FARAI CHIDEYA, host:
On our Bloggers Roundtable, name-calling and mud-slinging in the Democratic Party, plus a new bill in Maryland would allow police to collect DNA from suspects. With us this week, media consultant Carmen Dixon, she writes the blog All About Race; Jozen Cummings, he writes the blog Broke Thoughts on King magazine's Web site, he's also the editor; and public educator Avery Tooley, his blog is Stereo Describes My Scenario. Hey folks.
Ms. CARMEN DIXON (Blogger): Hey Farai.
Mr. JOZEN CUMMINGS (Blogger): Hello.
Mr. AVERY TOOLEY (Blogger): Hello.
CHIDEYA: So let's start out with the political stuff. On Monday, the New Mexico governor and former presidential candidate Bill Richardson endorsed Barack Obama. He was also, Richardson, a former member of President Bill Clinton's cabinet. So longtime Clinton adviser James Carville told the New York Times that Bill Richardson had committed, quote, "an act of betrayal" and - another quote - "his endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate if ironic." This was coming up around Easter. Richardson responded on Fox News Sunday.
Governor BILL RICHARDSON (Democrat, New Mexico): Well, I'm not going to get in the gutter like that, and you know, that's typical of many of the people around Senator Clinton. They think they have a sense of entitlement to the presidency. You know, and I got in this race myself. I am very loyal to the Clintons. I served under President Clinton. But I served well. But you know, it shouldn't just be Bush/Clinton, Bush/Clinton. You know, what about the rest of us?
CHIDEYA: Avery, you know, this brings up a few different questions. One of them is, if somebody speaks out on your behalf - in this case you've got Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton's surrogate James Carville in a way, talking about this act of betrayal. Should the Clinton campaign, should Hillary Clinton pay for that kind of strong language? Or is this just Carville out on his own?
Mr. TOOLEY: Well, I think that to the same extent that Obama has to deal with the effluence of what Reverend Wright said, then Hillary should have to deal with the same, with any comments that someone surrounding her campaign makes.
CHIDEYA: Carmen, what about the question of how tense this race is getting. Is this going to turn off - for example, there's been a record number of new voters who've registered. Is this going to turn some people off, the tone of the campaign?
Ms. DIXON: My instinct is that it already has turned people off to particularly the Democratic Party. It feels like a party that's eating its own. And I just don't know how it's going to heal itself by late summer, don't see it.
CHIDEYA: Jozen, do you think on just the fundamental level that Bill Richardson betrayed the Clintons, that there's something owed once you've held that kind of an office, a cabinet position?
Mr. CUMMINGS: No, not at all. I don't think he betrayed Hillary Clinton and I don't think that - it was Hillary Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, that gave him the position. Just because you're, you know, your husband has done something for you doesn't mean that you have to reciprocate by doing something for the wife. I got friends who are married and I like them, but I may not like their wife. You know, it's just one of those things where you don't have to show loyalty to both people, just...
CHIDEYA: You better keep that - if you don't like their wife, you better keep that to yourself. Anyway, let me let Carmen jump in here.
Ms. DIXON: Well, I just want to go back to Carville making this statement of - in using Judas. He's a very smart man. What he did is completely shift the news cycle away from Richardson endorsing Barack Obama to his use of the word Judas, and the media followed.
CHIDEYA: Mmm hmm.
Mr. CUMMINGS: I mean it was an act of - it wasn't an act of betrayal. I think that was a very emotional statement that he made and it affected his judgment. If you wanted to say that Richardson was wrong for endorsing Obama because Richardson was one of the first to say that superdelegates should vote according to the way that their constituency voted and you can point to New Mexico being in favor of Clinton, then that's a valid argument. To make it a personal attack on Richardson himself, to me that's just foul.
Mr. TOOLEY: Well, I think what we are getting is, we're getting hard words because it's a harder fight than anybody...
Mr. CUMMINGS: Right.
Ms. DIXON: Yeah.
Mr. TOOLEY: ...expected it to be.
