All in the game omar

He spoke in an Associated Press story in of his rough time growing up, and said he had struggled with drug addiction, which he had spoken frankly about in interviews in recent years. Citing environmental justice, Murphy halts power plant vote. Violent online messages before Capitol riot went unshared by DHS, emails show. Ad Microsoft. Full screen. Actor Michael K. Slideshow continues on the next slide. Williams, from 'The Wire,' has died at Click to expand.

Replay Video. Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article. Found the story interesting? No-one pretends this horror is right, or just, or desirable. It just — is. I got the shotgun. You got the non-executive board position.

Such is the mindset of a certain level of public official in Scotland. Which begs the question — if this is all so damned good for our democracy and our public life, why all the effort to cover it up? They know why, you know why, you know they know why. Senior SNP advisers routinely end up lobbying for airports or something. Senior civil servants get paid twice, once for doing their job, once for sitting on some board , a place they secured through their contacts.

Are you a former head of fisheries strategy and environment at the Scottish Government? No way that could be conflict of interest, right? Or how about being the Director of Governance at Glasgow City Council and then sliding straight into a role with a big company to which you just gave a major contract? Nothing to see there, right?

This two-jobbing and revolving door nonsense is so universal in public life now that it barely goes remarked upon, at least among those involved. They are only ever policed by themselves and a dreadfully under-powered Scottish media.

They know they have bulletproof political cover because the politicians are all at it themselves. And it has done irreparable harm to public life right across the democratic world. I have long since lost confidence that the solution to the abuse of political power is more politicians even though we do need more politicians. We need oversight from someone who is not inextricably wrapped up in this whole awful system, like ordinary citizens. Right now it really is all in the game.

I need your help. This site is about holding power to account in Scotland and offering hope things can change. I need people who know what is going on and who can explain it to others — but I also need your ideas and suggestions. So if you can afford to help me out with a small regular donation then that would be great. Eventually, of course, the figure of the patient, suffering Tom would seem as demeaning to blacks as the comic minstrel. Figures like Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas, Alex Haley's Kunte Kinte, and blaxploitation's anti-heroes Superfly, Shaft and Sweetback were hypermasculine and "bad" precisely to counter the saintliness of the emasculated Tom, even at the risk of playing into the hands of the even more racist "anti-Tom" myth that has continued to have some kind of valence in American culture since Dixon's The Clansman transmuted into Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

This "black beast" has been kept alive anytime whites feared, envied or scapegoated the sexual appetite or physical strength of black men. Since the late '90s, the anti-Tom stereotype has taken a backseat to the virtuous, black hero who sacrifices himself for whites.

The magical negro narrative, of which Stephen King's serial novel and the film The Green Mile Frank Darabont is the most popular model, seem to re-establish racial harmony from a white hegemonic point of view by falling back on the Tom story's tried and true expressions of interracial sympathy.

In this film white guards in a Louisiana prison execute an innocent black man "with love" in a way that we are meant to see as kind.

How a still majority-white America is to carry out the incarceration and execution of more and more African-American men while still feeling racially virtuous seems to be the deeper issue at stake in the films of this tradition. We can legitimately ask why it is not the justice system itself but only the personal racist villains who are exposed, when surely the pressing issue before the nation today is how to introduce real "moral legitimacy" into a system that seems only to know how to incarcerate more and more black men.

They exist in conflict with more overtly anti-Tom narratives that, although no one would offer them today as entertainment on film or television, have nevertheless played out in the news: the all-white jury that saw Rodney King as a hulking threat even as he was under the baton and taser of the Los Angeles Police Department, or white Bay Area Rapid Transit policeman Johannes Mehserle, who shot and killed the prostrate and unarmed Oscar Grant on New Year's Day in Oakland, California.

Because the anti-Tom "black best" lurks beneath the surface of even these overt Tom stories, I prefer to hold on to Leslie Fiedler's older formulation of "Tom" and "anti-Tom" for their longer term historical understanding of the back and forth nature of these racial feelings as well as the white hegemony within which they were originally generated. The melodrama of black and white is ongoing, and all racially based stories are grist for its mill. To understand the power of this melodrama of black and white is to see why repeated calls for more accurate, or more "realistic" representations of racially marked characters are powerless to overturn deeply embedded racial stereotypes that seem hopelessly outmoded, yet live on in the culture.

This is where we might begin to understand President Obama's privileging of Omar as "the best Wire character. Most refreshingly, the series does not pretend to exist in a colorblind world. Baltimore is majority black and not all blacks are in a ghetto. If the melodrama of black and white begins, as I have argued, in an initial attempt to include blacks within the fold of humanity and democratic citizenship, then it begins itself as a form of liberal white supremacy.

Its "anti-Tom" reaction simply reasserts the more overt sense of this supremacy by turning blacks into racial villains. The Wire writes the epitaph to these familiar melodramas of black and white but not because it achieves a state of colorblindness in which race does not matter. Rather, because it is no longer part of the black-and-white, tit-for-tat scorekeeping of racial injury that began with Uncle Tom and continues through every incident of racial violence, from Rodney King, to O.

Simpson, through Ferguson, MO. Though his life is short, Omar is neither a racial villain nor victim. He appreciates the consequences of the game he plays and he plays it openly, rarely lurking in the shadows. Clearly Omar prefers to play rather than to get played.

He does not perceive himself as a victim of any specially racialized villainy. And though he may certainly be a victim of homophobia, Omar does not act the part of the victim. He knows that the only recourse is to seek his personal revenge and he uses the police in what amounts to a momentary collaboration.

When he lands in jail and is in special danger as a known homosexual, his friend Butchie sends two lifers to help him defend himself. They bundle him up in phone books to protect his body and give him a shiv. When he is predictably attacked while in line for breakfast, Omar not only overcomes his attacker but enjoys taunting, and even kissing, this man before he shoves the shiv up his ass. This too is all in the game, play or be played, kill or be killed 4.