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Compiled by Africana Staff

[ebog note: Why is EBOG reposting old articles?]
This week on the A-List:

1. Donovan Jackson: Another Round of Videotaped Cops Get Off
What exactly does a black man assaulted by uniformed police officers have to do in order to get justice in an American court? The most obvious (and absurd) answers to that question -- get shot in the back on videotape, for example, or, at a lesser extreme, get beaten to a pulp on videotape -- are not so obvious, as the cases of Donovan Jackson and Rodney King have taught us, and the case of Marquis Hudspeth likely will. The mistrial declared last week in the LA trial of the two cops accused of beating 16-year-old Donovan Jackson while the teenager was handcuffed goes down with the King verdict as proof that there is no assault upon a black body that can't be excused by the claim that the big, bad, prone black man made their white batterer afeared for their safety, what with the way they were twitching and trying to escape the blows. "I feared for my safety" is the among the most consistent of white excuses for their irrational hatred of black men, the lie skipping backwards in time from King's case to that of NYC vigilante Bernard Goetz to countless lynchings. Next up: possible re-trial for the officers in the Jackson case in LA, while in Shreveport, LA, an entire county watches and re-watches the video tape of Marquis Hudspeth being shot repeatedly in the back while running away and prepares to debate the question of just how scared scared has to be for two armed white police officers to get off for shooting an unarmed, fleeing black man dead.

2. A Death in Florida: Southern Trees Still Bear Strange Fruit
The A-List believes in a bunch of things that others do not -- in voudon, in true love, in R. Kelly being a perv. We also believe in collective memory -- not just as a clever literary device utilized by Toni Morrison -- but as a real for true thing. Take the chilling image of the slack, defiled body of a black man hanging from the bough of a tree. We've never witnessed such a thing, but that we somehow know and share in the horror of it. And why not? Forget mom's apple pie and baseball -- there was a time not very long ago at all when nothing was more American than a lynching, and for better or worse, the A-List was born in US of A.
This collective memory thing is why, after the lifeless body of Feraris "Ray" Golden was found hanging from a tree outside his grandmother's home in Belle Glade, Florida, the A-List felt sure that Golden's death was not the suicide local officials quickly described, but a modern-day lynching. The local NAACP chapter was soon involved and Golden's May 28 hanging launched Palm Beach County's first public inquest in 18 years. The resulting investigation, led by a white officer who was supervised by a black detective, supports initial assessments that Golden (who was rumored to have been involved with the white daughter of a local police officer) committed suicide. The findings include a lack of any sign of struggle, extremely high levels of cocaine and alcohol in Golden's body, the fact that the sheets found around his neck were taken from his grandmother's home, and the grandmother's descriptions of him as a depressed man who had, indeed, threatened to kill himself. At the end of the day, all this means, though, is that in 2003, southern trees still bear strange fruit.

3. Jayson Blair Watch: NYT Scribe Gets More Work
While we here at the A-List had lots of fun following the Jayson Blair scandal, venting our outrage variously at institutional racism, media-world star-system politics and the spectacularly boneheaded Blair himself, we have to confess the whole story left us a little bummed out. Probably, this is personal. Why are we still here, laboring in the low-paying vineyards of online journalism, when someone like Blair gets fat gigs at plush places like the New York Times? The energy with which we pursued the story of his fall was tinged at least a bit with the envy we felt when contemplating his rise. New news this week revives the envy while doing nothing on the schadenfreude front: Blair, it seems, has landed on his feet, not only with the still-anticipated big book deal but now with not one but two high-profile glossy magazines assignments. For Esquire, Blair will review the memoir out from proto liar-performance artist Stephen Glass. And for Jane he'll pen a bit on "dealing with workplace pressures." What about the pressure of watching Jayson Blair get a big fat payday for being essentially being a complete *bleep*- up?

4. Councilman Davis' Murder Story Takes Strange Twists
Just in time for Harlem's Gay Pride celebrations comes news that James Davis' killer wasn't just crazy, he was also a crazy closet case. According to a slew of speculative but well-sourced reports, Othniel Askew's main beef with the man he would murder was fear and anger that Davis would out him in order to undercut Askew's bid for Davis' seat. The news of potential electoral dirty tricks on Davis' part have put the media in a tough spot. After canonizing the slain man, reports have to now factor in the possibility that Davis' mudslinging may have played a role in his death. Also, a media corps that has made peace with the ethics of outing public figures must now measure the implications of a public figure threatening to out someone for reasons of their own.

5. Criminal Justice: Black Men Make Up Most of the Prison Population
For the umpteenth and third time, the number of black men in prison tops the number of whites and Hispanics in the big house. That's more than half a million incarcerated black bodies (586,000) and just under half (45%) of the entire male prison population. You've heard this one before, but we can't say it enough: African Americans only make up no more than 12% of the population.

