Maia Campbell

I just got through watching the video of Maia Campbell in the car of her “pimp” and she is apparently very strung out and dropping f bombs like there is no tomorrow.  It was very difficult to watch.  I have to say that tears came to my eyes and I was completely devastated to see her in such a state. To say that the video is heartbreaking is an understatement. First off, the men videotaping her are b+-&* n@@@@@@ (In the words of Katt Williams.) and they will have to answer to their maker one day for egging her on by asking her inane questions in order to get more “footage.” I am not posting the video because I refuse to contribute to the horrific circulation of this depiction of a fellow black woman’s cry for help.  What kind of society do we live in where other blacks find the devastations of another black person humorous and are ignorant enough to video tape a black woman who could be your mother, sister, aunt, cousin and circulate it around and call it entertainment? The black gossip sites that are circling this video and others with such titles such as “Maia Campbell is Crack-ho” are accessories to the humiliation and demise of their community.  These social sites and bloggers should be ashamed of themselves for using a situation so serious as a marketing tool and by not telling the full truth about Maia’s history.  These videos go beyond anything I have seen as far as footage of a “celebrity” at their lowest point. At one point the black community needs to draw the line and not degrade ourselves.  Maia is not a “crack-head prostitute” as I have read on so many sites.  She suffers from a mental illness, schizophrenia (sometimes she is reported to suffer from bi-polar disease as well), a mental disorder that makes it difficult to distinguish between real and unreal experiences.  The condition manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking.  Maia’s condition has brought much anguish and distress to her family for a very long time.  So much so, that her late mother Bebe Moore Campbell wrote about it in one of her last novels “72 Hour Hold.”  Sadly, her mother’s death triggered Maia’s condition for the worse (with mental illnesses, traumatic incidents such as the loss of a loved one can have a negative effect).  Maia does not have the money like some celebrities who shall remain nameless to keep her blunders hidden, so she has to suffer the humiliation of heartless negroes who have no problem degrading black women in such a manner as to exploit her at her expense. (side note, these men know they would never be able to get her on their own, so supplying her with illegal drugs is the only way they are able to manifest their insecurities).  I’ve read posts from people who said that she refused to go to rehab and that she refuses to take her meds so she deserves this.  For those of you who have never experienced this for yourself or have never watched a loved one go through self-inflicted pain for reasons far beyond your control or understanding, you should not pass judgment.  One of the many side effects of suffering from a mental illness is that it precludes you from taking your meds. One ray of hope that I see with Maia’s video being circulated is that it raising the awareness of the devastating effects that mental illness has on the black community.  Unfortunately, Maia is the face of just one of millions of people affected by this devastating disease.  African Americans have a 200% higher risk of schizophrenia than Caucasian Americans. Mental illness is a taboo subject that has plagued the black community for decades and it is time that we start addressing it. We have shied away from mental illnesses as much as we shy away from addressing homosexuality.  We may think that mental illness does not affect us, but it does.  Many of the black men and women who are locked up for committing crimes suffer from some sort of mental disorder.  Many of the “streetwalkers” and “homeless bums” that are made fun of on the streets are people with mental illnesses who do not have the resources needed to receive adequate help like those in upper class neighborhoods.  And last, but not least, how many of us know of a situation where a young girl or boy in the family has been “touched” inappropriately or sexually assaulted by a family member who “wasn’t wrapped too tight?” and everyone knows about it, but won’t speak about it?  It is imperative that the black community tackle this issue head-on.  We are contributing to our own demise by turning the other way.  It begins with us.  (Remember MJ’s Man in the Mirror?) If you live in Illinois, visit the Illinois Department of Human Services’ Division of Mental Health’s website for more information on the many services offered to families and individuals who need help.  It is no longer harmless to say “she wild like her mama” or “he crazy like his daddy.”  Because mental illnesses are intergenerational, we have to explore why and what we are passing on to our children.  Did you know that stress is a form of mental disorder? And minority communities have the highest stress levels. We have to get past laughing at those with mental illnesses.  It is not funny to the families who have to deal with it and it shouldn’t be funny to us.  The negative images of Maia that are circulating should not be laughed and jeered at.  Those who take pleasure in watching it should really arm themselves with information on the different factions of mental disorders.  Her spiraling downfall is not our entertainment, but rather a wake-up call for our community to address this problem and no longer sweep it under the rug.  I will say that I am glad to see black publications and healthcare professionals over the past year are campaigning to raise awareness on the issues of stress and mental illness in the black communities.  The suffering that Maia is going through is only a snapshot of the reality of what is going on in our backyards – she represents many of our family members.  Maia Campbell does not deserve to be laughed and leered at. She deserves our prayers and our help.  We owe it to her, her late mother and to ourselves.

