[…]One week ago, Tamir Rice, 12 years old, was fatally shot by a police officer while playing at a park.
Officials claim that proper procedure was followed.
And we all know what comes next: “He was a thug.” “He had it coming.”
I’m sure someone will find a photo, maybe one as innocuous as him holding a basket of flowers, or as a baby, being bathed.
And who among you will then see a criminal, instead of a child? Who is willing to learn from history? And which history will you learn from?
How does perception shape our society?
How can you change this?
The smear campaign against Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old murder victim, has already begun.
Since I made this post…
Deandre Joshua, 20, was shot once in the head and then set on fire inside his car in Ferguson, Missouri. He had been friends since childhood with one of the young men who had been walking with Mike Brown when he was murdered by police.
Where does it end?
I live in a nation where John Crawford III can be murdered by the police while walking around with a TOY gun he picked up from the shelves of the store he was shopping at, while talking no the telephone with his family:
And yet, in the same nation, white people can walk around with REAL guns in the SAME stores (Walmart), inexplicably without being murdered:
I live in a nation where this woman’s cashier is more likely to be murdered by the police than the woman she is ringing up, who is holding a REAL semi-automatic rifle:
And instead of addressing the real problems, we see new legislation like and headlines like this:
I do not think the color of the guns is the problem.
I do not think that regulating TOY guns is the solution.
Not only is the United States refusing to learn from its own history, it is refusing the learn from its present.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture expresses deep concern over the "frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals."
Where does it end?
All of this is a problem of society and culture. Black lives are devalued, Black people are dehumanized, and all of this is not about “hurt feelings”. It’s about the systematic persecution and murder of human beings, and that murder going unpunished. It is about these men, women and children being blamed for their own deaths in the media.
This is a history blog, but racism is not “in the past”. It is alive, well, and murdering men, women and children right now.
This isn’t an “opinion”, this is a measurable FACT.
A Pew study found that 63% of white and 20% of black people think that Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Darren Wilson is not about race.
Those people are wrong.
African Americans are, in fact, far more likely to be killed by police. Among young men, blacks are 21 times more likely to die at the hands of police than their white counterparts.
But, are they more likely to precipitate police violence? No. The opposite is true. Police are more likely to kill black people regardless of what they are doing. In fact, “the less clear it is that force was necessary, the more likely the victim is to be black” (source).
In the face of this rampant evil, where is the limit? There are people who will still blame these victims of violence for violence.
I can only quote Jay Smooth:
Riots are things that human beings do because human beings have limits.
We don’t all have the same limits. For some of us, our human limit is when our favorite team loses a game. For some of us, it’s when our favorite team wins a game.
The people of Ferguson had a different limit than that. For the people of Ferguson, a lifetime of neglect and defacto segregation and incompetence and mistreatment by every level of government was not their limit.
When that malign neglect set the stage for one of their children to be shot down and left in the street like a piece of trash… that was not their limit.
For the people of Ferguson, spending one hundred days almost entirely peacefully protesting for some measure of justice for that child and having their desire for justice treated like a joke by every local authority… was not their limit.
And then after those 100 days, when the so-called prosecutor waited till the dead of night to twist that knife one last time. When he came out and confirmed once and for all that Michael Brown’s life didn’t matter…
Only then did the people of Ferguson reach their limit.
So when you look at what happened Monday night, the question you should be asking is how did these human beings last that long before they reached their human limit? How do black people in America retain such a deep well of humanity that they can be pushed so far again and again without reaching their human limit?
The history of the United States is steeped in murder, enslavement, genocide, and worse.
The present of the United States is steeped in murder, enslavement, genocide, and worse.
Merchants Rich in Cargoes of Despair [murder, anti-Black racism]:
