"The
sheep's entire life & dialogue is consumed with the wolf & its
intentions. For if the sheep relaxes one iota, it very well may get gobbled
up---literally”-Navar Ero
So,
Sandra Bland was suffering from depression & posted a video about it on
Facebook. Hmmm. Who isn't? I'm sure between the party, family, & food pics
many of you are too but don't know it. Does that mean a $500 bail & an ass
kicking from the cops will make you hang yourself with no sheet nor blanket in
sight?
Class, Occupational Status, Education, and Socioeconomics are all defining factors
when analyzing culture & the similarities of one's culture & individual
background, but once Race, particularly American Blackness, is thrown into the
mix, not only is it an entirely different ballgame, but the parameters &
rules & regulations of the proverbial ballgame cannot even be defined, let
alone found, in the aforementioned rule book(s).
Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes in New York City, you know, that diverse melting pot where anyone who is no one can actualize the American Dream, was accosted by the police for his illegal endeavors and ended up dying en route to the hospital via ambulance after being subjected to a Southern-style lynching vis a vis a police choke hold. Tamir Rice, only twelve-years-old, was haphazardly pointing a be-be gun at people, though it looked like a real firearm, in a Cincinnati park, was killed without warning by white policemen. Numerous other humans of a darker hue than the prototypical Eurocentric shade have been beaten, unjustly accosted, and/or killed at the hands of both Black and white police officers solely, in my opinion, because of the criminalized and deviant stereotype that is so often connoted with people with “African” or “Black” heritage in the United States of America.
Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes in New York City, you know, that diverse melting pot where anyone who is no one can actualize the American Dream, was accosted by the police for his illegal endeavors and ended up dying en route to the hospital via ambulance after being subjected to a Southern-style lynching vis a vis a police choke hold. Tamir Rice, only twelve-years-old, was haphazardly pointing a be-be gun at people, though it looked like a real firearm, in a Cincinnati park, was killed without warning by white policemen. Numerous other humans of a darker hue than the prototypical Eurocentric shade have been beaten, unjustly accosted, and/or killed at the hands of both Black and white police officers solely, in my opinion, because of the criminalized and deviant stereotype that is so often connoted with people with “African” or “Black” heritage in the United States of America.
Why
is this? Sure, whites are killed by
cops, but men lie, women lie, and numbers don’t like the greatest rapper who
ever lived Jay-Z/Shawn Carter once stated.
Black people are roughly 12.2% of the American population. Latinos/Hispanics another 16.4%, Asians around
4%, and the rest of the nation is or
considers themselves to be “white” (63%).
So, I, in my most humbly-hued opinion believe the comparison of Black
bodies being snuffed -out by government-sanctioned law enforcement officials is
disproportionately, and negatively, swinging in the favor of the Negro. So,
what do we, as a nation? (particularly a 70.6% Christian nation, per the census
and various nationals polls) Approach the injustice and violent encounters in
which many Black/African Americans endure during police encounters—whether
those encounters end up in incarceration, or, even worse--brutality,
humiliation, and death? Or do we become
“the ones we have been waiting for” like June Jordan once wrote and said,
whether publicly or in her mind’s psyche when she was constructing her
rhetorical art?
Do we, both Black and
White Americans, mirror the Christian ideology in which our nation so dotes and
touts itself among the international community, and practice what our
Protestant nation preaches throughout the world? The main tenant of Christianity—Love, has been proselytized and historicized throughout modern History as the tool good over evil and democracy over tyranny, which encapsulates a World History that has mythologicalized Anglo-Christianity as the embodiment, ideologically speaking, of justice and equality, and the international media portrays it as mankind's saving grace, a ideological Christ-of-sorts, which must be witnessed or experienced by the every human, every community, every nation, and hamlet in the world. So, if this message of democracy and Christianity is exhibited and defined by "acts" of kindness and love, then, there can be no American or Christian/Protestant dominance without Equality and
Justice, right? (to be continued. I
apologize. This text has been a two
month stream of consciousness.
-Gee Joyner