CHIDEYA: And a longer fight. It just keeps going on and on. Let me switch to a new topic, though. There is a new bill proposed in Maryland that would allow police to collect DNA samples from people arrested for violent crimes and burglary. Now, lawmakers are still arguing about the bill's language. Currently, only convicts are in the DNA database. Law enforcement says a DNA database would help prevent crimes and catch more serial offenders.
States, including California and Virginia, have similar laws that allow DNA collection upon arrest, as this proposed bill would do. So Avery, you live in Maryland. What do you think the impact of a law like this would be?
Mr. TOOLEY: It depends. I think it depends on the language in the law and how the law is used. I think that it could potentially lead to some abuses. But I also think that because there are a lot of people who could be exculpated by their DNA evidence, I think that it has a potential to be used for good.
CHIDEYA: So you think that it actually would help people be exonerated?
Mr. TOOLEY: I think the potential is there. I am not sure how it would necessarily play out in real life, because I'm not sure. I think that the state - if the state is allowed to take that DNA evidence, I think that the state should be required to exonerate anybody whose DNA proves that they did not commit the crime.
CHIDEYA: Jozen, one thing that I've heard is, okay, you're going to create a huge database of people who are innocent, and at the very least you have to have provisions to destroy this DNA if in fact the person is not guilty or, you know, the charges are dropped. And there also have been cases where DNA evidence has been planted. Are you concerned that there could be abuses of this?
Mr. CUMMINGS: I'm concerned that there could be abuses of this just like I'm concerned with any kind of laws that are put into place that people can turn around and find a way to abuse or manipulate in the favor of a conviction. But like Avery was saying, you know, I think what this bill has the opportunity to do, if they pass it and they pass it with the provision that, you know, this could be used to exonerate the wrongly accused, then I see no reason to let this fall through. They should go ahead and should - you should make sure that it does pass because the way I see it, it's a situation where the glass is - the glass can be half full for a lot of people that are wrongly convicted.
CHIDEYA: So Jozen and Avery seem to be mainly in favor of this. Carmen, how do you weigh in on it?
Ms. DIXON: Well, I have a big problem with it for two reasons. Number one, as I understand it, there are hundreds and thousands of DNA samples taken from convicts that have yet to be analyzed throughout the country, and so I don't understand how that backlog squares away with now collecting samples from people presumed innocent now to solve unsolved crimes or to prevent crimes in the future.
And my other problem with it is that it's simply a slippery slope. I remember the time when the eyewitness on the stand was incontrovertible. Legal thought was that the eyewitness is the damning accusation. But now we understand that eyewitnesses are often incorrect in their perceptions. So what's going to happen when DNA is planted, and I don't think it's as unlikely as some.
CHIDEYA: All right, I want to move on. Looking into the rearview mirror over another recent controversy, the one over the "Love and Consequences" book. There was a recent Washington Post article by Stacey Patton. She wrote a memoir called "That Mean Old Yesterday," and it's a tough look at her life growing up in foster care. But she was moved to write an article about "Love and Consequences," the memoir that faked experiences similar to Patton's.
Now, "Love and Consequences" was supposedly written by a half-white, half-Native-American girl who was raised by a black foster family in South L.A. It talked about running drugs for the Bloods, watching a friend die in a gang shootout. It was all a lie, and the Post article by Stacey Patton goes on to talk about how the book reaffirms a longstanding white fascination with blackness and how in her opinion. it's cool to act black without actually being black.
Finally, she said, Whose voice should speak about and interpret the black experience in America and whose voice white America wants to hear? Carmen, do you think that it's easier, in a way, for white Americans who take on, you know, black themes, for lack of a better phrase, to get their message out than actual black people?
Ms. DIXON: Well, what sprung to my mind was the book "Black Like Me," way back when, when the gentleman, you know, took on a darker skin tone and moved about the world and it was this huge sensation. And so I think it is more sympathetic, shall I say, to a majority white audience to see the black experience through eyes like their own.
CHIDEYA: Mmm-hmm. And Jozen, do you think that it's a question of finding, like, a sympathetic narrator, a white person is viewed as a more sympathetic narrator than a black person? Or do you even disagree with the whole premise of what Stacey Patton wrote about?
