Posted on 09/04/2014 7:10:13 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
They are not insurgents. They are not enemy combatants. They are not hostile enemy forces. They are not terrorists. They are our Black sons. And I beg you America to stop killing them in their own backyards, in the streets outside of nightclubs, on the phone talking to their girlfriend, and a few blocks from convenience stores from which they may or may not have stolen cigars. They do not deserve to die for such trivial incidents.
America, the young Black men you kill are our future and potential scientists and doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs; they are our future bus drivers, train conductors, teachers, garbage men, mechanics, cable TV guys, the clerk at the neighborhood grocery stores. Whatever their roles in the future, large or small, they do not deserve to die.
It is true. Some of our Black sons are misdirected and misguided, to be sure. But doesn’t every society have those disaffected youth who may follow the path to crime and violence? A few of them may deserve to be labelled thugs and hoodlums, but this is not every Black male child born, and our country says they are innocent until proven guilty. Even the “bad apples” don’t deserve to be gunned down and die like animals in the streets.
Do we condemn every White young disaffected 21-year-old male because of Columbine; Aurora, Tucson, Fort Hood, and most recently Newtown? No. In their article, “White Men have much to discuss about mass shootings, Charlotte and Harriet Childress point out that White boys and men are often given a pass and attention turned to mental health issues, rather than the fact that disproportionately, White men have been involved in mass shooting sprees. Yet, they are not racially profiled.
You would never know it from the images of Ferguson, but this is not Iraq. We are not living in Afghanistan. This is not the Gaza Strip. This is the United States of America and Ferguson, Mo. So who gave ipso facto permission? In other words, what powers that be authorized today’s policemen, living in small town America in the heartland, to function like trained military and to treat our young Black sons as if they were terrorists and the enemy without justification or evidence?
Today’s policemen are under tremendous stress complicated by the individual backgrounds of those in uniform. The proliferation of racial profiling, the ongoing killing of young Black men point to an epidemic of violence in which White police officers (and some troubled men of color) use their uniform and their role as police officers not to protect society and its citizens but to mete out discipline to those Black male bodies they have come to associate with violence. Who turned society’s peacekeepers into judge, jury and executioners that can shoot the unarmed in the back and use petty crimes to justify their horrendous actions?
America has failed Black men because it has not lived up to its promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all its citizens. America has decided that Black men’s lives are disposable, and so it has built a prison industrial complex that privately profits from mass incarceration instead of spending that money on better public schools, on salaries for teachers who believe in their students, on job training and a youth service corps for unemployed urban and rural youth, and on inner city youth programs that encourage success and courage and instill pride, loyalty and respect.
Throughout our history Black men in America have been enslaved, lynched, used as strike breakers, incarcerated for petty crimes, discouraged from having big dreams, unemployed at three times the rate of White men, hired last and laid off first, paid lower wages for the same work as White men, incarcerated longer and receiving harsher sentences for the same crimes as white men, ten times more likely to be stopped by the police for bogus reasons, stopped repeatedly and harassed for minor traffic violations, and now they are routine target practice for police who take out their own white supremacy rage, their racism and sense of vigilante justice under the guise of protecting the public.
Law enforcement or the police have never been viewed by the Black community as a source of protection. In truth, Black communities have felt the need to be protected from the very forces sworn to uphold justice. Police don’t respond to violence in Black communities with the same degree of commitment as they do to their own White communities. Too often White policemen have terrorized Black men whom they considered “uppity” through lynching and other means of regulating Black male bodies.
Lest you forget, not too far in the past it was policemen who upheld and reinforced segregation and sanctioned lynching. Lest you forget, it was policemen who occupied the highest ranks of the Ku Klux Klan and it was policemen who turned fire hoses and unleashed dogs on peaceful Black civil rights demonstrators. Why should Black America trust the police?
Even recently with Black and Latino policemen among their ranks, there is no equal justice for our Black sons. Stepping into the police uniform renders these policemen of color senseless and they adopt the crowd mentality that all Black men are suspect, suspicious, thugs, druggies, anti-authoritarian hip hoppers, and in need of police control – translation: they need to be beat down like beasts. And so they kill our Black sons.
Black men are thrown in jail for carrying small amounts of recreational drugs while White men in suburbia are sent to rehab. Police follow Black men around the streets without probable cause because they assume that all Black men are up to no good. Policemen even kill their own (a Black policeman) for firing a weapon when out of uniform because there is no such thing as a Black man with a legitimate reason for having a gun. Police routinely racially profile Black men as a group, yet have not developed a profile of the type of young White men most likely to commit mass murder at their schools.
Doing this kind of profiling might require that they look in the mirror and acknowledge that there are a lot of angry White men wearing badges who resent the legislation and changes in the country that they believe have reduced their White privilege and sense of entitlement. Many of these angry White men wear badges and may have been socialized from childhood to believe that the only good Black man is a dead one. No amount of Police Academy training can erase years of pent-up racism, White supremacy thinking, a sense of entitlement to White privilege and uncontrollable rage that it is a Black man who now holds the highest office in the country.
Today is a day of mourning. Unfortunately, Michael Brown is not the first, and he will not be the last Black son of America who dies. Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo. has become an iconic symbol for the injustices that Black boys and men face, just as Emmett Till became almost 60 years ago. As the mother of a Black son, I weep not only for the mother of Michael Brown, I also weep for Trayvon Martin’s mother, and the mothers of all those young Black men who unjustly have fallen at the hands of America’s police. When will it stop? When will America regain its sanity as a society, and stop? Until there are answers, I will let my tears fall and mingle with those of the many Black mothers here and all over the world who have but one request: Stop killing our Black sons. Stop it. Now!
:)
lest you forget, it was and as far as I’m concerned,still is, the democrats who were the KKK, the segregationists, the racists, the killer of black youth...and yet you continue to elect them to keep you down for generaton after generation. You get what you vote for, you get what you tolerate....to blame ANYONY but yourselves for your fate is nonsense.....single mothers, absent fathers, no moral values whatsoever, crime ridden neighborhoods, stesling stores out of business, rape, thuggery on the streets, lack of education, dirt and filth in your neighborhoods....please, you are disgusting.
Her precious black sons are, to her, nothing more than pawns in the game of “let’s destroy Western civilization” that she plays with her fellow leftists. They’re of no more interest to her than the thousands upon thousands of black babies who are murdered by the like of her each year, and for the same reason.
Well,I'm sick and tired of punks of *all* races terrorizing decent citizens of *all* races.
90% of blacks killed are killed by blacks. She should direct her comments to her black audience.
I’m inclined to want to finish that title with 2 words, but I’m not in a ‘zot’ mood over my own personal amusement...
White people, especially white American men, are very well respected here, I would say, more than Europeans. They either call me "sir" or "Joe." I always laugh. There is no ice skating here, or at least it is 400 miles away, so next month I am going ice skating. We are waiting for you. Look up the Mall of Asia "Eye."
Yeesh.
And for some reason, reverse version of a Daft Punk song popped to mind.
White Cops on the Grassy Knoll
Incredibly blind to the real truth. This woman’s talent for ignoring relevant facts that destroy her case is uncanny! When 70% of black children are growing up without fathers, raised as wolves on the street, stealing, lying, raping, failing at school, illiterate, selling drugs, and murdering their fellow blacks at monstrous rates, this woman believes that the real problem facing black America is a grand police conspiracy of racist white cops shooting black males? Really? White cops on the Grassy Knoll again. She screams conspiracy of white murderers but then she weakly names a handful of victims over a decade. Why so few when you have a million cops?? An army of white racist cops and just a tiny handful of deaths, even if they were wrongful. There are thousands of innocent black children being massacred by the Crips and Bloods, yet this woman cannot find that tsunami of death even warrants the slightest mention when compared to her thug-martyrs killed by white police. So she obviously doesn’t care about black life when it is so casually and generously murdered by other blacks - she has no complaint. The numbers of blacks killing black children are staggering, but it merits no comment from her, yet she finds herself so terrified over a tiny number of white caused deaths that she could barely function. She strains on the gnat but swallows the camel! Her screed sounds false, contrived, a flood of alligator tears, and just plain political propaganda - or else how could you really ignore the tsunami but scream at the puddle?
It is hard to take her seriously. A false examination, and made-up case of paranoid conspiracy. She bombards us with bad math as her ignorance of statistics surpasses her supreme determination of ignoring relevant uncomfortable facts. Columbine and Tuscon and the rest of the shootings, on a statistical basis cannot even approach the carnage that occurs in the daily ghetto. Blacks may commit fewer crimes than whites in total numbers, but since blacks are such a smaller portion of the overall population their crime numbers are far greater, they are over represented in the criminal category. In other words, if whites committed crimes in the same numbers as blacks, the nation would cease to exist.
Then the idiotic claim that we are not spending enough on education? We have spent more than any other Western nation. We have seen no return on the billions spent on education because money has nothing to do with it. In NJ the Abbott decision forced the state to take 40 billion from the ‘wealthy’ communities to 31 Abbott districts in the inner city to fight the racial differences in education. Four decades later - not one grade improved in Newark, Jersey City, Camden, Trenton, etc, Throwing money is the liberal panacea, and it always fails.
Nothing redeeming about this article.
She is also a racist.
In a word the fix is: Jesus.
We are all sinners. As a Catholic I get to go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation. I get to repent and NOT repeat those sins. As we get older (also old white woman here) we get smarter and have more self-discipline.
ALL those young men and women who have sex outside of marriage KNOW it's a sin but they do it anyway. They learn the hard way and make their children pay for it and DOOM them to repeat the sinful behavior.
Staying close to Jesus is the only way I know how to better stay on the straight and narrow. Do YOU know of any other way to do it?
She writes “creative non-fiction” don’cha know.
Amen.
Thank you for that clarification.
To any honkies that have the bad luck to be in the same area where they feel safe to "act out", they most certainly are all of the above.
If an armed white person decides to defend themselves, tough shiite. Should have kept it in the ghetto, or kept up the improving black family unit that was clearly there through the late 50's.
LBJ and the socialist "Great Society" are the best focal point for your angst, but you will never accept that from your ghetto viewpoint.
So true. You know my parents raised three of us and all three have college degrees. My father and mother were each married one time period. Both of them had degrees from the early 1940 timeframe.
Miles Davis did a great tune which I agree with: “So What?”
**In truth, Black communities have felt the need to be protected from the very forces sworn to uphold justice. Police don’t respond to violence in Black communities with the same degree of commitment as they do to their own White communities**
that’s wierd....because...
” .... rural agencies...are more likely to commit homicides of whites....than urban ones, which are more likely to kill blacks. “
If urban area police forces are diversity-staffed, and rural whites are all racist meanies, why are less blacks killed during the arrest process in rural areas (that tend to have predominately white officers)? Maybe because it’s not racism?
According to USConservatives website article below, there’s about 11,000 non-suicide, non-accident homicides by gun in the USA per year. 100 blacks killed by cop annually pales in comparison to blacks killing themselves to the tune of 50-80% of urban homicides per year:
“Detroit logs some 350 homicides annually, there is no hard statistic to grasp the exact percentage that is gang-related or involving gang-members. In New Orleans, between 35-55% of homicides are classified as gang-related. In Chicago, an estimated 80% of homicides are gang-related. And in Baltimore, the police commissioner states that 80% of homicides are drug-related...
When comparing cities plagued by gun violence and looking at “the most dangerous” cities in the United States, the most commonly cited cause of violence is gangs.
from LA times, 532 deaths in the county for the year:
What these stats seem to tell is that black youth in urban areas are more likely to both carry a weapon and be ready to use it to kill. This lack of respect for human life is an urban subculture the black community has created and which the urban officer has to adjust his response to. When blacks can get it together, realize that yes, their lives do matter, and manage to stop slaughtering themselves by the thousands, maybe we can address whether there really is a “race issue,” or just a “someone to blame” issue...until then...
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