Imagine yourself as a regular white commentator on Fox news, MSNBC, or the New York Times — maybe a paid pundit, maybe a supposed expert in some area, maybe just an opinionated billionaire. You weigh in on a major racially motivated political issue happening across the country, making strong predictions of disaster. The protests by African Americans after white police officers wrongfully gun them down, you declare, will cause soaring violence and disasters if not suppressed; the callousness of the US Federal Bureau’s forensic lies that wrongfully cost innocent African Americans lives, you declare, is not entirely a reason for the high incarceration rates in Black communities; integrating white controlled police forces in Black neighborhoods, you declare, is “reverse-discrimination” and will cause high crime inflation; the importance of a common core to give every American child a chance and give the truly talented the opportunities to make America better, you declare, “our children are not interested.”
But nothing you predict or surmise is actually based on facts or objectivity. And you know it. So what do you do?
You might admit that you were wrong about marijuana – that it actually helps your little five-year old angel whom God refused to bless with good health; you might admit that the War on Drugs was actually a War on African Americans, and you might just admit too, that white cops in African American neighborhoods do look like a Nazi Occupying Force in Tanzania – you might even admit that Tanzanians ought to fight back and deserve to fight back; and you might try to figure out why white cops have come to occupy Black neighborhoods as such.
But almost nobody – none of you – does that; we live in a white America of unacknowledged lies and brutality.
Alternatively, you might insist that sinister forces are covering up the bright and cheerful reality of America’s multi-ethnic or multiracial – call it what you will – reality. Quite a few well-known pundits are, or at some point were “racism falsers” claiming that the world’s sociologists were lying about the pace of racial advancement in America. There have also been many prominent liberals, the New York Times leading the mouthpiece-pack, declaring that the sight of Barack Hussein Obama in the White House is not but one cooking in the book, that the policies of America are moving it towards an integrated United States of America, and so on.
Finally, there’s a third option: Those who pretend that they didn’t make the predictions of a backward America if Black America arose – if Barack Hussein Obama really became president. I see that a lot when it comes to people who issued dire warnings about America’s future in the hands of a Black man, and now claim that they did no such thing. Where you are bound to see it most, however, is on jobs creation and healthcare. Obamacare is working better for white people than even its Black supporters expected — but its white enemies say that the good news proves nothing, because nobody predicted anything different. The jobs market for white people in America has not been better since the white man, Ronald Reagan, left office. Companies, owned by white men have not raked in more profit than now. Everywhere African Americans look, white America’s future has not been any more certain.
But read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and woe betides you if you should watch anything on FOX, pictures of criminal Black men are peppered on these publications over and over. As if white men commit no crimes in America? You would have to go back to the seventeenth century to find a guilty white man! Before Ray Rice, white men beat their wives, before Adrian Peterson, white men beat their children, before Floyd Mayweather, white men were hailed for boasting and pumping their chests after every victory over another white man. But somehow, Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice became the posture criminals for domestic violence in white controlled media. Yet, white men still beat their wives and children!
And, somehow, more than 76 percent of white America hopes that Manny Pacquiao, a Filipino, who, if not for boxing, and for the fact that he stands to challenge a Black man in America in a fair sport that is ever so dominated by African American men, would otherwise have been chased, beaten and locked up in jail like any Black man struggling to make ends meet in America.
The answer to a rising Black America is not disaster! Rather, it is hope. A hope for a moral country. A hope for a godly United States of America, devoid of sycophants, hypocrites and terrorists. A hope where all Americans can have equal opportunity and fair treatment under the law.
That is what we have seen under President Barack Hussein Obama – more than any US President to date!
He is a Black man. He is African American! And if only he ruled the world for long.
“What seems to escape the police spokesman who claims that Baltimore
police have been injured “without provocation.,” and what seems to
escape affluent white Americans commenting in this thread, outraged that
black youth are fighting back against a system that brutalizes and
kills them, is that there is a limit to the violence a racist society
like the USA and racist institutions like the Baltimore police can
inflict beyond which their victims have nothing left to lose, even if it
means throwing stones against police armed with heavy military
weaponry.
The “provocation” the police spokesman in your video
seems not to have noticed is that Freddie Gray was murdered by his
police and he has told the world Freddie Gray died because he wasn’t
buckled into his seat in a police van. Freddie Gray’s neck was broken
before he was dragged screaming in pain into that van, and his neck was
broken by a gang of Baltimore police. He was lynched. By your police.”
~ Bill Appledorf
“I am brown,
today I walked with a white person,
who condemned the looting
as reprehensible,
and incomprehensible,
I asked her why reprehensible?
Those on the margins,
Those without hope boil,
Those under an unfair system’s boot
those who don’t care loot.
I asked her why incomprehensible?
Do not the white cops kill with impunity,
She asked me to go out and be a cop,
I asked her why incomprehensible?
In my encounters with white cops
my rights too were violated.
She asked me to go out
and be humble with the cops.
She told me I condoned anarchy,
I told her I opposed police brutality.
She told me she’d like to see me
in the midst of the mob
without police protection.
I told her the police
wouldn’t protect me anyway
and when they shoot
I could be collateral damage.
She walked away from me as we spoke.
The distance between us was unfathomable.”
~ Usha Srinivasan
“All those sanctimoniously condemning the violence and asking us to “come
together”: OK. After we hold hands and chant peacefully, then what?
What will have changed in the power structure? It takes time, you say:
how much time? How long is long enough to wait for justice?
We
don’t need more ritualistic gestures to reassure us that everything’s
OK. We don’t need more statues of MLK. Everything’s not OK. We no longer
live in a democracy. When you’re more indignant about property damage
and injuries to the police than the acts of humiliation, brutality, and
disregard for human life that provoked this violence, you’re supporting
the power structure. Remember that “property rights” was evoked in
arguments that abolition might at best be enacted gradually, so as to mitigate financial harm to slaveowners—even if the “property” owned
consisted of human beings. I can’t help thinking of that when black
Americans are told to be patient and well-behaved in demanding justice. I
can’t help thinking of that when people seem to be as anguished about
the destruction of property as they are about the unjust taking of lives
among those who are black or deemed otherwise disposable.
As a
middle-aged white woman, I’m supposed to think I have no “skin” in this
game. I don’t accept that division. “Then they came for me … ” The idea
that ordinary people have any power in this country is an illusion. What
causes people in power to give it up peacefully? That’s the
prescription we seek, if it exists.”
~ C Wolfe
Looting, vandalism, setting fires–the level of outrage in
comments denouncing the rioters in Baltimore is palpable and borderline hysterical.
But breaking a black boy’s spine in police custody–well, turn the page,
keep moving, nothing to see here folks. But then again, a black boy’s
life is worth practically nothing in racist America.
“”When did it become so easy to forget the hard-earned lessons of non-violence? ”
I see history through a different lens.
I
see a one-half century of history where civil rights advances came
predominantly as the result of violence, whether it be community
reactions to lighter-skinned Americans(many tome police or Army or
National Guard) perpetrating violence on darker-skinned Americans, or
darker-skinned Americans acting out violence against their own
communities or lighter-skinned Americans.
From an old labor song, words fairly accurate:
Freedom doesn’t come like a bird on a wing
You have to live for it, fight for it, die for it
And every generation must win it again on its own
That’s
the lesson for Baltimore. That’s the lesson for Tuesday’s Supreme Court
proceedings. That’s the lesson of weakening the Koch Brothers. That’s
the lesson for freedoms for this generation. It’s the lesson being
drummed by Freddy Gray, by Walter Scott, by ….”
~Dr. Bob.
“I have family in the hood in Baltimore. And I have been visiting them
and the city since 1968. The city has changed for better and worse over
those years. My male family relatives were regularly harassed by thugs
in cop blue and thugs in street colors. Black Baltimore has been
falling apart by malicious white supremacist intent for decades.
Black
political power in the city is not matched by corresponding
socioeconomic and educational power. Liquor stores, hair care and
churches are not business. The national black urban dilemma. Kurt
Schmoke was elected the first black hopeful mayor of Baltimore. But hope
died an unnatural death. Martin O’ Malley followed in Schmoke’s wake
and brought the corrupt callous cynical spectre of slave and Jim Crow
era back to Baltimore.
Schmoke was the youngest best and
brightest mayor that Baltimore has had in a generation. All of his
successors, particularly the current mayor, have been feckless and
clueless. Black members of Congress from Baltimore have been mostly loud
mouth entertainers whose job it is to mollify and distract the black
masses from their misery.
Freddie Gray was a low level criminal.
But he did not deserve to die for making eye contact with a white cop
while Black and unarmed. Nor did he deserve to die for his criminal
past. Gray was no martyr like Jimmie Lee Jackson or James Cheney. Gray
was a member of the one human race and an American. ” The Wire” was
thinly veiled fictional Baltimore truth. Omar was justice.”