Below is a statement released by Maia’s family:

Our hearts have been deeply touched by the outpouring of love that so many of you have freely displayed in the past several days about our beloved Maia C. Campbell. Our spirits have been lifted by your words of support and your acts of kindness and we have been encouraged to continue our efforts to assist our daughter and granddaughter to become whole again.

As a family, we have been struggling with Maia in her illness for quite some time. We continue to hold fast to our faith and hope that some day she will realize that healing will begin when she decides to reach out and accept the help and treatment that have been offered to her. We all have challenges in life that we must face, but when compound problems such as mental illness and substance abuse are prevalent, it can appear that there is no way out. However, our sustaining faith and trust in God compels us to believe differently. We strongly believe that Maia will be healed.

We also know that Maia’s mother, the late Bebe Moore Campbell, who devoted much of her later years in life to mental health awareness and education, along with her family members and friends would welcome your prayers and support for Maia’s sustained recovery. In addition, we urge your support for efforts to diagnose and treat mental illness in our community.

We ask that you not only pray for Maia’s wellness, but also commit to understanding this insidious disease, which is devastating our loved ones and community. Help erase the “stigma” of mental illness, which is a very serious barrier to treatment, so that we can help those with the disease to live wholesome lives. Call for more treatment options and prevention strategies, have compassion for those stricken with this illness, and help guide those who have been unable to find their way to appropriate treatment. Additionally, support those families who are struggling to cope with loved ones with the disease because mental illness affects the entire family.

Finally, we ask that you support Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, which was established by Congressional Resolution, H. Con. Res. 134, in April 2008, and is celebrated during the month of July each year. It was established to enhance public awareness of mental illness, especially within minority communities. Please join us in this effort to bring attention to this problem, to identify resources and to strengthen the focus on treatment along with research relative to minorities and mental illness. This is the work that we continue on behalf of Bebe Moore Campbell.

Let us move forward, face our challenge, and turn that challenge into victory and a celebration of life.

To God be the Glory,

Sincerely,

Ellis Gordon Jr., Father
Doris C. Moore, Grandmother

Are we going to go from a racial issue to a sexist issue?

UPDATE: There are photos plastered all over the place showing the beer meeting. How much could they have possibly progressed with a horde of media surrounding them?

President Obama has invited police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates for beer.

Will White House beer help nation chill on race?

(CNN) — Lucia Whalen strolled down a sidewalk near Harvard University, enjoying a lunchtime ritual she’d repeated many times in her 15 years working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But on this day, July 16, her outing would become something else altogether — the first steps in a national drama.

An older woman approached Whalen, worried that she’d just witnessed two men breaking into a home. That’s when Whalen, a first-generation Portuguese-American, called 911 from her cell phone — alerting police to 17 Ware St. — the home, as it turns out, of renowned Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Whalen’s call — now clearly the well-intentioned act of a passerby — ignited a firestorm over race and police relations, a national debate that went all the way to the White House. It was a call she says she never expected to be “analyzed by an entire nation.”

Gates was arrested by Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley for disorderly conduct, a charge that was later dropped. Exactly what happened inside Gates’ home may never be known, but it seems clear that the key players in this saga brought their own personal history with race to the moment. That was true of Gates and Crowley, as well as the nation’s first African-American president.

All three will meet for a beer today at the White House to help chill the furor over Gates’ arrest and, in Obama’s words, try to turn the events of the past two weeks into a “teachable moment.”

“White woman” targeted

It’s a bit ironic, said Whalen’s attorney Wendy Murphy, that the three people who “reacted badly” will sit down together while the “one person who did not overreact” will be at work Thursday. “Maybe it’s a guy thing,” Murphy said, adding of Whalen: “She doesn’t like beer anyway.” Watch Whalen describe “painful” criticism »

Gates’ arrest sparked heated rhetoric on TV, radio and the Internet. Initially, it seemed to break down along racial lines: African-Americans saw it as racial profiling by a white officer. Whites asked why the acclaimed scholar on black history didn’t just show his ID to Crowley at the outset. Wasn’t the officer just doing his job?

Even Whalen, the Good Samaritan, got smeared in the initial response. The police report identifying her as a “white woman” resulted in a torrent of accusations that she racially profiled Gates and his driver when she first called 911.

But a review of the call showed she never identified the suspects as “black” — and even told a police dispatcher she wasn’t sure it was a break-in. “The criticism at first was so painful for me. … I was frankly afraid to say anything,” Whalen said Wednesday, fighting back tears. “People called me racist and said I caused all the turmoil that followed, and some even said threatening things that made me fear for my safety.”

Whalen is sensitive to the issue of racial profiling, because of her own olive-skinned complexion, her attorney said.

