I think it is very sad that he has to defend himself. The media has always portrayed him to be at fault for Whitney’s downfall. Was Whitney the only celebrity to have a drug problem? Hell no. But Bobby became the poster child for people being blamed for another person’s drug use, like Yoko Ono became the poster child for the reason Jon Lennon got shot.

Britney Spears had a great reputation before she met Kevin Federlien. A few years later, she was committed to the psychiatric ward at UCLA Medical Center. The relationship received intense attention from the media, but that was because he had another woman pregnant when they announced their engagement. Public opinion was that Britney was losing her mind, not that Kevin Federlien was bringing her down. The media made him out to be the good stable guy taking care of the kids.

Lindsey Lohan had drug issues; you heard people criticizing her parents, but she was a teenager and they are her parents. If Bobbie Brown was Whitney’s daddy, then Cissie got some explaining to do.

Are we going to blame the hookers and strippers for Charlie Sheen’s drug use?

Are you going to blame the ghost of Charlie Chapman for Robert Downing Jr’s downfall?

Should David Hasselhoff blame the hamburglar or his daughter for his addiction problems?

But, seriously, the entertainment industry has hundreds of drug users going back to the Wyatt Earp. And by the way, his first wife died from an opium overdose. But nobody ever blamed Wyatt. No where in the history books do you see him being labeled as an enabler.

Whitney has stated more than once, she started doing drugs at 19, LONG before she’d even met Bobby. Whitney was a grown woman, who made the decision to do drugs. She was NOT as squeaky clean as most people would love to THINK. Those are the people who can’t separate entertainment from the real world. As a result of HER choices, she is now dead… NOT Bobby’s fault; end of story!

RIP Whitney

The Latino gang members were looking for a Black person, any Black person, to shoot, and they found one. Cheryl, perched near her scooter chatting with friends, was shot dead. The gang members were members of the 204th Street gang that targeted African Americans, and the shooting was an act of ignorant racial hatred. Why? Because according to authorities, acting on orders from the Mexican Mafia, Latino gang members in Southern California were terrorizing and killing innocent Blacks, all based on propaganda bullshit about drugs being stolen. Can you believe that one minority group would be practicing ethnic cleaning against another minority in the 2000s? This is no different from when back in the 1890s the Klan made up excuses that some Black man raped a White women to get dumb ass members fired up to go lynch any Black person. Only in America and I don’t mean that in a Don King way.

Regardless of their lies, Cheryl didn’t have to die. She was a good student, a good kid, had good grades, was liked and had a tremendous amount of potential.  She had a good family who, like Trayvon’s Martin parents, petitioned the media and called for justice in the name of their young one. (One of the things that had many activists in an uproar and even screaming conspiracy from the onset was the length of time it took for the media to broadcast the screams of Trayvon’s family.)

However, after Cheryl was shot, no news ever hit the mainstream media.  Did they run out of paper? Ink?  Oh maybe the editor has been on vacation for the last SIX YEARS.  Why hasn’t she become a household name and a rallying cry for justice?  Why has she not become a symbol of racial hate in America and victimized Black women as Trayvon has become a symbol for the war on our young men?

Today in every vestige of the media, the dark skinned woman is relegated to the background.  Making Cheryl’s story front page news, while it unfortunately wouldn’t bring the child back to her mother, would have reinforced the fact that not all victims are White women.  Just as there is outrage when stereotypes personified by fictional characters cost a child his life, just as there is a collective whimper of pity when a beautiful White girl is kidnapped and murdered (Jon Benet Ramsey, Natalie Holloway) there should be justice and protection for the thousands of little Black girls who are kidnapped, raped, murdered, or otherwise become innocent victims of criminals. 

As it stands, there are three types of stories in which Black women as victims make the news.  One is if the perpetrator is related to the victim, typically a Black man: husband ,boyfriend, or father.  This situation adds to the stereotype that Black men are violent sex crazed monsters. The second is if the victim has a peppered past. You know drugs, welfare or she is a stripper.  Maybe she likes lycra and lace. Whatever the case, she asked for it by enticing the offender. The third is…. You know what? I’m too upset right now to tell you the third ill focus on Cheryl: she was a regular eighth grader who loved junk food and watching Court TV with her mother and had recently written a poem beginning: “I am Black and beautiful. I wonder how I will be living in the future.”

But the media, instead of reflecting the obvious public sentiment, has held their ground: they are waiting for the facts. This is always what happens when you have a major story that involves a Black victim and non-Black suspect. It’s hard to imagine that they truly believe that we don’t see the pattern when they run the same plays every time. 

