Posted on 11/26/2014 2:24:04 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Peaceful protests have been happening for over 100 days. But white folks only really pay attention if they fear they have something to lose. Smoke flares in their nostrils, because then they are confronted with the possibility of charred, burning, white flesh. No more water. The fire next time.
If I have to begin by convincing you that Black Lives Matter, we have all already lost, haven’t we? So let’s not begin there. Let’s begin at the end. At the end there is only Michael Brown Jr.’s dead body, no justice, and weeping and gnashing of teeth.
For his parents, there is only grief.
They are undone. We are undone. I am undone. This is what American democracy coming apart at the seams looks like. Our frayed, tattered edges are showing. The emperors are the only ones who can’t see it. Where can we begin so that we don’t end up here?
Is anyone else tired of wandering in this wilderness? Surely this land of broken promises isn’t what Dr. King had in mind for us. Hopefully, from the fiery furnace of Ferguson, the floating embers will spark and spread and blaze us a new trail – up out of this madness.
Did you expect me to call for peace? Did you expect me to condemn looting and property damage? Did you expect me to preach at the people about being constructive rather than destructive?
Peaceful protests have been happening for over 100 days. But white folks only really pay attention if they fear they have something to lose. Smoke flares in their nostrils, because then they are confronted with the possibility of charred, burning, white flesh. No more water. The fire next time.
I woke up in black skin this morning. Frustrated, because for the first time in a long time, I felt the weight, the scourge of this skin. Had visions of being able to unzip myself, climb out of myself, and lay aside this weight, but the woman who climbed out was darker still. Since black is beautiful, we are never supposed to admit that we are sometimes tempted to believe what white supremacy tells us to believe about ourselves. But you caught me in a moment of weakness.
Utterly undone. Put out trying to pull it together. Still trying to put together – piece together —all these pieces. Of “evidence.”
Many things are evident this morning.
Our black president says that first and foremost, we must “respect the rule of law.” I watch, as he says this, a split screen of unruly protesters smashing the windows of a police cruiser. It is evident what they think about “the system.”
It, too, is evident what the system thinks about us.
(Do you feel the struggle in these words? The utter inadequacy of them? The struggle to contain and train my rage on the proper (white) people, and not all of them? The challenge of trying to narrate black rage, and black pain, and black fear, and black freedom dreams deferred – again—in hopes that white folks would really understand? The resentment at my failure? The rage at my having to do so in the first place?)
Tupac famously asked “if there was a heaven for a gangsta.” I find myself hoping there’s a hell for white supremacists. But too many of them believe in Jesus. So fire and brimstone in Ferguson and beyond will have to suffice.
The attorneys for Michael Brown’s family appear on the news, admonishing us to be “dignified and disciplined.” I laugh, tears threatening the back of my eyes. I want to ask them if they really believe what they are saying.
There is no dignity in lying dead on scorching, hot pavement for four hours. That is evident. There are no disciplined acts of resistance that will restore dignity to Michael Brown’s life. Only justice can do that. Justice affirms that his life was worth protecting, that Darren Wilson, the person who took it, should be punished.
There will be no justice for Michael Brown, so there will be no surrogate acts of “dignity” from protesters.
Neither should we any longer submit to the disciplinary impulses of the “rule of law.” The rule of law wants to beat into us, through “discipline,” the belief that we –black people — would be animals but for its chastening rod of correction. The law stepped to a podium yesterday, under cover of night, to tell us that it reserves the right to slaughter black men with impunity, that it seeks to coerce through threat of force, our permission to do so.
To ask us to be “dignified and disciplined,” to ask us to “respect the rule of law” in the face of such a mockery of justice is to ask us to affirm the path to our own destruction.
Surely America knows black folks better than that.
Humans can only be sucker punched for so long. Humans can only have the life choked out of us for so long. Humans can only be kicked in the stomach while your foot is on our neck for so long. Humans can only be bullied for so long. One day we stagger to our feet, and you see reflected back to you the results of your own unresolved monstrousness.
I asked for a different beginning, hoping we wouldn’t end up here. But here we are — at the end again. Here we are – black people – yet again faced with the magnitude of our need and the inadequacy of our resources – trying to make ends meet. Trying to begin again.
If you see a rabid dog, raccoon or possum in the street gnarling at you, foaming at the mouth, do you try to reason with it?
All this is the response of a spoiled child who gets ignored: I’ll take all my toys into my room and smash them!
The proper response is not to spoil the child more, but to ignore him.
“Humans can only be sucker punched for so long.”
That’s right. And when walking down the street, I see a “gansta” I’ll be passing by...If the perp tries to cold-cock me...he’ll be eating corn, for the rest of his life...with NO EFFIN TEETH.
This article has MYYYYY blood boiling!
In this whole article, she did not even make a pretense of discussing the facts of the case. From her babbling, the facts I got were that Mike Brown was black and he was shot by a white cop, therefore the white cop is guilty. My question is, how come so many people can be so outraged after a mountain of evidence shows that this thug attacked a cop? If the cop were black, would there be this outrage? I think not, and if that’s the case we have to ask who are the racists in this country in 2014? I think we know the answer.