6. Politics Watch: Bush Pretends to Court Black Voters
Proving once again that half of politics is preconception, this week President George W. Bush came to the National Urban League's annual convention, gave a speech that was by all accounts responded to with applause, and left having gained exactly no traction with black voters. This a week after three Democrat hopefuls got their hands spanked for failing to do the same before the NAACP -- and the Democrats lost exactly no traction with black voters. Bush's appearance at the NUL sounds like an especially farcical event, in which he talked of "hopeful signs" in the economy -- perhaps the applause was a kind of ploy to simply shut out the sound of his lies -- and perhaps explains why he's never addressed the NAACP, whose less polite stance might prompt an audience to boo that kind of blatant BS. Later, seven of the nine Democratic challengers (everyone but Kerry and Graham, whose absence this week attracted little attention) took on Bush, performing riffs on the same theme before what was by all accounts and appreciative crowd (not surprising, given that Bush got about 9% of the black voter last time out and has alienated a few points off of that!). Half of politics is "what have you done for me lately?" and Bush does next to nothing to meet the needs of most black voters, and he knows it. Showing up and pretending to court those votes is neither necessary nor sufficient. The Dems, on the other hand, still (mostly) stand (somewhat) behind the middle-and-working-class that the vast majority of African Americans still inhabit. So no matter what brand-new GOP chairman Ed Gillespie says about the potential "drift" in black voters from the Democrats to the GOP, we don't foresee the party of Lincoln coming anywhere close to winning black hearts and minds in our lifetime.

7. The Patriot Act: Racist Immigration Enforcement Must End!
As an enemy of racism in every form, the A-list does not discriminate when it comes to responding to both overt and covert attacks on any non-black group. This is why we're more than thrilled that a lawsuit has finally been launched to contest the USA Patriot Act. Saudi-born American citizen Alaa Abunijem is bringing the suit against the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the USA Patriot Act's anti-immigrant provisions. We applaud these efforts and stand in solidarity with our Arab brother Abunijem! This isn't just a matter of fellow traveling for us: Let's not forget, as the Schomburg Center's event on Racism and Repression reminded us last year, that there are parallels between the tactics used in '70s COINTELPRO and today's ubiquitous Homeland Security Acts. The A-List would also like black America to take note that anti-immigration laws are particularly harmful to brothers and sisters who speak in all kinds of languages and come in all shades of brown. Part of the A-list is only first generation American, our family has been subject to racist immigration enforcement while lighter immigrants -- Cubans, for example -- are welcomed with open arms. Had racist tactics of previous years prevailed, the A-list might not be writing this right now...

8. Drugs and Docs: Why are Pharmaceutical Trials Race-Based?
Used to be, when people talked about separate doctors, drugs and medical care based on race, that it was the white patients who got Dr. Kildare-type care, while black patients got, you know, free syphilis and the like. But lately, a new trend in identifying genetically-based differences in the way drugs interact with the human body, has seen some medications and therapies being offered specifically to folks with an African heritage -- even if they don't work at all on people in the Social Register. This is what we call progress! But we won't really buy into this whole new world of race-based medicine until we can be sure it isn't the same old race science all over again: you remember, back when phrenology "proved" the Nordic brain superior to the Ethiopian one, and they kept the Venus Hottentot in a jar in a museum in Paris. Still, if new technologies that perceive racial difference can be used to help the disproportionately black victims of prostate cancer, uterine fibroid tumors, or high blood pressure, we are all for it.

9. Heavy D's Weight Loss
After loosing Big Pun and Barry White to weight-related illnesses the A-List has become worried about its big bubbly and cuddly friends in and out of the limelight. Cushin' for the pushin' aside, overweight lovers are out of style, folks, officially (plus, the only reason they were ever in da house was because that's where the food is). The A-List has learned that fallen (in weight and status) rapper Heavy D has lost an astonishing 135 pounds, without narcotic assistance! Though Heavy is telling folks that the loss is because a director was actually kind enough to pull him aside at an audition and tell him that he would have had the part if not for his weight, the A-List thinks otherwise. Big guys are like hightop fades in the 50 Cent get-muscles-like-you-were-locked-up era -- played out. (Disclaimer: The A-List has never seen Life, The Cider House Rules, Big Trouble or sat down to eat Cheese Doodles and watch Roc, Living Single or Boston Public, so Heavy D's acting career is nonexistent to us.) If he stopped trying to deny his obesity and just say he did it to be healthy, then he might actually get some steady work -- replacing Subway's geeky pitch-guy Jared!

10. That's it for the A-List
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About the Author
We are not Jayson Blair. [Kate Tuttle, Zakia Carter and Ken Gibbs all stirred the pot on this A-List, throwing in items and ingredients. I miss you guys!]