I am raging this fine Sunday morning.
Goddammit. How many more negroes have to die before white people figure it out? Two more this week. This week Charlotte Mecklenburg shot a man with traumatic brain injury. The father of seven. Killed him dead. If that wasn’t outrageous enough Tusla police shot and killed a pastor. A pastor whose father taught him to put his hands on the roof of the car when the police were jacking him up. Did your Dad teach you what to do when you are being jacked up by the police? Thought not. Terrence Crutcher was a pastor and a father of four. A God fearing man. A good man. Shot him dead. Like a dog in the road.
If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention!
Imagine, it’s Saturday night and your son is going to go out with friends. What do you say? Don’t drink and drive, just because they’re doing it doesn’t mean you have to, remember who you are and do the right thing, be respectful to the girls you meet, call if you need a ride home and oh yeah, don’t get your ass shot by the local PD. If you are white in America you don’t have to say the last part, but if you are a black mother in America, every single time your son goes outside you have to worry if some trigger happy jackass of a cop is going to shoot off your son’s ass of that night.
What has been happening is outrageous and wrong. It only stops when white people say “Enough!” and stand with our fellow Americans of color. If you saw the video of Terrence Crutcher being murdered, you could hear the officer in the helicopter say “looks like a bad dude, too. Could be on something.” How the hell does he determine that from a freaking helicopter? Because Crutcher woke up black in America. And that cost him his life. And four children no longer have a daddy. Because Crutcher was a family man, a Godly man, a gospel singer and now that “bad dude” is a dead man. And the cop in the chopper should be disciplined as well.
There is no justification for this. None.
This bullshit that “I was in fear for my life” is just that. Bullshit. A total cop out and we must not accept this as an answer. That’s the canned answer for every single police screw up. You know what? If you’re such a chicken shit, get another job. You are not cut out for policing. Your job is to “protect and serve”. When you are murdering unarmed citizens, you are doing neither. You are oppressing Americans of color and you are putting other cops in harm’s way with your incompetence. Go home, you are incompetent and do not deserve the shield.
Until we stop with the bullshit wiggle words and have the hard conversations, this shit just won’t end. We have to support Kaepernick and his protest, because if he was not in the NFL and wasn’t as recognizable as he is, he knows and you should know, he runs the risk of being shot by the police. We have to all take a knee. We have to stop saying stupid shit like “blue lives matter” or “all lives matter”, and start paying attention. We need to start thinking about what the nice African American lady at work goes through when her son walks out the door every day. When her husband stops for groceries on his way home from work. When he takes a different route home because he’s helping some old lady from church get something down out of the attic. When he goes to pick up their kids from school. Will her loved one be next? White people don’t go through that. So yeah, black lives matter. And us white people need to figure it out.