Charles Ramsay was eating a McDonalds in his house in a down-at-heel area of Cleveland, Ohio when screams for help came from a nearby house. Kicking-down the barricaded door, he found Amanda Berry – and three others – who had been held captive for up to 10 years.
Berry was white and Ramsay was black. His off-the-cuff interview included: “I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway”.
Compare and contrast this dryly humorous observation at the bitter/sweet experience of dudes-like-me with the massive chip-on-shoulder opportunism of rapper, Lauryn Hill.
As part of her trial for tax evasion, she said: “I am a child of former slaves who had a system imposed on them,” Hill said in court. “I had an economic system imposed on me”. Hill is 37 years old and the daughter of a high school teacher and computer programmer; both of whom paid their taxes.
Hat-tip Amie.
Returning to Ramsay, Amy Davidson in the New Yorker writes:
But one phrase in particular, from the interview, is worth dwelling on: “I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” In many times and places, a line like that has been offered as an excuse for walking away, not for helping a woman break down your neighbor’s door. How many women have died as a result? They didn’t yesterday.
Compare and contrast with the experiences of Dublin-resident, Jane Ruffino who severely beaten by her boyfriend until his hand shattered; avoiding life-threatening injuries, in her words, only because he did not know where to place his thumb when throwing a punch.
Following his conviction – which, in this country, I would have expected to result in one for serious assault (at least, had it not been viewed as a lesser crime because of the relationship between offender and victim) – Mark Jordan received a non-custodial sentence and €2,000 plus €3,000 fine.
Writing on Facebook for the first anniversary of the attack, Ruffino first saw her update vanish without an explanation then received a warning from Facebook that it had been determined to have been a personal attack on an individual (who had left her permanently scarred, and that was only the assault he was convicted for and so she could mention specifically without fear of defamation).
This presumably followed a complaint to Facebook from ‘somebody’, and the piece was moved here.
(At the same time, Facebook had vacillated and oscillated and changed their position on hosting footage of a baby being assaulted and of a Mexican woman being beheaded; initially on the grounds that such dissemination allowed condemnation of the acts in ways common news reports could not.)
