Blackstreet 1995

[Lynne Pruskowski]

Blackstreetis the debut studio album from American R&B group Blackstreet, released in 1994 on Interscope Records. The group was formed by Riley with Chauncey Hannibal after the dissolution of Teddy Riley's former group Guy.[3] The other members of Blackstreet - Joseph Stonestreet and Levi Little - were session singers alongside Hannibal on Bobby Brown's third album Bobby, an album that was mostly produced by Riley.[4] They recorded one song for the soundtrack of the Chris Rock film CB4 called "Baby Be Mine".[5] Before they could record the second half of their album, Stonestreet left the group in 1994 due to his creative differences with the rest of the members of the group which led to him being [3] replaced by former Force One Network singer Dave Hollister.[6] When they re-recorded "Baby Be Mine" for their self-titled debut, Hollister's vocals were added on the album version of the song.

Hip hop producer Erick Sermon co-produced the first single "Booti Call",[3] which was a response to the rape trial and conviction of professional boxer Mike Tyson at the time of the album's release.[7] Riley, who was a close friend of Tyson,[7] referenced his incarceration in the album's liner notes: and to our main man Mike Tyson "we can't wait".[8] The song's opening was done by stand up comedian Bill Bellamy, who popularized his infamous saying on an episode of Russell Simmons' Def Comedy Jam.[9] The second single "Before I Let You Go" was released with a music video that featured appearances by actors Omar Epps[10][11] and Shari Headley.[12]

Also on the album is former member of The Sylvers songwriter and producer Leon Sylvers III, who collaborated with Riley on the writing and production of several songs on the album. Riley's proteges The Neptunes make one of their earliest appearances on Blackstreet as well, with Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo receiving a co-writing and assistant producer credit on the song "Tonight's the Night",[3][13] while Hugo plays the saxophone on the ballad "Happy Home".[14] Singer Michael Jackson helped with the composition of "Joy"- a song that was originally intended for Jackson's 1991 album Dangerous.[3][15] Blackstreet would be the first and last album with members Hollister and Little, who left the group at the early year of 1996.[16][17]

The album peaked at number fifty-two on the Billboard 200 chart. By April 1995, it was certified platinum in sales by the RIAA, after sales exceeding 1,000,000 copies in the United States. Blackstreet's cover of the Stevie Wonder song "Love's in Need of Love Today" was featured in the 1995 Harrison Ford film Sabrina, but it does not appear on the film's soundtrack.[18]

While Stanton Swihart of Allmusic commented that some of the songs weren't fully formed and others sounded like new jack retreads, he did remark that the work included "some brilliantly catchy R&B tracks, songs that easily stood out in the mid-'90s urban soul crowd."[2]

On a hot summer afternoon in August 1998, 37-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Rossano V. Gerald and his young son Gregory drove across the Oklahoma border into a nightmare. A career soldier and a highly decorated veteran of Desert Storm and Operation United Shield in Somalia, SFC Gerald, a black man of Panamanian descent, found that he could not travel more than 30 minutes through the state without being stopped twice: first by the Roland City Police Department, and then by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.

Perhaps, too, the officers understood the power of an image to stir people to action. SFC Gerald was only an infant in 1963 when a stunned nation watched on television as Birmingham Police Commissioner "Bull" Connor used powerful fire hoses and vicious police attack dogs against nonviolent black civil rights protesters. That incident, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s stirring I Have a Dream speech at the historic march on Washington in August of that year, were the low and high points, respectively, of the great era of civil rights legislation: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

How did it come to be, then, that 35 years later SFC Gerald found himself standing on the side of a dusty road next to a barking police dog, listening to his son weep while officers rummaged through his belongings simply because he was black?

Rossano and Gregory Gerald were victims of discriminatory racial profiling by police. There is nothing new about this problem. Police abuse against people of color is a legacy of African American enslavement, repression, and legal inequality. Indeed, during hearings of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders ("The Kerner Commission") in the fall of 1967 where more than 130 witnesses testified about the events leading up to the urban riots that had taken place in 150 cities the previous summer, one of the complaints that came up repeatedly was "the stopping of Negroes on foot or in cars without obvious basis."

