Part 1. - Urban Teen Heroes - the twisted morality of the streets - fanning the fires of discontent? - Jameis Winston - NFL Superstar or Serial Rapist - you decide

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Twice in the past few days the hypocrisy of American morality rose to the forefront when Black urban heroes made tens of millions of dollars.  Just who are these idols of a generation of young men in our urban areas?

More important, do the backgrounds of these new heroes reflect at all on the sense of lawlessness, immorality, and breakdown of the family structure that is fueling the fires of racial discontent?

A few days ago, the number one pick in the NFL draft is Jameis Winston, the Heisman Trophy winner from Florida State University.  He even led the Seminoles to the national title.

He is pictured with his NFL contract his first day as a professional, the ink barely dry on his four-year, $25.3-million rookie contract, which he signed 90 minutes earlier.  On television, he looks and he is emotionless.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are his new team.  Yet the Bucs hired private investigators to check out Winston, who’d been accused of, but not charged with, sexual assault. Twice he was exonerated by prosecutors, and once by the university after a probe by a Florida state supreme court justice found insufficient evidence to charge Winston with sexual assault.

This was a great test of the innocent-till-proven-guilty mantra in the American justice system, and the authorities could not prosecute Winston.  So Winston passed the test. “He kept checking every box,” Licht said.

Here is what The New York Times had to say about the actions of Winston.

A Star Player Accused, and a Flawed Rape Investigation

Errors in Inquiry on Rape Allegations Against F.S.U.'s Jamies Winston

By WALT BOGDANICH

April 16, 2014

Tallahassee, Fla. — Early on the morning of Dec. 7, 2012, a freshman at Florida State University reported that she had been raped by a stranger somewhere off campus after a night of drinking at a popular Tallahassee bar called Potbelly’s.

As she gave her account to the police, several bruises began to appear, indicating recent trauma. Tests would later find semen on her underwear.

For nearly a year, the events of that evening remained a well-kept secret until the woman’s allegations burst into the open, roiling the university and threatening a prized asset: Jameis Winston, one of the marquee names of college football.

Three weeks after Mr. Winston was publicly identified as the suspect, the storm had passed. The local prosecutor announced that he lacked the evidence to charge Mr. Winston with rape. The quarterback would go on to win the Heisman Trophy and lead Florida State to the national championship.

Here is the full report from The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/16/sports/errors-in-inquiry-on-rape-allegations-against-fsu-jameis-winston.html?_r=0

Woman who accused Jameis Winston of rape sues football star

By Steve Almasy and Jason Durand, CNN

Updated 12:09 PM ET, Fri April 17, 2015

(CNN)Erica Kinsman, a former Florida State University student who has accused star football player Jameis Winston of rape, has filed a lawsuit against the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, her lawyer said Thursday.

Kinsman has said Winston raped her in December 2012. A prosecutor decided against bringing criminal charges in the case.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday, Kinsman alleges sexual battery, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Winston has said the sex was consensual.

CNN obtained the following statement from Winston's attorney David Cornwell.

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Beyond the lawsuit, Ms. Kinsman was part of a new movie released this week called The Hunting Ground, about how female college students are the victims of predators seeking victims to rape. 

Is this the kind of role model we want for our urban youth?

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Miley Cyrus - The Seduction of Money in Entertainment

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For several years we have warned of the lure of money in Hollywood on our young teen stars and the seduction of sexuality that can entrap them. Previously we have written about the dangers to young stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift has seemed to manage to control the seduction of Hollywood money to her credit but Miley Cyrus, now just 17, seems to have embraced the seduction in an effort to shock her young fan base and try to compete with the older bad girls who trade off sexuality more than talent.

Here is what Chris Willman wrote about the new Miley packaging for her current album.

Miley's New Video: Parents' Council Would Like To Tame It

Posted Mon Oct 11, 2010 9:11am PDT by Chris Willman in Stop The Presses!

Has Miley Cyrus finally gone so far with her increasingly sensual image that she's been condemned by her own father?

Well, no, not exactly. But her racy new music video, "Who Owns My Heart?," has been slammed by the Parents Television Council. Funnily enough, when you check the list of folks sitting on the advisory board for this conservative watchdog group, the biggest-name celebrity listed there is—you guessed it—none other than Billy Ray Cyrus!

Apparently, Papa Cyrus was not advising the Parents Television Council when they released a statement saying: "It is unfortunate that she would participate in such a sexualized video like this one. It sends messages to her fan base that are diametrically opposed to everything she has done up to this point. Miley built her fame and fortune entirely on the backs of young girls, and it saddens us that she seems so eager to distance herself from that fan base so rapidly."

But by "us," the Parents Council apparently doesn't mean that board member Billy Ray is saddened, too. Or is he, secretly? Even if you don't have any problem with Miley getting so sexy at 17, there's evidence that it's hurting her just on a career level.

