86 45
BYEDON
Vote
Vote blue
#BlueWave2020
Showing posts with label Tamir Rice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tamir Rice. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Tuesday, September 1, 2020
Sunday, July 26, 2020
We Must Make Black Lives Matter in America
Four examples. Following are just four very recent examples of what's gone on in America. And for far, far too long.
--Tamir Rice was 12 years old. He had a toy gun. Within 3-1/2 seconds of the police officer arriving on scene, he had already shot and killed the boy.
--Breonna Taylor was at home. She was an EMT. It was around midnight. The police officers came crashing through her apartment door on a no knock warrant. They immediately shot and killed her. They had the wrong address.
To this day, from March to today, July 26, those officers haven't been arrested. For anything.
--George Floyd was THOUGHT, only thought to have passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Eight minutes and 46 seconds after the officer began knee pressure on Mr. Floyd's neck/throat, he had killed him, Mr. Floyd. The officer, therefore, made himself judge, jury and executioner right there on the street.
--Auhmaud Arbery was jogging, out jogging, in his mother's neighborhood when two brothers, one an ex-police officer, thought he looked suspicious so they accosted him and within minutes shot him with a shotgun. Twice. Killing him. Again, they made themselves judge, jury and executioner, no less, and in only a few minutes.
All 4 were Americans. American citizens.
--Auhmaud Arbery was jogging, out jogging, in his mother's neighborhood when two brothers, one an ex-police officer, thought he looked suspicious so they accosted him and within minutes shot him with a shotgun. Twice. Killing him. Again, they made themselves judge, jury and executioner, no less, and in only a few minutes.
All 4 were Americans. American citizens.
Those are just 4 very recent situations, with their facts. 4, frankly, nearly insanely, of many here in the US both recent and going far back in our nation's history.
How could any of that be okay or right? How can any of that be okay here in our nation, in the United States of America?
We must make Black Lives Matter.
How could any of that be okay or right? How can any of that be okay here in our nation, in the United States of America?
We must make Black Lives Matter.
See for yourself:
Search Results
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Black Lives Must Matter
Langston Hughes was writing about this back at the beginning of the century, folks. And it certainly goes back farther than that, to the beginning, the founding of our nation.
I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
--Langston Hughes
Poem originally published 1926
Black Lives Matter didn't grow out of a Black issue or a problem Black people have or only Black people have, no. Far from it. It is a problem white people in America have. It's a problem we all have and share as Americans. If you don't see that, you don't know our own nation. You likely don't know our own nation's, your own nation's history.
Sunday, July 5, 2020
On This Day, -- July 5, 1852
"In 1852, the Maryland-born abolitionist Frederick Douglass was invited to address the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association’s 4th of July celebration in Rochester, N.Y. President Millard Fillmore, national political leaders and abolitionists from across the country were among those in the audience.
The speech, which was become known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” was in fact delivered on July 5. In many ways, it seems every bit as relevant today as it did 168 years ago."
A Marylander's Words That Still Resonate
168 Years Later
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Sunday, October 8, 2017
In Case You Don't Understand Why Athletes Are Taking a Knee
Local columnist Jenee Osterheldt put it better than just about anyone today in our own Kansas City Star.
Another black man dead,
another white cop free
I wondered if he knew riding a bicycle without a light could get you killed. Not by traffic, but by the police.
Did Patrick Harmon know that his black skin was something to be feared? Surely it’s something he’d learned in his short 50 years.
Is that why Harmon ran away when, on Aug. 13, the cops went to arrest him in Salt Lake City? They said he threatened them. The video shows him complying. They said he had a knife; one officer said it was “the scariest situation he had ever been in.” But Harmon looked like he was crying. Then he was fleeing for his life. Then he was dead. Less than two months later, the courts ruled the killing was justified.
Did Harmon know the next time Chiefs’ cornerback Marcus Peters sits during the national anthem to protest oppression and brutality, he’d be one of the brutalized?
Did Harmon know that we are not this country’s people? Did he know that black men in 2017 account for more than a quarter of police killings of unarmed people and only 6 percent of the population? Did he know that black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police?
And they get away with it. Ask Jason Stockley. He killed Anthony Lamar Smith, 24, in St. Louis and claimed he had a gun. But the gun found only bore Stockley’s DNA. Stockley said he was scared but as he chased Smith’s car, he can be heard saying, “We’re going to kill this, mother**”, don’t you know?”
We know, Jason. And you got away with it. Just like the cops who got away with the killings of Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and I could keep listing names but we’d run out of space.
The judge overseeing Stockley’s case said it would have been an anomaly if Smith did not have a gun. A judicial validation of white fear.
White fear says he shouldn’t have been running. That if you just comply you’ll survive. Because it worked out great for Castile, who was pulled over while driving in Minnesota and was shot seven times.
White fear says if you just stay in your place and stand for the anthem and salute the flag instead of protest brutality and oppression, that everything will be fine.
White fear says All Lives Matter and act like #BlackLivesMatter is a hate group. And act like it’s completely normal for St. Louis police to shout “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” Because controlling a city has been confused with protecting its people.
In Kansas City, the Chiefs organization says it has found no evidence that anyone called Washington Redskins’ Terrelle Pryor a n----- at Arrowhead, as if their own Peters hasn’t been threatened with racial slurs and violence since he started sitting during the anthem.
Did they think not a single Chiefs fan could be involved? (See: Confederate flags flying at Arrowhead Stadium’s parking lot.) Maybe they did. Just like Chad Dearth of KC Trends Motorsports believed rallying local businesses to refuse service to Peters carried no oppressive subtext. But, you know, he says he didn’t know Peters was protesting brutality. Okay.
It’s not a stretch to believe that Pryor was responding to racism. But it is telling that he was expected to apologize for flipping the bird at a racial slur. Just like lawyers must prove beyond the shadow of a doubt a cop wasn’t acting out of fear, but the assumption of a black threat comes naturally. They’ll pay out settlements like masters paid for slaves but to convict a killer of a black person would require recognizing our humanity.
But this is a country where President Donald Trump will call a black man a son of a bitch for protesting but won’t call a white mass murderer a terrorist. Brutality and oppression are why the athletes kneel, sit or raise a fist.
Like James Baldwin said: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Because:
America loves its guns more than its people.
America loves its flag and its anthem more than its people.
America loves its police more than its people.
America loves its people as long as queer people, immigrant people and people of color aren’t its people.
Sunday, September 24, 2017
In Case You Don't Get or Agree With the Silent NFL Protests
One picture. One example.
Links:
Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue: Trump’s comments are ‘insulting and disgraceful’
Here's two teams, anyway, that aren't "taking a knee" during the National Anthem:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