Two men; two views

Inside 17 Ware St., Gates and Crowley exchanged words as the officer sought to determine whether Gates belonged in the home. Each blamed the other for a situation that escalated; each felt the other brought prejudices to the moment.

Both had personal experience with racial profiling. iReport: Racial profiling, from both sides

Long before his acclaim as a scholar of black history, Gates had faced the prejudice of a white man. Gates was just 14, and had suffered a hairline fracture in his hip.

“The white doctor who examined Gates shortly afterward questioned the boy about his injury as well as his career plans. When the young Gates replied that he wanted to be a doctor and then correctly answered many questions about science, the doctor made his diagnosis,” according to a biography of Gates posted on Gale, an online research tool.

“He told Gates to stand and walk, and the young boy fell to the floor in intense pain. The doctor then turned to Gates’s mother and explained that her son’s problem was psychosomatic — a black boy from Appalachia who wanted to be a doctor in the mid-1960s was an overachiever.”

Gates, now 58, walks with a cane as a result. “The most subtle and pernicious form of racism against blacks [is] doubt about our intellectual capacities,” he once said.

The typically soft-spoken Harvard professor is revered worldwide for being at the fore of African-American issues. His award-winning PBS documentaries have made him one of the most powerful forces of academia, admired by colleagues of all races.

At the time of his arrest, Gates had just returned from China, where he had filmed the ancestral cemetery of Grammy-winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma as part of an upcoming series on immigration in America.

Gates told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that his arrest was a wake-up call.

“What it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are — how vulnerable all people of color are and all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policeman,” he said. “It was the fault of a policeman who couldn’t stand a black man standing up for his rights right in his face.” Watch Gates describe arrest »

But those who know Crowley, including African-American colleagues, say not so fast.

For years, Crowley taught a racial profiling class at a Massachusetts police academy — hand-picked by an African-American police commissioner.

He also tried to save the life of Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis in 1993 when the black athlete died during an off-season practice. “I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn’t working on a black man. I was working on another human being,” he told the Boston Herald.

Two black officers on the Cambridge force have stood solidly by their comrade.

Sgt. Leon Lashley was outside Gates’ house when the professor was arrested. He has no problems with the way Crowley handled the situation.

“It happened to be a white officer on a black man, and the common call a lot of times is to call it a racist situation,” said Lashley. “This situation right here was not a racial-motivated situation. … There’s nothing rogue about him. He was doing his job.”

Lashley acknowledged that if he, as a black officer, had entered the home first, it likely would’ve been a different outcome.

Kelly King, another African-American Cambridge officer, said she has known Crowley for more than a decade and that he’s “a good police officer, a good man with character.” Watch black cops stand by Crowley »

“I think Professor Gates has done a very good job of throwing up a very effective smokescreen, calling race into this. It had nothing to do with it,” she told CNN’s Don Lemon with Crowley at her side.

She said people who have turned against Crowley need to “keep their minds open and realize that we would not support someone that we felt wronged someone else. … We would not support anyone in blue doing the wrong thing.”

When she finished speaking, she and Crowley embraced. “You’ve got to be touched by that,” CNN’s Lemon said.

The officer at the center of the controversy nodded his head, fighting off tears.

Obama steps in

A third player ratcheted up the controversy and he, too, brought history to the moment. President Obama entered the fray when he said police “acted stupidly.” His comments outraged many in law enforcement, and he soon did a mea culpa, saying he could’ve “calibrated” his words differently. Watch Obama say he helped ratchet up debate »

Obama is a friend of Gates. A graduate of Harvard Law School, the president also once studied under Charles Ogletree, the law professor who represents Gates.

As state senator in Illinois, Obama pushed for a racial profiling bill in 2003. According to the Chicago Tribune, the bill created a means for police to track the race of drivers stopped for traffic infractions over a period of years.

In his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama said his status insulated him from the “bumps and bruises” of the typical black man in America.

But, he said, “I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my 45 years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason.”

“I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger.”

As the three men sit down together at the White House, there are many lessons to be drawn from this most teachable moment. Not the least of which might be that race is still a major factor in perceptions, and misperceptions.

As for Whalen, she says she would still make that 911 call if she had it to do over again.

“I would hope people would learn not to judge others,” she said.

She added, “I was just trying to get lunch.”

Cab driver Abdinasir Kahin had just dropped off a passenger in Lake View early this morning when he saw two men beating another man in the head with a chain.

Police were on the scene and had captured one man, but another was getting away.

So Kahin got out of his cab, chased the man and grabbed him — until police arrived.

Now police are commending Kahin and saying he deserves a citizens award.

The two men are in custody for the beating and robbery of a 20-year-old man visiting Chicago from Ireland.

