LiLSpeedy's Blog

(Reuters) - U.S. Representative Michael Grimm of New York, who pleaded guilty last week to a federal felony tax charge, is expected to resign from office in coming days, published reports said Monday.

Grimm spoke privately on Monday with Republican leaders about the decision, sources told the Washington Post and Politico.

Grimm could hand in his resignation as early as next Tuesday, the reports said.

Following his guilty plea, Grimm said publicly he had no intention of stepping down.

Daniel Rashbaum, one of Grimm's lawyers, declined to comment on the reports.

A spokesman for House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner told Reuters he could not confirm Grimm's plans.

Grimm pleaded guilty in Brooklyn federal court on Dec. 23 to aiding the preparation of a false tax return in connection with a health food restaurant, Healthalicious, that he co-owned before his political career.

As part of a plea deal, Grimm also signed a statement of facts, admitting to concealing over $900,000 in gross receipts from 2007 to 2010 and lying during a 2013 deposition.

Boehner has not publicly called for Grimm's resignation, but House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi last week said the Republican leadership must "must insist that Congressman Grimm resign immediately."

The 44-year-old former Marine and FBI agent easily won a third term in office in November. His resignation would set up a 2015 battle for his House seat, which covers parts of Staten Island and Brooklyn.

He faces a maximum of three years in prison when he is sentenced on June 8.

Author; Editor; Speaker; Activist

I don’t understand. I just don’t.

I’ve watched the Eric Garner tape for what seems like the hundredth time, and I don’t understand how we not only tolerate, but go to great lengths to make excuses for, a system that disproportionately kills young black men. I saw the tape. And while I realize that video tape isn’t a panacea, in that it is the product of a series of framing choices that doesn’t always allow for a full understanding of context, still, I saw that man killed. I heard him say, “I can’t breathe.”

And I don’t understand.

Should the fact that the police have chosen a vocation rife with peril offer that much latitude when it comes to violence? Shouldn’t the fact that we extend that latitude in acknowledgement of the danger they face mean that they should be more rather than less accountable--which is to say, more prepared to defend that latitude when they exercise it?

The reason I ask those two questions is because, to the extent that you issue an expanded license to inflict violence, you automatically raise questions of abuse when you fail to account publicly for each use of it. A social contract cannot retain the ties that bind it together when part of the population always seems to draw the short straw when it comes to the application of power.

Because, here’s the thing: Racism isn’t just people intending other people harm because of the color of their skin. Racism is toleration of (and, therefore, participation in) a system that routinely disadvantages people because of their race. In other words, it’s entirely possible to be racist without intending to be. That’s why we so often encounter racist statements that begin with “I’m not a racist, but … " --which then go on to use racist placeholders like“thug” or “inner city” or “you people.”

And I take (most) people at their word--that they don’t consider themselves racist. But whether you feel like a racist is largely beside the point. If you prop up a system--either actively or passively, through silence--which regularly negatively impacts non-white people, you’re a racist.

That you don’t belong to the KKK, or sport a Confederate flag license plate, or call people appalling epithets is a step in the right direction.

That you have a friend of a different race is laudable.

That you like Martin Luther King, Jr., and have a soft spot in your heart for his “I Have a Dream” speech is wonderful thing.

But none of those things get you off the hook.

Because you can do all of those things and still make excuses for a system that repeatedly refuses to hold white police officers accountable for abusing, and too often killing, people of color.

Because you can talk all you want about being “color blind,” while still unconsciously assuming that middle class white lives are the standard against which all other lives are to be measured.

Because you can feel sympathy in your heart for Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and their families, but still assume that if they were killed, the bulk of the blame must lay with them--since they had obviously questionable elements in their past or in their character, since they shouldn’t have questioned their treatment at the hands of someone with a gun who was (or claimed to be) in a position of authority, since maybe they shouldn’t have been where they were looking all menacing with their hoodies and scary giant man-bodies.

Because you can talk about how everyone gets the same fair shake in our “post-racial” society, but still give the benefit of the doubt to a system that incarcerates African Americans at six times the rate of whites; a system where African Americans and Hispanics comprise 60 percent of the prison population, while comprising only 25 percent of the total population; a system that is three times more likely to arrest an African American person than a white person; and where estimates suggest that two African American people per week are gunned down by white police officers.

Feeling strongly that you’re not a racist isn’t enough. Avoiding using overtly racial stereotypes and epithets isn’t enough. Not being “prejudiced” isn’t enough.

Whether or not it’s intended, if the practical effects of a system over time continually disadvantage one race to the benefit of another, it’s a racist system. If you think a system that’s obviously weighted to keep those in charge … in charge … is fair, and that any fault in it can always be traced to poor choices made by individuals, whether you feel like it or not, you’re a racist.

Now, me calling you a racist under that description of racism isn’t a value judgment about you personally (I don’t even know you); it’s merely an observation about the criteria necessary to establish that racism exists, and that otherwise nice folks (Christian or not) are up to their eyeballs in it.

But here’s the thing that keeps occurring to me: If you find that you’re continually defending yourself from charges of racism, maybe it’s you who needs to reexamine your relationship to race, and not a demonstrably disproportionately disadvantaged group of folks who need continually to reexamine their relationship to you.

Look, I take no pleasure in pointing this out, since it means I also have to contend with my own grievous complicity in a racist system. 

WASHINGTON (RNS) “African-American brothers and sisters, especially brothers, in this country are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be executed, more likely to be killed.”

It’s the kind of statement that’s often cited by black clergy and civil rights activists. But hours after a grand jury on Wednesday (Dec. 3) chose not to indict the New York City police officer who put Eric Garner into a fatal choke hold on Staten Island, those words came from none other than white evangelical leader Russell Moore.

