help little girls in elevators without getting vilified?

Papilo… James is from Portland. You need say no more.

Radical Feminist played a large and well documented role in the Ritual Sex Abuse Hysteria/Satanic Panic that can easily be comfrined by documentaries, video footage, interview, articles, Ms magazine covers… it’s not a secret.

I have to wonder what James must think about the articles Lenore shares written by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who is highly critical of anti pornography and prostitution radical feminists long standing relationship, and institutionalized moral crusades, they share with religious fundamentalists.

White female here. I was at the airport once and found a crying kid, who I happened to know! I was his preschool teacher. After asking an airport employee where to go, I started walking with him towards the security area. I saw kids mom then 2 or 3 police officers whisked the kid away from me. And then I walked away. I found myself asking “Well, aren’t they worried I’m abducting him?”

I should have added… this is not how the porn wars end, as the TP article suggests. They are just starting to get good again with radical feminists behind the wheel.

Gail Dines has been declared the new Andrea Dworkin, Cat MacKinnon’s former partner in censorship, and she has been traveling the globe speaking on the dangers of porn since 2010. Gail, a self proclaimed Marxist RadFem (see mentioned Think Progress article) and women’s studies professor in Boston, not a medical professional, has taken it upon herself to declare pornography a Public Health Crisis that is grooming all the children for a life of sex trafficking.

Something, according the Gail, horrible and lazy parents who do not care about their children have allowed to happen.

Of course religious politicians and public figures filed in line and several states have declared porn a public health crisis and started writing legislation to block or ban “obscene content”. Considering the hang up Gail and many others seem to have with rates R movies, I’m curious to see who gets to define what is obscene.

It’s the same stuff, different day. “Trigger”, pardon “content warnings” were developed so parents could have an guide on what was or was not appropriate for their children. As many warned throughout the 70s & 80s… this would never be enough.

From an 2016 Atlantic article titled HOW UTAH DECLARED PORNOGRAPHY A PUBLUC HEALTH CRISIS…

In 2010, Arkansas psychologist Ana Bridges and colleagues scrutinized 304 scenes that they would deem in a scientific journal to be “popular pornographic videos.” The researchers were looking for aggression. It was not rare; 88 percent of the scenes contained what the experts deemed physical aggression, defined in the academic journal as “principally spanking, gagging, and slapping.” Nearly half contained verbal aggression, usually from men toward women, who “most often showed pleasure or responded neutrally to the aggression.”

To sociologist Gail Dines, a self-identifying radical feminist and “anti-porn advocate,” these findings added to a body of evidence that she deemed conclusive. Dines believes that non-coercive pornography cannot exist in a capitalist society, where sex-based media will always lead to an industry that becomes a violent manifestation of structural inequalities. In The Washington Post this weekend, Dines wrote a column that spread widely: “Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter: It’s a Public-Health Crisis.”

The divisive proclamation was occasioned by a bill passed last month in Utah declaring pornography to be “a public-health crisis.” The bill, like the phrase, traces back to Dines, who has spoken and lectured on the evils of pornography around the world. In 2013, Dines traveled to Reykjavik, where she met with Iceland’s Ministers of health and welfare amid country’s campaign to ban pornography. The move would have put the liberal state—with an openly lesbian prime minister and a gender-pay gap that is the lowest in the world—in the company of Saudi Arabia and the countries where gender disparities are greatest. But it made sense to many as a matter of public health.

Dines honed this approach—framing pornography not as a subject of moral decree but as an urgent issue of tangible detriment to human bodies and mind — in high-level meetings in Poland and Canada. In 2015, she returned her focus to the U.S., relaunching an advocacy group based in Boston with the new mission to “eradicate porn’s harms because porn has quickly escalated into an overlooked public health crisis.”

^^ It’s still an argument of morality. Most of the research they assert is conducted by highly ideological special interest groups with a long history in moral crusades against obscene content. They are simply trying to reframe/rebrand the conversation and promote trafficking hysteria around it, and to implement human trafficking laws surrounding it