NBA
Meek Mill’s first post-prison public appearance could be Sixers-Heat Game 5
Sixers owner says via Instagram that he’s en route to pick up Mill
4:32 PMWith the breaking news that Meek Mill is a free man, after the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania overruled Judge Genece Brinkley’s controversial sentence, comes the question: What’s next? Meek outlines his plans in the below tweet thread, but what happens tonight? Philadelphia 76ers owner Michael G. Rubin, who befriended Meek years ago and has become one of the rapper’s most vocal supporters, announced he was en route to pick Meek up from prison.
I’d like to thank God, my family, and all my public advocates for their love, support and encouragement during this difficult time. While the past five months have been a nightmare, the prayers, visits, calls, letters and rallies have helped me stay positive.
— Meek Mill (@MeekMill) April 24, 2018
To the Philly District Attorney’s office, I’m grateful for your commitment to justice. I understand that many people of color across the country don’t have that luxury and I plan to use my platform to shine a light on those issues.
— Meek Mill (@MeekMill) April 24, 2018
In the meantime, I plan to work closely with my legal team to overturn this unwarranted conviction and look forward to reuniting with my family and resuming my music career.
— Meek Mill (@MeekMill) April 24, 2018
Whether Meek actually shows up courtside tonight as his hometown Sixers attempt to complete a first-round series victory over the Miami Heat is up in the air.
It is, however, hard to imagine a scene when he doesn’t. If Meek waltzes in as Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons warm up and they all dap and hug, we’re looking at one of the loudest ovations we’ve heard in a basketball arena in a long time. Philly could potentially be looking at a courtside trio of Meek, Allen Iverson and Kevin Hart. That type of cultural star power doesn’t happen every night. Brotherly love for real.
Boxing
Why a Jack Johnson pardon would be easier for Trump than Obama
The first black heavyweight champ went to prison for sex with white women
2:48 PMDon’t be surprised that Donald Trump is expressing enthusiasm about pardoning Jack Johnson while Barack Obama ignored it.
The first black heavyweight champion was wrongfully imprisoned a century ago by racist authorities who were outraged by his destruction of white boxers and his relationships with white women. In 2004, a group of people began seeking a pardon for Johnson, but they were rebuffed by then-Presidents George W. Bush and Obama.
Now, President Trump is tweeting that he’s considering the idea. Here’s why a pardon is easier for Trump than Obama:
Exonerating Johnson would have opened Obama up to racial repercussions unique to the first black president. The boxer enjoyed rubbing white America’s face in his profligate habits with sex, money, cars, clothes and jewelry. At a time when black men were lynched for even looking at white women, Johnson not only flaunted his Caucasian companions, he viciously beat at least one of them.
Johnson’s lifestyle was like “the hip-hop culture of its day, widely associated with black criminality and black masculine pathology,” wrote American University history professor Theresa Runstedtler in her book on Johnson. Obama pardoning Johnson would have appeared to some people like pardoning Tupac Shakur or Bobby Shmurda. Black Americans, meanwhile, are more uncomfortable than whites with interracial unions.
Even though Johnson deserves to have his record posthumously cleansed, Obama was focused on clemency for living victims of mass incarceration policies, which disproportionately affect the black community.
Heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, circa 1909.
The Ring Magazine/Getty Images
Trump, meanwhile, was elected despite multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. Pardoning a womanizer like Johnson doesn’t dent Trump’s image as much as it would have tarnished Obama’s (evidence that black folks still need to be twice as good to succeed).
Pardoning Johnson would send a valuable message to white America, which is Trump’s main constituency. “It helps us white people more than black people,” the filmmaker Ken Burns, who directed an illuminating Jack Johnson documentary, told me in 2016. “Black people don’t need this information [about racial injustice]. Black people know this already. It’s us white people who don’t know it.”
Finally, a pardon would provide Trump with an opportunity to do something, albeit symbolic, about racial injustice. Trump’s Justice Department is reviving the “tough on crime” policies that created the racially biased disaster of mass incarceration – the exact catastrophe that Obama tried to mitigate with both policy and his huge number of commuted sentences.
Overall, it’s a fitting irony that Trump is weighing a pardon Obama never chose to pursue.