With back-to-back grand jury decisions that white police officers will not face charges in the deaths of unarmed black men, white Christians, including evangelicals, have grown more vocal in urging predominantly white churches to no longer turn a blind eye to injustice and to bridge the country’s racial divides.

“It’s time for us in Christian churches to not just talk about the gospel but live out the gospel by tearing down these dividing walls not only by learning and listening to one another but also by standing up and speaking out for one another,” said Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Other white evangelicals issued similar pleas.

“I weep & pray for his family,” tweeted Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, the day before he led a prayer for justice at his school in Wake Forest, N.C. “I beg our God to bring good out of this tragedy.”

“’Love your neighbor as yourself’ means you picture yourself being choked and surrounded by five men while you say, ‘I can’t breathe,’” tweeted Scott Slayton, a white Southern Baptist pastor in Chelsea, Ala.

The Rev. Alan Cross, a white pastor in Montgomery, Ala., said the publicized video of Garner’s choke hold has moved some white Christians to speak when they might not have after Officer Darren Wilson was cleared in the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Cross is encouraging them to not just speak but listen to black people’s perspectives instead of only considering their own.

“What often happens when white evangelicals try to speak into this is that we continue to think first in terms of our own position,” said Cross, a Southern Baptist and author of “When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus.”

“We should consider what people in the black community are saying, what are they going through, what is their experience.”

Cross and others went online in the hours after the Garner decision to share how blacks were reacting. Author Barnabas Piper chose to post what others were saying about Ferguson and Garner on his blog, saying as “a young white man” he wasn’t in the best position to explain it all.

“Put yourself in the shoes of the authors and immerse yourself in the experiences they describe,” he wrote. “You and I need to do so if we want to contribute anything to stopping injustice and closing the racial gap that exists.”

The Rev. Barbara Williams-Skinner, co-chair of the National African-American Clergy Network, sees a growing interest among white Christians and others to speak up about the “pile on” of events capped with the Garner decision.

“It just so offends the human spirit of people of every race that it compels them to act,” she said. “We don’t have to ask young white students and young white adults anymore to act. They understand … if the system will so violate the rights of people of color today, they will violate everybody’s rights tomorrow.”

She had already witnessed an interest across races in the Ferguson events when her network’s planned letter on justice from black church leaders took on a more interracial feel.

Even before the Garner decision, the progressive Christian group Sojourners had gathered 50 leaders, including black clergy and white evangelicals, for a retreat on Tuesday and Wednesday that included a “historic pilgrimage of racialized St. Louis” and a discussion of theological implications for “our nation’s broken justice system.”

“There were white evangelicals in the room in Ferguson who were weeping when the Garner decision came down,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder of the Washington-based social justice group.

White Christians beyond evangelicalism added their voices to the outcry about the ruling.

“The degradation and demeaning of black life must stop,” said Serene Jones, president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary. “What the hell kind of country do we live in?”

Moore, noting some of the reaction after he called for racial reconciliation in the wake of the Ferguson strife, said some white Christians see no reason to speak up for better race relations.

“I have gotten responses, and seen responses, that are right out of the White Citizens’ Council material from 1964 in my home state of Mississippi, seeing people saying there is no gospel issue involved with racial reconciliation,” he said in a podcast.

He doesn’t agree with them.

“Are you kidding me? There is nothing that is clearer in the New Testament than the fact that the gospel breaks down the dividing walls that we have between one another.”

Jason Ross, a writer for The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, kicked off the hashtag on Wednesday afternoon when he tweeted his own criminal past—a past that did not result in his being shot (as Michael Brown was) or choked to death (as Eric Garner was) by a police officer.

“Busted 4 larceny at 11. At 17, cited for booze + caught w gun @ school. No one called me a thug. Can’t recommend being white highly enough,” wrote Ross. He then asked other white people to share their stories of getting away with crime because of racial privilege.

Thousands of tweets later, the unverifiable stories paint a clear picture of just how differently law enforcement officers tend to treat white Americans who commit crimes.

In light of the deaths of Brown and Garner, those tweeted incidents, and the countless similar ones, should raise the eyebrows of any American who cares about justice. But the sad reality is that in America black folks don’t have to commit a crime to experience harassment, abuse, or death at the hands of police officers.

Just ask the 5 million mostly black and Latino and supposedly suspicious New York City residents who experienced stop-and-frisk treatment at the hands of the NYPD. Most were found with no weapon on their person. (Mayor Bill de Blasio made reforming the controversial practice a key part of his election campaign.)

Remind yourself of the 1999 Bronx killing of Amadou Diallo, who was simply holding his wallet on the stoop of his building when NYPD officers decided to fire 41 shots simply because the immigrant father fit a description. And yes, those officers were acquitted.

Or feel free to watch the gruesome video of footage of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, the black child who was shot and killed by police on Nov. 23 while playing with a toy gun in a park in Cleveland.

That’s why in response to #CrimingWhileWhite, Ebony editor Jamilah Lemieux started the hashtag #AliveWhileBlack on Thursday.

Lemieux then asked her African American Twitter followers to share stories of being harassed by police while just going about their daily lives. The stories of injustice began pouring in.

Some Americans may still be tempted to say that Garner and Brown were nothing but thugs and criminals, and if the two men had simply complied with the directions of police officers, they’d still be alive. But #AliveWhileBlack also shows that in the eyes of some police officers, being black is crime enough. As for the disturbing stories being shared through #CriminingWhileWhite, they reveal to us that no matter what’s going on, many white people who are doing things that are against the law tend to come through their interactions with police unscathed. If that’s not an unjust double standard worth rallying and protesting against, what is?