No person of color is safe from this treatment anywhere, regardless of their obedience to the law, their age, the type of car they drive, or their station in life. In short, skin color has become evidence of the propensity to commit crime, and police use this "evidence" against minority drivers on the road all the time.

Racial profiling is based on the premise that most drug offenses are committed by minorities. The premise is factually untrue, but it has nonetheless become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because police look for drugs primarily among African Americans and Latinos, they find a disproportionate number of them with contraband. Therefore, more minorities are arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and jailed, thus reinforcing the perception that drug trafficking is primarily a minority activity. This perception creates the profile that results in more stops of minority drivers. At the same time, white drivers receive far less police attention, many of the drug dealers and possessors among them go unapprehended, and the perception that whites commit fewer drug offenses than minorities is perpetuated. And so the cycle continues.

This vicious cycle carries with it profound personal and societal costs. It is both symptomatic and symbolic of larger problems at the intersection of race and the criminal justice system. It results in the persecution of innocent people based on their skin color. It has a corrosive effect on the legitimacy of the entire justice system. It deters people of color from cooperating with the police in criminal investigations. And in the courtroom, it causes jurors of all races and ethnicities to doubt the testimony of police officers when they serve as witnesses, making criminal cases more difficult to win.

Still others argue without apology that making disproportionate numbers of traffic stops of African Americans and other minorities is not discrimination, but rational law enforcement. But as one officer learned, such "honesty" can be a dangerous counterpoint to official denials of profiling.

Carl Williams, New Jersey's Chief of Troopers, was dismissed in March 1999 by Governor Christine Todd Whitman soon after a news article appeared in which he defended profiling because, he said, "mostly minorities" trafficked in marijuana and cocaine. Williams' remarks received wide media attention at a time when Whitman and other state officials were already facing heightened media scrutiny over recent incidents of profiling and public anger over police mistreatment of black suspects.

Whitman and her attorney general, Peter Verniero, recouped from Williams' remarks somewhat when they issued a statistical report on April 20, 1999, acknowledging that the problem of racial profiling is, as Verniero put it, "real, not imagined." The credibility of that admission was seriously undermined, however, when Whitman told The New York Times that evidence of racial profiling is "not something [the state] had any reason to anticipate."

As events in New Jersey demonstrate, even when faced with a lawsuit, statistical evidence from independent experts, public pressure and intensive news coverage, officials in law enforcement and government are not eager to acknowledge the problem of racial profiling.

The ACLU believes that addressing the problem will require a multi-faceted effort. Our state affiliates and other civil rights advocates have brought lawsuits based on showings of discrimination by law enforcement agencies, but legal action is only a beginning; these cases are always difficult, long-term efforts that take considerable resources and plaintiffs of unusual fortitude. For instance, a lawsuit filed in Oklahoma earlier this month on behalf of SFC Gerald and his son may take years to resolve.

The pervasiveness of racial profiling by the police in the enforcement of our nation's drug laws is the consequence of the escalating the so-called war on drugs. Drug use and drug selling are not confined to racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.; indeed five times as many whites use drugs. But the war on drugs has, since its earliest days, targeted people of color. The fact that skin color has now become a proxy for criminality is an inevitable outcome of this process.

President Ronald Reagan established the Task Force on Crime in South Florida under Vice President George Bush's direction. The primary mission of the Task Force was to intensify air and sea operations against drug smuggling in the South Florida area, but it was not long before the Florida Highway Patrol entered the fray. In 1985, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles issued guidelines for the police on "The Common Characteristics of Drug Couriers." The guidelines cautioned troopers to be suspicious of rental cars, "scrupulous obedience to traffic laws," and drivers wearing "lots of gold," or who do not "fit the vehicle," and "ethnic groups associated with the drug trade." Traffic stops were initiated by the state troopers using this overtly race-based profile.

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