Was thinking the same thing. And if they come to my neighborhood, they better bring a tank. Because sure as the day is long, they will be outgunned. :)
I guess what the government is showing us is that we can do anything we want to protest in this country. So mass disruptive demonstrations are due as Barry keeps breaking the law with his pen.
The induced attitude that being educated is “white” and therefore undesirable along with the inculcated belief that white people owe them whatever they think they need keeps many otherwise bright black kids from ever developing their potential. Work is for slaves and they aren’t slaves any more. Free people don’t have to work. Money grows on trees and white people exist to do the work of pulling the money down from the trees and giving it to them.
To quote the greatest truth-teller of the 21st century, Jonathan Gruber, “Was this by any chance written by one of my adolescent children?”
“......Back at CNN, I learned that black mob violence is no big deal because white people do it too. Just as often. Just as bad. So singling out Ferguson is racist.
Also unsaid: the hundreds of cases of recent black mob violence around the country.
Ferguson was not the only. Just the latest.
No one mentioned Louisville, and how last Spring 200 black people rampaged through that downtown, beating grandparents in front of their grandkids, destroying property, stealing, looting, and creating mayhem.
And when it was over, PBS was kind enough to report that all of that black mob violence was the result of “white racism.”
Black people have no problem saying this all over the country. But reporters black and white are loathe to question it.
And oh yeah, that’s been happening a long time in Louisville, and lots of other places: Cincinnati, Virginia Beach, Fort Lauderdale, DeKalb, South Bend, Champaign, Peoria: Has no one heard about them?
How about the black bus driver who called 20 black people to beat and kick a white family on her bus. All while the black passengers cheered?
College campuses are favorite targets of black crime.
In Rochester, black people have taunted, harassed, robbed, and attacked more than 1000 recent Asian immigrants. A social worker blacked it in Asian “naivete.”
Hear about that?
Exactly.
This is a long list in a short article with no room for the hundreds and hundreds of cases of recent black mob violence and for the denial at a level that can only be called delusional.......”
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/black_mob_violence_now_a_sickness.html
How many of the dead in these riots back to Watts and Newark have had "white flesh?" These folks are pointing the revolver at their own heads and demanding if White Society doesn't give them what they want they will shoot.
Hope and change and she cant bring herself to condemn her messiah obama, they blame the republicans. She cant see that in the first 2 years of his presidency he had the house and senate and could have passed everything he wanted to help his black brothers and sisters but he didnt. But its white priviledge, old white men, corporate America, raicist white folk that is the cause not absent fathers or boyfriends, illegitimate children, drugs, gangs, alchohol, economic dependency on the “white priviledged” LOOK IN YOUR OWN HOUSE AND THEN LOOK IN THE MIRROR the truth is in front of you
This latest incident (there will be many more just the same) is indicative of the vast gulf between the white vision of reality and the black vision. Why is that so? If Brown had been a white kid who acted the same foolish way as Brown and got himself shot and killed like Brown, even if it were a black cop, rest assured no white mobs would be out in the streets burning down buildings and threatening violence against blacks.
So the big question that has puzzled me for decades now is: how can blacks not see the destructive behavior of black males leads to their premature deaths? How can they not see what is obvious to everybody else? How obtuse do you have to be?
Do they really believe that some young punk who had just robbed a convenience store, disobeyed the lawful orders of a police officer to get out of the middle of the street, assaulted the police officer, and ended up getting shot and killed is blameless? I just shake my head...what can be done with these people?
Start by cleaning up your own back yard.
:: The rule of law wants to beat into us, through “discipline,” the belief that we –black people — would be animals but for its chastening rod of correction. ::
And so we have the abject PROOF of the author’s bigotry, bias and ignorance; the same maladies that infected the JimCrow-white’s in the early 20th century. Does not this single observation fully describe the Ferguson melee?
You get called names for it, but the only hope for black people (and the country) is sterilization of the Black Underclass. It would take billions (trillions?) of dollars, but until the country rids itself of this parasitic, uncivilized, and violent group of Americans, we’ll be reading about many more Fergusons in the future.
Your black student’s statement is contradicted by the fact that Brown’s criminal buddy Johnson did what he was told and got out of the middle of the street without attacking the cop. Johnson is alive today. Brown is not.
Whether the original offense was accidental or deliberate, murder or self-defense does not matter. There must be a very large tit for each tat. That is the lex talionis of old. A major step to Civilization is the substitution of Law for Vengeance with the government assuming the duty of punishment for infraction and circumstance, rather than relationship, determining what and whether the punishment.
Subcultures that have regressed to tribalism may still accept the concept of that government substitution but also insist on retaliation for offense rather than punishment for crime. If someone damages a member of the tribe then it is the government's duty to retaliate, no matter what the original circumstance.
Lady, if you want war you’re gonna’ get it but know this; you and all the violent thugs whose desire to violence you rationalize (in this age of black leadership at the very top of law enforcement)have never been in a TWO WAY war.
Blood is on the hands of the liberal media. The demolished city should sue the big media corporations for fanning the flames of racial hatred and force them to pay for the cleanup and the rebuilding. They are entirely responsible for what happened.
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