Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Jordan davis, Eric Garner, Dontre Hamilton, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Tony Robinson, Phillip White, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Samuel dubose, Oscar grant. WHO IS NEXT? This is a non-exhaustive live of black bodies that have been killed due to senseless violence. The vast majority of these people were killed at the hands of police officers.
What do I say to all this violence? America doesn’t care about black people. What do I mean by that statement? I mean this: America doesn’t care about black people. As long as America has existed it has left a “trail of tears” or a stream of blood. America with its imperial ways has shed the lives and pillaged the communities of Native Americans, has ripped African’s from their families and captured them from there continent to be forced in to lives of servitude and slavery. Raping black women, taking from their sons, daughters, for their own sinful pleasures and leaving there husbands powerless to stop it, only having the knowledge that they could not protect their own wives.
America has permitted some of the most heinous crimes in history. Don’t you dare try to be the moral police of the world when your own closest is not even clean? America’s bloody past is perpetuated today with racial profiling, police killing black people, and the inequality faced by minorities in this country. Why is this the case? Because America has devalued the black body, America has devalued black people to something they consider worthless. This is the only way that you could participate in something as cruel as the transatlantic slave trade and not have you conscience rip you apart. You have to rationalize in your mind that these people are sub-human. We still seem the legacies and remnants of this thinking in 2015.
Who is to blame? All of us have, so many of us have bought into this lie. It is far reaching in its destruction, the devaluing of black people. Are contributions are heavily relegated to entertainment and are less accepted in more serious endeavors like academics, law, politics, science, etc. Are young people have bought into this lie. The darker your skin, the more out of favor you find yourself. The lighter your skin the more attractive you are to potential suitors. Africa is the butt of many jokes as early as elementary school as some place that is primitive, dark, disgusting and un-enlightened. Black women are devalued aesthetically (Example Serena Williams). While white/Eurocentric versions of beauty are held up as the standard and the closer you are to that Eurocentric standard of beauty the more attractive you are. The further you are from the standard the uglier you are. Black men kill other black men like it’s a sport. Some will kill simply for initiation into a group, to feel accepted; others will kill simply because of the color someone is wearing. All kill because they have a deficit in their understanding of the value of that person’s life. Many of them don’t even value their own life.
Go to the dictionary and look up the definitions for the word “black” and then the word “white”. Some of those definitions reflect the sentiments that we see in society. The devaluing of black people is a far reaching phenomenon. It has reached every sphere of society from church, to academia, to professional life and it is perpetuated in part by images of the media. We have elected the first black president and it seems while he was in office the value of black life has not increased. President Obama has spoken several times on race with regards to Travyon martin and Henry Louis Gates for example. He has also come up with an initiative known as “My Brother’s Keeper, of which black males stand to benefit and I think these examples are great. I still think we have a long way to go before black people are fully valued in this society.
An entire academic dissertation could be written on this topic. I won’t do that today, but when you have video evidence of black people being murdered by police and you’re not sure if the officer will get off with a slap on the wrist or not, we have issues in this society. None of this is new. How dare you show more concern for a lion then a person? Lion King was one of my favorite childhood movies of all time but brothers and sisters are dying in the street EVERYDAY. Value your brother. Value your sister because America doesn’t know how to do that and they need someone to show her how it’s done. Black is beautiful. Black men are Kings. Black women are Queens. So act like it. We need to stop killing each other and we also need the law to start valuing our lives and hold murderers of black lives responsible; whether it’s another black person, a police officer, etc.
godinspiredlove 