ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on the violent videotaped arrest in 1995 of Pharon Crosby, an African American teenager, in Cincinnati. The setting for this text analysis of the 1995 violent, broadcast arrest of Pharon Crosby, an African American teenager, is the cityscape of Cincinnati. The racially defined history of this city penetrates deep in the American psyche. Cincinnati resident Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of Eliza’s escape to freedom on the ice floes of the Ohio River, and in Tony Morrison’s Beloved readers are steeped in a painful reminder of how far our society can be from fully enacting communities of equality and justice. “Cincinnati’s a microcosm, the belly of the whale,” Kweisi Mfume, national president of the NAACP, described the city (quoted by Clines, 2001b). Recently Cincinnati became the site of national attention as media images of police firing rubber bullets and spraying tear gas at protesters were circulated throughout the country. Discourses of race, gender, social class, and police distrust com mingled to create a media frenzy, after Timothy Thomas-nineteen
years old, unarmed, and African American-was shot and killed by a white police officer. Thomas had fourteen outstanding warrants and was fleeing police at the time of the shooting. Many of the warrants were for traffic violations, five of them for not wearing a seatbelt. This is not a story without history. In May of 2001 a coalition of black civil rights groups and the ACLU of Ohio filed suit in federal court in Cleveland accusing Cincinnati of a “30-year pattern of racial profiling” (Clines, 2001a). The story of what is “acceptable” policing of African American youth has wider implications for urban secondary education, as the 1995 video footage of the Pharon Crosby arrest illustrates. Public narratives about controlling teenage bodies are always potentially narratives about schooling.
