Toya Graham, known as the woman in yellow who smacked and then dragged her 16-year-old son away from the protests in Baltimore has been getting a lot of attention. Some people have called her “mother of the year” and the police commissioner applauded her efforts. Graham has explained that she acted instinctively, not even realizing there were cameras rolling:
“That’s my only son, and at the end of the day, I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray.” … On Tuesday, she told CBS News, “there are some days that I shield him in the house just so he won’t go outside. I know I can’t do that for the rest of my life. He’s 16 years old, you know, he’s into the streets.”
What is clear is that Graham is being used as a pawn for people’s own personal agendas.
Team Blackness also discussed the Orioles game in an empty stadium, Chicago’s police brutality, and faith leaders who are demanding liberal Supreme Court justices sit out the marriage-equality debate.
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LWA (Liberal With Attitude)
That was my reaction when I started to see this exploding on my Facebook feeds from righty friends.
That instead of grasping that this woman wanted to spare her son from police brutality, they want to use her as a poster child for respect for Law&Order and Property Rights.
Sly
I didn’t think I could hate violence against children to an extent greater than I already do. Then scumbags decided to add a racist dynamic to violence against children (“See, this is the only thing that can control these thugs!”) and proved me wrong.
C.V. Danes
Note that the point that she was trying to make is that she didn’t want her 16 year old boy to wind up dead at the hands of the cops. Like Freddie Gray.
jl
I watched some interviews with her, and one with her and her son. Seemed like she is an intelligent thoughtful person who can make the good points and fend for herself. I also watched Dr. Phil try to explain real life to the Fox and Friends dolts and tools (not that Dr. Phil is the best person to do that, but hell, the requirements for being able to school Fox News hacks are not high).
So, thankfully, I did not see outright BS in the youtube clips I watched. But I have no doubt people will try to use her and the incident for racist and classist propaganda BS.
Edit: I will look for the vile O’Reilly clip when it shows up on the intertubes.
Fridaynext
I have a bunch of friends who loved this clip. Many of them have college age, or near college age kids. When the time comes I am going to ask them if they plan to go to their kid’s schools and monitor their behavior after a big game or a pumpkin festival. Since a lot of them have kids at University of Maryland, they will know the exact time and date their kids will be tempted to riot. Whenever their basketball team plays Duke. Win or lose. I expect them to go slap their kids around on national television when they start to riot. Of course, it’s always the other kids that do that. NEVER their own.
Scott S.
That was the first thing I thought — the wingnuts are so dumb, they don’t realize that the reason she didn’t want him out there was because the cops like to kill kids his age and skin color. By celebrating her, they acknowledge that Baltimore cops are dangerous and out of control — and they don’t even realize what they’re doing.
Keith G
She did what mothers should do, and fathers too. She did what my mother would have done.
Although I know this is probably an impossible dream, but I hope that both sides can applaud her initiative as a concerned parent and then just leave her the fuck alone to raise her family as she sees fit without any extra editorializing or otherwise intruding into her life.
Punchy
I suspect she’ll be harassed by the po-po for the foreseeable future. How dare she imply that the cops may also 86 her kid, too. On national TV. For the next 6 months, 2 mph over the limit and they’ll be Tazering her during the traffic stop.
Bullies dont take lightly to being shown up.
Derelict
Being a Black parent today means that no matter what you do, and no matter how your kid turns out, he or she is still fair game to get his or her life irreparably screwed by the cops. The kid could be an honor student on his way to becoming a Rhodes Scholar: One encounter with the cops and BAM! here’s an arrest record that makes the scholarships go away and renders the kid unemployable for decades if not life.
Or, of course, the cop could just shoot the kid dead.
C’mon wingers: Tell me more about how people just need to bootstrap themselves up out of poverty.
glory b
I was very frustrated with her appearance on CBS. She started to talk about the fact that she is a single mother of 6 kids and has recently lost her job and her understanding of the frustrations and sense of despair in her community and Charlie Rose interrupts her to say, “That’s some left hook you have! And how remarkable it was that her son respects her. WTF?
First, I think that it winds up with the narrative that the only way to deal with young black men is with force and physical violence.
I also believe that the jovial foxtards would secretly like to do the same but can’t/are too araid, so they pump up this woman’s actions.
Last, we avoid the knowlege that there is a lot of physical punishment used by black parents. As a black female with children, I avoided this, first, becasue I had a father who was a pricipal and saw how he was able to treat the kids in his schools, and becasue my kids were/are pretty compliant and easy going when they were coming up. I know lots of justify it, and we had that conversation after the Adrian Peterson abuse charge, so I won’t repeat it here.
As was stated then, black parents had to be ruthless enforcers of discipline, otherwise, they had Emmett Till as an example of what happened to disrespectful black males. Admiring the left hook used on a son avoids all of these issues.
Derelict
@Punchy: I fear there’s all too much truth to what you’ve written. How long before she gets arrested, or some crusading wingnut finds out that she once stood next to someone at a bus stop who knew some guy who was related to another guy’s brother who murdered someone?
Derelict
@glory b: Watching Charlie Rose was your first mistake. Rose’s entire interview style is basically to ramble for a minute or two, ask an inane question, then interrupt the answer to put his words in the subject’s mouth or to re-iterate how great Charlie Rose is.
rikyrah
O’Malley 2016 Just Committed Suicide in Baltimore
He was supposed to be Hillary’s main rival. But when Martin O’Malley rode back into his battered hometown, he was told to GTFO.
It could have been a breakthrough moment for former Governor Martin O’Malley.
A former mayor/governor/turned potential presidential contender cuts short a series of paid speeches in Europe to return to the still-smoldering city he once governed and where he still lives.
“I just wanted to be present. There’s a lot of pain in our city right now, a lot of people feeling very sad,” O’Malley said Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. “Look, we’ve got to come through this together. We’re a people who’ve seen worse days, and we’ll come through this day.”
But as he hopped in and out of a black Suburban that ferried him from neighborhood to neighborhood torn apart by fire, looters, and poverty, he just became a joke. Worse, for some people, he revealed himself to be a root cause of Baltimore’s problem.
“There are a lot of cameras here in town and some people are looking for attention,” Governor Larry Hogan said Wednesday afternoon. “I’m just focused on the crisis. I’m here to answer your questions, but we’re really here trying to heal the community.”
O’Malley was even heckled, according to the Post, as he walked around the streets.
A Baltimore police veteran talking with MSNBC on Wednesday afternoon took it a step further.
“If he’s coming back to town, you may see a riot,” retired Baltimore police officer Neill Franklin said. “I would encourage him to not come to Baltimore.”
One former Maryland Democratic official, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about O’Malley, said his return to Baltimore only hurts his chances for 2016 because it reminds voters elsewhere how unpopular O’Malley was in the state when he left.
“If you look up the street to Philadelphia or you look down the street to Washington, D.C.—those cities have really turned the corner and Baltimore has not turned the corner. Going back there reminds everybody of that,” the official said. “If you are somebody in Iowa or New Hampshire and you are looking for the next president and you send a reminder that this was the city you were mayor of, and you are sitting in your living room in East Des Moines watching the city burning, and he says, ‘I can do for the country what I did for Baltimore’? I don’t think so.”
It became very clear that his staff’s insistence that his visit was not a photo-op was true. Or at least, the trip did not paint the picture that he had hoped.
O’Malley’s flirtation with the presidency and return to Charm City even sparked criticism from an old foe: David Simon.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/30/o-malley-2016-just-committed-suicide-in-baltimore.html?via=desktop&source=twitter
rikyrah
That mother was trying to save the life of her child.
Period.
Plain and simple.
jl
@Derelict:
From the interviews, she seems willing to say what she thinks. As soon as she falls out of the preferred teabagger, Fox News, and Mornin’ Joe propaganda narrative, she’ll get the treatment. Assuming they can sustain interested beyond a day or two.
@Keith G:
This liberal certainly applauds what she did. But even I, who tries to limit exposure to BS corporate media and Fox New, have already heard people saying stuff like ‘Well, if only more of ‘those people’ would lay down some slapping on their kids, this shit would not happen.”
Ruviana
Jared Plotkin
GOP Congressman Bill Flores says gay marriage is to blame for Baltimore riots! You should do a post on that insanity.
Tenar Darell
@rikyrah: One psychological option to terrible fear is anger. Seems quite sensible really in light of the obvious danger of the cops.
Oh, and Charlie Rose is a vanity interviewer who often inserts the answer he wants to hear right into his question. There’s a lot of interviewers like that. Even faux journalists can often get better answers by asking self-evidently “stupid” questions. I can’t watch his PBS show anymore because his questions are so bad I yell at the tv. (A corollary of old people yelling “get off my lawn” might actually be liberals yelling better questions at the tv).
Slugger
People, rioting young men included, are willing to put up with a lot including corporal punishment if they believe in the underlying beneficence of the authority figure. On the other hand, if one thinks that the authorities are fundamentally hostile to them, people will react violently to provocations. Now to apply these principles to policing, the Popo needs to at least stop killing people.
Gavin
Presented without comment:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish
ThresherK
Which Pittsburgh newspaper is the wingnut one? Because I’m getting links sent to me re a cartoonist named Bish at the Tribune Review where the police say “We’re calling your mothers!”
kc
@Fridaynext:
Do you really think your friends’ kids riot?
rikyrah
@Derelict:
simple truth here.
nina
I also noticed that she tried to bring up one of the root causes of the Mondawmin riots and was quickly shushed by the interviewers. She was there to get her son because the police stopped the school buses and blocked the streets so that there was a big crowd of teenagers who wanted to get home but couldn’t without going through police.
Oh, but tell us again how you whupped him!
burnspbesq
@Fridaynext:
Not very much to worry about there. Unless ESPN makes it happen (as part of the ACC-B1G Challenge), there will be no Duke – Maryland games for a very, very long time.
burnspbesq
@kc:
Fuck yes they riot. Ask the business owners on Route 1 in College Park, or the PG County cops.
Chris
@Scott S.:
Well, the other way to look at it is that this’ll go down as “good mother beats the crap out of kid, vindicating those of us who believe that hitting hard and good parenting would have prevented this!” and that everything she’s trying to say will go completely ignored.
Ten years from now she’ll be the punchline of a Cracked.com article: “6 People Whose Actions Were Immortalized (By People Who Completely Misunderstood Their Message).”
LanceThruster
I see a lot of smug satisfaction with the attitude of, “Beat your kid so the cops don’t have to.” I think that both misrepresents and ignores what’s really going on.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: Yeah, I think O’Malley’s done. Not that he had any chance of getting nominated anyway.
Plantsmantx
@nina:
Yes, and no one is going to be held accountable for that.