Kahin “did stop the initial foot chase,’’ said police officer Tim O’Brien. “He took it upon his own conscience, which I am thankful for.’’

Police can’t say whether the attack is related to the string of other robberies of men in the Lincoln Park and Lake View areas.

The 20-year-old man was walking to the CTA’s Belmont station around 4:30 a.m. when two men jumped him near Belmont and Sheffield, police said. One grabbed the man’s wallet, said Ray Calderon, one of the officers who responded to the scene.

The Irish man began chasing the men, who were headed South on Sheffield. Calderon and O’Brien were in the area in a squad car.

“We saw three males running, and we thought it was suspicious so we followed them,’’ said Calderon. The men started to beat the victim with what police said was a chain used to tow cars.

The officers jumped out of their car and caught one of the men and put him in handcuffs.

The other man, who ran in a different direction, then came back to grab what police described as a purse that he had been carrying.

Kahin, 40, of Rogers Park, saw the attack of the Irish man by what he described as two men in their early 20s, including a black male and another man who may have been either black or Hispanic.

He saw the Irish man just after he got hit with the chain.

“There was blood flowing all over,’’ Kahin said.

Kahin saw police capture the first attacker but the other began running toward him.

“He was running very fast so I had to intervene,’’ he said. “I had to block him and get ahold of him. I left my cab and ran towards him. We grabbed each other, and I got hold of him until police got there.’’

But O’Brien said that man put up a struggle, first attempting to grab the officer’s pepper spray and reaching for his radio. A crowd had gathered, and the man even started yelling for help, police and Kahin said.

Then Calderon came and the officers were able to subdue him and take him into custody.

The victim was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center where he was scheduled to get staples in his head and undergo a CT-scan, police said. But his injuries were not life-threatening.

Belmont District police Capt. Jan Dillon said didn’t think the incident was connected to the other recent attacks on men walking by themselves on the North Side, but she said it would be up to police detectives to make that determination.

Dillon commended the officers and said she would nominate Kahin for a citizen’s award.

Alaina Reed Hall, a singer and actress who played Olivia Robinson on “Sesame Street” for a dozen years beginning in the mid-1970s and later played Rose Holloway on the situation comedy “227,” has died. She was 63.

Reed Hall, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, died Thursday at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, said her husband, Tamim Amini.

One of the original cast members of the 1974 off-Broadway production of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road,” Reed Hall joined “Sesame Street” in 1976 and played Olivia — a professional photographer and sister to the character Gordon — until 1988.

In a 2004 interview with the Springfield (Ohio) News-Sun, Reed Hall described “Sesame Street” as “the best job I ever had.”

When she heard fans calling out to her as she rode in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, she said, “It dawned on me. I have a big responsibility. I was in their house every day.”

On “227,” the 1985-90 NBC sitcom, she played the apartment landlady and best friend to star Marla Gibbs’ Mary Jenkins character.

In the show’s final season, Reed Hall’s character falls in love with Warren Merriwether, played by Kevin Peter Hall, and the two characters wed. In real life, the two actors were already married.

“It was a wonderful segment because we had [guest star] Luther Vandross, who was also a friend of Alaina’s, sing; and we had the same minister who performed the actual wedding,” Gibbs told The Times on Monday.

Gibbs, who had attended the couple’s real wedding, first met Reed Hall when she auditioned for the TV series.

“She was very good in the role, and some episodes were written around her,” said Gibbs, adding that Reed Hall “was a wonderful singer. As a matter of fact, she and I did a nightclub act together at my club, Marla’s Memory Lane,” while doing the series.

“She worked on Broadway, she did stuff in New York; she was a very well-known singer in New York for a while before she did the show,” Gibbs said. “After we finished the show, she did quite a few commercials, so I was calling her the ‘Commercial Queen.’

“She was just a wonderful friend. She will be sorely missed; she fought the good fight.”

Born Bernice Reed in Springfield, Ohio, on Nov. 10, 1946, she appeared in stage productions of “Hair,” “Chicago” and “Eubie.”

She also made guest appearances on TV series such as including “ER,” “NYPD Blue,” “Friends” and “Ally McBeal,” and appeared in a number of films, including “Death Becomes Her,” “Cruel Intentions” and “I’m Through With White Girls (The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks).”

Reed Hall’s first marriage ended in divorce. Her marriage to the 7-foot-2 Hall, who played the Bigfoot character Harry in the film and television series “Harry and the Hendersons,” ended with his death in 1991. Reed Hall married Amini in 2008.

A list of surviving family members was not provided.

No funeral service will be held. A celebration of Reed Hall’s life is being planned for early next year.

dennis.mclellan

@latimes.com