7/2/09 - Joyce Asabor, a woman of African descent, formerly employed as an RN at the Beacon of Hope House in Staten Island, is suing Beacon of Hope, the Archdiocese of New York, Catholic Charities, and four BHH employees, Dennis Scimone, Anne Tommaso, Joy Jasper and Ron Morgan.  Hearing about this case, currently being prepared for trial, sparked the following thoughts.

I have the same relationship toward Staten Island as I have toward Oklahoma or Nebraska:  better viewed through a window on a passing train.  Better still, from high above in the clouds.  I have often wondered if this was justified, or if in fact I had allowed my own prejudices to cloud my judgment.  After all, I have never actually been to those states, instead allowing those largely artificial media constructs omnipresent during national political campaigns, the “red states” (voting heavily republican) and “blue states” (voting heavily democratic) to shape my own imperceptions.  And then I went to Staten Island. 

Like Nebraska or Oklahoma or Arizona, Staten Island always existed in my New York City world as the “out there”, the “across the…”, in the land of “oh, yeah…”.  Simply off the beaten track of my bustling subway transits through the metropolis.  More than that; frankly, I identify these places as threats to my personal safety.  Unlike Nebraska or Oklahoma, I regarded Staten Island as simply physically inaccessible (ferry? Who needs a ferry?).  The specter of the 2005 beatings  in Howard Beach, the 1998 murder of Wyoming teen Matthew Shepard, and the Texas truck dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. of the same year are normally more than enough to keep me watching my back.  Yet, to my mind, Howard Beach is an isolated area. 

Body Shape of James Bydr. Jr. 6/13/1998

The rights of gay people are typically regarded as unrelated to the rights of ethnic minorities (a mistake in my opinion and others’—witness the fact that a 2007 march in the city protesting the Shepard murder bristled with placards linking the anti-gay lynching of Shepard to the racist lynching in June 2007 of Byrd Jr.).  And Texas?  Everybody where I come from—central Virginia—knows enough to stay out of rural Texas.  So, despite such incidents, I still regarded the five boroughs as my own potential playground.

Then came the incident at Columbia University in 2007, in which someone hung a noose over the office door of an African American professor at Columbia University Teachers College. The professor, Madonna Constantine, taught a course on racial justice.  Though there are questions as to the rapidity with which Prof. Constantine was willing to employ ‘the race card’, and though she was eventually fired for plagiarizing the works of students and others,  this in no way diminishes the seriousness of the hate crime.  As University of Pennsylvania professor John L. Jackson has written in the Chronicle on Higher Education (Brainstorm at Chronicle.com, April 24, 2009), “Racism can be both a dangerous weapon for marginalization/demonization and a mere simulation of reality at one and the same time, both genuinely real and a parody.”  In the end, Columbia University student Mikayla Graham got to the crux of the matter when she said, “You would think, Columbia being such a diverse campus and New York being such a diverse city, it shouldn’t happen here.”  You would think.  Graham could as easily have been referring to the case against Prof. Constantine as to any of the incidents previously mentioned.

The Columbia incident occurred on the heals of the hate-crime arrest of a ‘white’ woman accused of hanging a noose over a tree limb and threatening a ‘black’ family living next door in Queens. The police task force commander investigating that case noted that the two incidents were “the first noose cases in recent memory” in the city.  Noose cases.  Uh-huh.