5. THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon) A notorious crime — the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989 — is revisited in this painful, angry, scrupulously reported story of race, injustice and media frenzy.
The report, a study of race riots this summer, said that Britons "tiptoe" around the subject of discrimination and that they needed to engage in an "honest and robust debate" on the subject to forestall further unrest.
Reports of race hate crimes rose by 15%, religious hate crimes by 34% and attacks because of sexual orientation by 29%.
One site, Redwatch, requires visitors to enter by clicking a telescopic sight on the head of a Yorkshire Post journalist – a journalist who has won awards for his reporting of race issues and his exposure of fascists in Leeds.
While there are no confirmed reports of race- or religion-related violence directed at athletes, David Clay Large wrote this month in a Times Op-Ed that "the Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today's International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events".
Recent weeks have seen the Sun newspaper blame Muslim youths for acts of vandalism that the police denied were their fault; the reporting of "race riots" in Windsor when what occurred was an attack on a Muslim-owned dairy by white youths; and many more non-stories blown up into front-page headlines purely because they involved Muslims.
To determine race, the researchers used the children's mothers' self-report of race as well as the distribution of 150 genetic markers in the children's blood, which track ancestry.
There is a bill before Congress that will make reporting police-involved shootings mandatory -- including reporting of race, situation, type of weapon, and individual officer involved.
And today, with the continued national reports of race and violence, I can't help but wonder: If Derrick were white, would people already be familiar with his story?
I remember as a teenager watching televised news reports of race riots in Washington, D.C., Vietnam protests, and seeing smoke billow behind the Capitol dome from those street activities in the '60s.
