Our Determination Will Set Us Free!
On July 5th, Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man, was wrestled to the ground and executed by Baton Rouge police officers for selling cds outside of a food mart. One day later, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds captured the murder of her boyfriend Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man, by Minnesota police on her cell phone and broadcasted it for the world to see via Facebook. Keeping in line with similar patterns, the criminal justice system responded by placing the murderers and executioners on paid administrative leave. The following day, July 7th, another Black man was found dead hanging from a tree. This time it was in Atlanta, Georgia. It was ruled a suicide.
Philando Castile makes the 123rd Black person killed by police this year. How many videos have we seen of Black women and men being brutally assaulted or killed by police? Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Tanesha Anderson, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice are just a few. Before Alton, there was Rodney King. Before Rodney King there was Bobby Hutton, Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, not to mention, thousands and thousands of our ancestors who were violently lynched in the Jim Crow South. This cycle of violence enacted against Black people has done nothing but evolve into new names and new forms. Racism is the disease of this country and thanks to social media contributing to the high circulation of public lynchings, we are viewing and consuming racism in its most brutal form.
Our political leaders are missing the point.
Our nation’s leaders are encouraging the public to disarm themselves and are adamantly pushing for more gun laws. Following the mass murder at a queer nightclub in Orlando, FL, Democrats, led by Representative John Lewis, waged a “sit in” to pass legislation around gun control. Interestingly enough, there has been no such radical action to propose disarming the police despite countless videos of police violence and murder. According to The Washington Post, just this year alone the police have killed 533 people.1 Last year, over 1000 people were killed by police, according to The Guardian.2 Not surprisingly, Black males were killed at twice the rate than other racial groups even though Black people were more than two times less likely to have a weapon.
Police brutality is nothing new and neither is the fear of weapons in Black hands. In response to the violent police brutality targeting Black people in Oakland during the turbulent 1960s, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense organized armed patrols in order to monitor and prevent police brutality against Oakland’s Black community. What was Governor Ronald Reagan’s response to this collective response to protect our communities from overly excessive and racist violence? Reagan passed The Mulford Act, also known as the Panther Bill, prohibiting the open carry of arms in public.3 Now, in 2016, we are once again called to “disarm” and being told that small reforms around gun control will make “America safe again.”
This is an erroneous belief.
For Black and Brown people, America has never been safe.
Violence at the hands of white-supremacist-terrorists groups such as the KKK and other state- supported militia, have been a part of the blood- stained fabric of our history. In line with that history, police patrols have acted as modern day slave patrols. Police in communities across the country have demonstrated little difference from their hooded counterparts in targeting Black people with violence and humiliation as their means of control.
Instead of asking the perpetrators of violence to reform their behavior and change their brutal ways, Black people are called to carry the banner of peace. We are asked to step to the high ground and lay down our weapons, water down our words and carry the burden of history once again on our shoulders. Black people are expected to behave within rules of decorum while our sons and daughters are being killed in front of us. We may protest if we don’t shout too loud, if we don’t interrupt routine and if we don’t damage property. We must stay in our place. This means that protest is convenient only when it follows the rules and gives people a sense of action that will feed and manage the need for substantive change of the status quo. But what has really changed? While fighting to recognize our humanity is a battle cry in and of itself, it is at least safer than what this country fears the most– that we would reach a majority scale and that those most marginalized would expect and demand power.
In the same way that we choose not to acknowledge the hand that this country has played in manifesting international “terrorism” through violent occupation and by arming and radicalizing the very people that are now considered enemies, we cannot call for peace and disarming only when it applies to Black and Brown people. We live in a violent world, where national leaders wage war and genocide at the drop of an almighty dollar or the faintest scent of oil, and yet, we point the finger at young people who practice “senseless”’ violence in cities across the country, often hustling for the very same dollar. We ask them to be a model of peace and restraint and to come to that high ground that seems to be so out of reach for the world’s most affluent global leaders.
Some have noted that the power of groups like the “Deacons for Defense” or the “Black Panther Party,” was not in the physical damage that could be done by weapons in the hands of a relatively small group of organized Black people. Instead it was the psychological impact and the possibilities that could be imagined by those who had nothing left to lose. Those people were the Black people who had felt powerless and who understood that the law of the land would never side against itself in the interest of their equality. They understood that even when laws were passed on paper the practice was never felt on their ends. Our grandparents knew that there was no place that was ever “safe”. These power groups in turn unleashed our power. The impact of feeling some sense of protection had the capacity to ignite something far more dangerous than just a few guns, it had the power to somehow make us feel safe with each other. It had the power to make us feel less afraid of standing up collectively. It still does.
As long as we fear the brother and sister who are just as oppressed as us and find safety in the arms of our oppressor, we will continue to call for more police, more weapons, more war on our own communities and schools and in turn we will sleep at night as the moral peacemakers while our survivors are locked in cages.
While there are so many opportunities to shift the paradigm, here are couple of low hanging fruits:
- Model for our youth, by disarming our schools of armed police, military weapons and surveillance.
- Support systems for children that don’t involve throwing them into jails as a form of “rehabilitation”
- Invest in basic human rights to housing, healthy food, medical care, education and clean natural resources.
One way or another, things must change. It is not our docility but our determination that will bring us to peace.
References
- “National Police Shootings,” The Washington Post. 7-21-2016 http://wapo.st/1VFOBUi
- “The Counted,” The Guardian. 7-21-2016 http://bit.ly/1SQhWZa
- “The State Capitol March,” PBS, 7-21-2016 http://to.pbs.org/1lVAbLw