By Frank Cerabino
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Rev. Al Sharpton needs a theatrical agent.
He's a gifted actor, but he accepts too many bad scripts. That's why he needs somebody to read over his shoulder and weed through the ridiculous roles he sometimes plays.
Like Tuesday, for example.
The Reverend Al duck-walked himself up to the microphones in front of the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office in downtown West Palm Beach like the perfect matinee idol he is.
The leading man was fashionably 22 minutes late and ready to deliver his lines to the cluster of microphones on the makeshift sidewalk stage.
The part was a bread-and-butter role for him: decrying the victimhood of three local black teenagers caught up in a juked criminal justice system.
Al can do roles like this in his sleep. He just finished a bravura performance in the Jena 6 story in Louisiana, and now, he was starting on a new role.
Except this new script's destined to be a box-office bomb.
If Al had an agent, he'd be reminded that Denzel Washington stays on top because he doesn't do ridiculous, audience-insulting scripts. Denzel does Malcolm X and the Great Debaters; not Booty Call and Soul Plane.
Sharpton isn't that discerning. He's more like Chevy Chase. He doesn't turn down the dreck.
So Tuesday, he started shooting Free the Dunbar 3!
The logline seemed promising: A group of white teenagers in Boca Raton are accused of rape, and free on bond, while a group of black teenagers in West Palm Beach's Dunbar Village housing project are charged with rape, and are held without bail.
"You cannot have one set of rules for acts that are wrong and horrific in Boca, and another set in Dunbar Village," Sharpton said Tuesday, delivering his lines.
Dunbar incident violent, heartless
But he would have been much better off combing the country for a better script. The facts in the Boca Raton case and Dunbar Village case are radically different.
In being the champion for the Dunbar boys, Sharpton is making victims of black teenagers who are charged with raping a black woman in their housing project, in what police say was retaliation for her littering complaint.
Police charge the group of teenagers with abducting the woman at gunpoint, raping her, forcing her to have sex with her own son, then dousing her internally and externally with ammonia and alcohol and pouring nail-polish remover in her son's eyes.
It was a black-on-black crime, and a rape so violent and heartless that a judge's decision to hold these boys without bail was far from controversial.
In the Boca Raton incident, sheriff's officials have charged that a group of white teenage boys got two white teenage girls from their neighborhood deliriously drunk and then raped them. The case will hinge on the defense claim of consent.
Those boys, like the Dunbar boys, were charged as adults, but were allowed to post bonds.
To call these cases identical, as Sharpton did, is to ignore far too much. And to make martyrs of the Dunbar teenagers only trivializes real cases of racial injustice and further denigrates two black victims of unspeakable crimes.
A good agent would have told Reverend Al that he was stepping back to Tawana-land on this one. And that sometimes, the roles you don't play are as important as ones you do.
He's already being panned by a network of black women bloggers, including Tanisha Mathis, 31, a Florida college student who visited Dunbar Village and has followed the case closely.
"I'm not sure why of all the cases, he picked this case," she said. "I didn't see the injustice going on here."
So if anybody has an actual civil rights story, please notify Sharpton before he does any more harm to the legitimate cause of racial injustice.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/local_news/epaper/2008/03/12/s1b_bino_0312.html
Indictment:
Charges brought by grand jury
Criminal complaints
Avion Lawson
Nathan Walker
Jakaris Taylor
about the rape
http://www.blueridgenow.com/article...Attack_Many_Hope_for_Change_but_Few_Expect_It
blog
http://dallassouthblog.com/2008/03/...p-are-wrong-in-dunbar-village-gang-rape-case/
http://politicalseason.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-letter-to-naacp-and-al-sharpton.html
to help the victims of the gang rape
https://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/stop-naacp-support-of-rapists
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Rev. Al Sharpton needs a theatrical agent.
He's a gifted actor, but he accepts too many bad scripts. That's why he needs somebody to read over his shoulder and weed through the ridiculous roles he sometimes plays.
Like Tuesday, for example.
The Reverend Al duck-walked himself up to the microphones in front of the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office in downtown West Palm Beach like the perfect matinee idol he is.
The leading man was fashionably 22 minutes late and ready to deliver his lines to the cluster of microphones on the makeshift sidewalk stage.
The part was a bread-and-butter role for him: decrying the victimhood of three local black teenagers caught up in a juked criminal justice system.
Al can do roles like this in his sleep. He just finished a bravura performance in the Jena 6 story in Louisiana, and now, he was starting on a new role.
Except this new script's destined to be a box-office bomb.
If Al had an agent, he'd be reminded that Denzel Washington stays on top because he doesn't do ridiculous, audience-insulting scripts. Denzel does Malcolm X and the Great Debaters; not Booty Call and Soul Plane.
Sharpton isn't that discerning. He's more like Chevy Chase. He doesn't turn down the dreck.
So Tuesday, he started shooting Free the Dunbar 3!
The logline seemed promising: A group of white teenagers in Boca Raton are accused of rape, and free on bond, while a group of black teenagers in West Palm Beach's Dunbar Village housing project are charged with rape, and are held without bail.
"You cannot have one set of rules for acts that are wrong and horrific in Boca, and another set in Dunbar Village," Sharpton said Tuesday, delivering his lines.
Dunbar incident violent, heartless
But he would have been much better off combing the country for a better script. The facts in the Boca Raton case and Dunbar Village case are radically different.
In being the champion for the Dunbar boys, Sharpton is making victims of black teenagers who are charged with raping a black woman in their housing project, in what police say was retaliation for her littering complaint.
Police charge the group of teenagers with abducting the woman at gunpoint, raping her, forcing her to have sex with her own son, then dousing her internally and externally with ammonia and alcohol and pouring nail-polish remover in her son's eyes.
It was a black-on-black crime, and a rape so violent and heartless that a judge's decision to hold these boys without bail was far from controversial.
In the Boca Raton incident, sheriff's officials have charged that a group of white teenage boys got two white teenage girls from their neighborhood deliriously drunk and then raped them. The case will hinge on the defense claim of consent.
Those boys, like the Dunbar boys, were charged as adults, but were allowed to post bonds.
To call these cases identical, as Sharpton did, is to ignore far too much. And to make martyrs of the Dunbar teenagers only trivializes real cases of racial injustice and further denigrates two black victims of unspeakable crimes.
A good agent would have told Reverend Al that he was stepping back to Tawana-land on this one. And that sometimes, the roles you don't play are as important as ones you do.
He's already being panned by a network of black women bloggers, including Tanisha Mathis, 31, a Florida college student who visited Dunbar Village and has followed the case closely.
"I'm not sure why of all the cases, he picked this case," she said. "I didn't see the injustice going on here."
So if anybody has an actual civil rights story, please notify Sharpton before he does any more harm to the legitimate cause of racial injustice.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/local_news/epaper/2008/03/12/s1b_bino_0312.html
Indictment:
Charges brought by grand jury
Criminal complaints
Avion Lawson
Nathan Walker
Jakaris Taylor
about the rape
http://www.blueridgenow.com/article...Attack_Many_Hope_for_Change_but_Few_Expect_It
blog
http://dallassouthblog.com/2008/03/...p-are-wrong-in-dunbar-village-gang-rape-case/
http://politicalseason.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-letter-to-naacp-and-al-sharpton.html
to help the victims of the gang rape
https://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/stop-naacp-support-of-rapists
Last edited:
