A poem with a vivid title has started a brouhaha at the Mood Disorder Clinic at Western Psychiatric in Pittsburgh. “Nigger Do Not Speed In My Town” was discovered on a desk by two black employees who reported it to the EEOC as evidence of a racist environment at the Mood Disorder Clinic. The offended...
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Pizza Politics
Pittsburgh’s Human Relations Commission did the right thing in January in the pizza “redlining” case against Pizza Hut brought by Carl and Shelia Truss. The Trusses, a middle-class black couple who reside in a mixed-race area of well-kept homes in the upper Hill District area of Pittsburgh, also known as Sugar Top, phoned Pizza Hut...
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Black Helicopters and the Morning Militia
People in other cities, said an Army spokesman, don’t get their feathers ruffled during midnight helicopter invasions. What is it about Pittsburghers that caused them to pour into the streets in their underwear during recent treetop antiterrorist maneuvers? Nine Army helicopters swooped into Pittsburgh one midnight in June, complete with the sounds of mock gunfire...
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White Devils With a Badge
Jonny Gammage died on the night of October 12, 1995, in front of Frank and Shirley’s pancake parlor, just three miles from my home. Jonny was a black man, a cousin and business partner of Pittsburgh Steeler Ray Seals, and he died in the custody of five white suburban policemen who had pulled him over...
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The Stuffed Grape Leaf Standard
Danger lurks everywhere these days, even in five gallon plastic tubs of feta cheese. The containers of feta delivered to our restaurant come embellished with sketches of a baby falling headfirst into a bucket of cheese, which is preserved in liquid, and therefore comes complete with grim warnings of possible drownings in English and Español....
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Yahoo Justice
The Supreme Court that has recently issued its anti-harassment decision sits in the middle of a city under siege. Justices who have pronounced the nation’s employers liable for “permitting a hostile environment” to exist in the workplace cannot walk within two blocks of the Supreme Court building without being confronted with the most hostile of...
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The Big Chill Generation
The Big Chill generation came bouncing into town with all of the hoopla you could imagine—bright, in-your-face articulate, self-righteous, and pompous enough to remind us that they were people more likely to be found in bus stations than in airports and that this, in itself, somehow demonstrated their moral superiority. During their second week in...
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Guerrillas In Our Midst: The L.A. Riots Remembered
Grappling with the meaning of the L.A. riots, wondering with Rodney King why we can’t get along, I muse about days long ago when I was a terroristette for the women’s movement. I cared so much about violence against women that, with a group of my sisters, I participated in a rampage of window-smashing, targeting...