Play One:  He’s not one of us. They begin by repeatedly pointing out that Zimmerman is not White or he is part Hispanic. So part one of the playbook has been very effectively accomplished. They have managed to separate the wrongdoer from the White community as a whole. Usually, this is accomplished by telling about the criminal’s unusually tragic childhood or some other stereotypically ethnic characteristic. This time, they were able to use the murderer’s driver’s license.

Part Two: This involves the sheer time lapse between the crime and the reporting, hoping that no one will want to relive their tragedy over and over. Many White on Black crimes go unreported in the mainstream media. It’s not exactly scientific, but try comparing the crime blotter on the back page of your newspaper, with the crime statistics in your area and put that data beside your local headlines. The differences will be glaring.  Also, they will use rhetorical questions as headlines to paint negative mental images.  Ex: Was Treyvon Martin a drug dealer?

Part Three: Give the crook an excuse at the time of the incident, something of a moral alibi. When recordings of the 911 call were initially released, it was with the intent to show that Zimmerman contacted authorities and provided a chain of events. If it were known that Trayvon was captured screaming for help, you never would have heard it. The scary part is now that millions have heard the recording, and very few of us are experts, will there be some legal trick to keep that evidence concealed when and if this goes to trial?

Having failed to make progress with these three tactics, they are holding out for the Hail Mary, trying to run 40 yards in just one play:  smearing the victim. They haven’t found the gap that they will be able to slip through yet; but it’s coming. You can be sure that if Trayvon broke his 3^rd grade girlfriend’s heart by giving her a purple lollipop instead of a red one on Valentine’s Day, we will eventually hear about it. And if that doesn’t work in time to smear the Black community, by showing Black crime, Fox news will run their Black on Black crime report. CNN will run their Black and drug stories and the local news around the country will just camp out in Black crime-ridden areas and wait until they find a story to balance it out so there can’t be any sympathy for a Black victim. That’s why the story of a young Black girl playing in her yard shot by a racist Hispanic in Los Angles never became a big story, or the Tulsa Shootings are still not getting the coverage the Trayvon story is getting. And there were five Black victims. Oh that’s right. They are still gathering all the facts.  

We know it is coming because the media has such a long record of doing just this sort of thing. When the victim is Black and the suspect is White, and it’s a high profile case, they always say “Let’s wait for the facts. What that really means is “Let’s wait til the media or cops can find something negative on the victim to sway public opinion.”  For example, if there is a rape case and the suspect is Black, they show all these innocent pictures of the girl smiling with her friends and family. But if the suspect is White, they paint the “she was asking for it” picture with the short skirt, and heavy makeup, and her drinking at parties and you get a visual of his mother crying and saying that he has always a good boy. See, what the media is trying to do is give people doubt. 

That’s why the story of the Black family man who was minding his own business being shot by the police never becomes a big story; it has to be a story that both sides can sympathize with. Every day a Black female accuses a White male of rape in this country on some college campus, or some corporate office. But there have only been two of these cases that became mainstream media stories: the “Duke Lacrosse Rape Case” and the “Twanna Brawley” one. Why? Because the victims had shaky backgrounds. If the victims would have been from a good hard-working Black family who goes to church every day, you would never hear that stories. The many cases of the sisters in the college library, or the one in the corporate copy room who gets assaulted never see the headlines, mostly because it’s harder to gather the “facts” on hard working women with college degrees. When you ask people, why do you think the media doesn’t cover stories of little black kids being kidnapped? Some will try to come up with excuses, but most can’t say anything about an innocent kid being kidnapped. Oh wait, they have a play for that too. Let’s gather facts. Let’s wait to see if their parents have criminal backgrounds or if there are some drugs around.

Think about this: Two White females are murdered (allegedly) by their famous husbands and both husbands are found not guilty of the murders. The media paints one as a great mother and innocent and the other female is painted as a gold digger. Can you guess which woman was married to O.J. and which was married to Robert Blake?

Recently, at the 2012 all-star game, Sean “P-Diddy” Combs grabbed the microphone and yelled “Black power.” This started a big rant across the Internet about “if a White person had done that, he would be considered a racist.” (Why do they always play the “if a White person done this or that” card?) However, on the surface, that might be true. But there are a lot of things White people can do that Blacks can’t (like drive through a neighborhood where they are the minority without being stopped by the police or shot at by self-appointed assassins). There is another reason why there is a double standard and it’s not just because of the history of racism. It’s because of the history of both movements.