Rarely has a song gotten so much media attention and yet been as commercially unsuccessful as Cyrus' "Can't Be Tamed," the title track of her latest album. Even after a series of controversial performances of the song on various TV shows and awards programs, the single quickly flamed out, debuting at No. 8 but disappearing from the Billboard Hot 100 chart altogether after a mere 10 weeks. (By comparison, her 2009 smash "Party in the USA" spent 28 weeks in the top 10.) The Can't Be Tamed album is also absent from Billboard's list of the current 200 bestselling albums, just four months after it came out. It's sold 260,000 copies to date, anemic by the standards of the previous three Cyrus releases.

Given the performance at radio and retail of the current album and previous single, you might have expected the 17-year-old singer to retreat to safer territory for the new video. But maybe you didn't get the message last time around: Miley can't be tamed... not even by failure!

And so "Who Owns My Heart?" pushes the same buttons as the last video. She writhes around on a bed without pants on (though there are only quick flashes of what appears to be black underwear). She gyrates freely and suggestively with both men and women on the dance floor at what no one would mistake for a high school sockhop.

Whether this is envelope-pushing or not depends on your frame of reference. Compared to most other dance-pop videos, it's standard fare, if not downright tame. Compared to the videos being put out by other underage girls and/or stars who still have sitcoms running on the Disney Channel, it's provocative.

The fact that Hannah Montana's fourth and last season is still on the air complicates things—or should, to some people's minds. Although taping for the show wrapped up in May, the season is being stretched out long enough by the Disney Channel that its status as a first-run show won't end till next March's two-part season finale.

With her 18th birthday approaching next month and her status as a tween TV idol months away from officially ending, Cyrus seems to feel that there's no time to waste in attracting a demo of fans that are her age or older. Bit throwing one solidified fan base over for a less certain new one is always a calculated risk at best. And Cyrus may have jettisoned her young-girl support before she had a substitute audience of older teens and adults locked in.

It's easy to see how Cyrus and her team may have thought she'd already graduated to the next level of demographics. Initially, she had a hard time crossing over from Radio Disney to Top 40 because programmers saw her appeal as skewing too young. But "See You Again" was just too undeniable a song not to play, as was "Party in the USA." Then came "Can't Be Tamed," and as a single, it was...deniable. Radio Disney couldn't touch it, and Top 40 didn't care. Her move away from guilty-pleasure rock & roll bubblegum to dance-pop suddenly made her a competitor to Lady Gaga and a hundred other hitmakers, and though it worked with Dr. Luke helping her out on "USA," it didn't with the duller songs on the new album.

And it may have been the very raciness of her new image that sunk her with Top 40 radio. All the outcry about her alleged sexualization at 17 just reminded radio programmers of what a chance they'd taken with their older listeners by throwing her in with more mature artists in the first place.

Of course, her history of controversy for supposed suggestiveness goes back two and a half years now. Hard to believe, isn't it, that it was April 2008 when news broke about Cyrus, then 15, posing in bedsheets for Vanity Fair? In 2009, she danced around a pole at the Teen Choice Awards in a fashion that made her not every parent's choice. Also that summer, she broke up with model Justin Gaston, when she was 16 and he was 20, to take up with her somewhat more age-suitable Last Song costar, Liam Hemsworth, who is only two and a half years her senior. Hackles were further raised when a secretly recorded video of the 16-year-old performing a risque dance for a 44-year-old producer at the Last Song wrap party was leaked. "It's what people her age do," explained Billy Ray Cyrus.

This year brought her wearing a corset in the "Can't Be Tamed" video in May, followed by Cyrus simulating kissing a female dancer while performing the single on Britain's Got Talent in June. In July, the New York Times published a story headlined "Fans of Miley Cyrus Question Her New Path," which theorized that it was not prude moms who were rejecting the saucy new image but Miley's own tween fans.

There are still some scolds among the older set, to be sure. Hollywood Life, the site run by former tabloid queen Bonnie Fuller, recently ran a story allegedly quoting a "Cyrus family insider" as saying, "We're concerned for her. She's 17 years old, but is the one who makes the money and calls all the shots in the family. No one tells Miley no." Fuller wrote a separate editorial noting how Cyrus has been seen partying into the wee hours in clubs she can't legally enter, and addressed Billy Ray and Tish Cyrus directly: "Your daughter may be a big star but she's still your little girl and that means you need to be her parents."

So far, Cyrus' image change has been a bust, at least when it comes to affecting her music career. Of course, she's only one smash single away from having a chart comeback and having her accelerated maturation perceived as a brilliant career move. The problem is, the smash single that will turn it back around for her probably isn't "Who Owns My Heart," and probably isn't anywhere else on the Can't Be Tamed album.

So her next chance to prove that this sexy-mama thing is working out for her in terms of numbers and not just blogging controversy is the movie LOL: Laughing Out Loud, in which Cyrus' character engages in some very un-Disney-like behavior. That recently wrapped film won't come out till after Hannah Montana has finally concluded its run. But we have a feeling the Parents Television Council will have something to say about it.

Meanwhile, any bets on how many days or hours it'll take until Billy Ray's photo disappears from the advisory board page on the PTC website? Surely, having an organization that he supposedly helps lead condemn his little girl—and, by implication, his parenting skills—is breaking his achy breaky heart.

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