Mr. CUMMINGS: I found some things that Stacey Patton wrote about I agreed with. What I'm glad that she pointed out was the Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke in 1981 concocting a story about an 8-year-old black heroin addict.
It's this thing where, you know, Margaret Seltzer, she lied about who she was. She lied about her background and everything like that, but what made it worse is that she actually does not come from this world at all, and I think that a lot of black people, they've never been exposed to that world that Margaret Seltzer was talking about, either, but might feel prone to go ahead and claim some time spent in that world simply because that kind of struggle is so much a part of being black to so many people that they go ahead and they take that on, too. So it falls on both ends, and that's what I liked Patton pointing out.
CHIDEYA: Do you think that there's like an addiction that even we in the black community might have to the, you know, the gangsta narrative? You know, there's the whole thing of the studio gangsta rappers who go in and try to pretend that they have street cred when they don't. Are we addicted to that whole scenario?
Mr. CUMMINGS: Yeah, everybody is. Hillary Clinton is. That's why she lied about, you know...
CHIDEYA: Right. The wild West ...
Mr. CUMMINGS: Being shot at. We all like to go ahead and claim that it was hard, that we got to where we got to today because - and there was a struggle involved. It just makes for a sexier story all around. Nobody wants to be guilty of saying that they were handed their achievements on a silver platter.
CHIDEYA: So Avery, it sounds like the question - there's a couple things here. There's race, but then there's also just adventurism. You know, how do you think this falls on the spectrum?
Mr. TOOLEY: It's a combination of both, I think, as Jozen said. I think everybody wants to play a part in it, even if you think of when we're kids and we talk about here, we play the dozens. One of the stories that we tell when we play the dozens is who had it the hardest. Oh, man, I remember when we didn't have no light, and we had to drink Kool-Aid, you know, we had to drink cereal with water.
So I think that's just part of how we grow up, and it does lend itself to some sort of voyeurism, though, because people who are not part of that process will pretend that they were.
CHIDEYA: What effect does that have on discourse about not just race but about things like poverty, where people - you know, there's so many stories, but the people - excuse me - who have the most experience aren't always the ones who are able to get the venue to tell those stories. How does that play out?
Mr. TOOLEY: I think it makes it very difficult to get the authentic story, and I think it really makes it hard for - it makes it hard for people to understand because sometimes someone who's not from that environment will struggle greatly to understand what it's like.
Like speaking for myself, you know, as a single - as an only child of a single parent, you know, I did not live in the numbers. So like I always grew up with my own room and my own shoes, and so I don't know what it's like to be poor and to have to share, you know, pants or shoes or something like that.
So when I hear somebody tell me that story, that's fascinating to me, but the challenge is then not to appropriate that story and act as if that was my own story.
CHIDEYA: Carmen, do you think there's a place for - I mean, do we relate to authentic storytelling about struggle just on a human level that's important for us, and does every fake jeopardize that authentic storytelling?
Ms. DIXON: That's an interesting question. I would say every fake doesn't jeopardize the authentic storytelling. I think it's always in the voice of the storyteller, and if it's compelling, if it's attractive to the reader - and we find that authentic storytelling can also get a broad audience. It depends on how compelling the story is.
CHIDEYA: All right, guys, well, we're going to have to wrap it up there. Thanks so much.
Mr. TOOLEY: Thank you.
Mr. CUMMINGS: Thank you.
Ms. DIXON: Thank you.
CHIDEYA: We've been talking with public educator Avery Tooley. His blog is Stereo Describes My Scenario. He was at our HQ in Washington, D.C. Jozen Cummings writes the blog Broke Thoughts on King magazine's Web site. He's also the site's editor. He was at our New York studios. And media consultant Carmen Dixon write the blog All About Race. She was with me at the NPR West studios.
And you can go to our blog at nprnewsandnotes.org, a link to nprnewsandviews.org, to speak your mind. It's a chance for you to take the microphone.
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