The only non-negotiable is to erase white supremacist culture
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Make sure you are focused on the right thing.
As you imagine if that was your white son who went for an innocent jog and got killed, don’t stop there.
I want you to imagine a society where two black men, father and son, drive around in a truck and feel so emboldened to make a citizens arrest and kill a young white male with his whole life ahead of him. A jogger whom the neighbors knew. A jogger who was picked up on cameras in that neighborhood every day on his jog and a homeowner would hear a ping of the camera, and say, “that’s our daily jogger!” A jogger who belonged, whom you as a community claim as your own.
And these two black men come along and feel it is their right, their responsibility to kill that young white male runner. The ownership and control of the environment that they felt was owed to them, that gave them the AUTHORITY to question and eliminate, that made them feel that the land was their own and they have the right to dominate every little outcome that happens in that neighborhood.
Feel it. If you are white, feel the superiority of those two black men over your body, physically standing in a truck, with two guns pointed over your life with the whisper of your last breath in your mouth. Domination. Control. Power. Authority. Rightness. Ownership. Dictatorship.
Feel that powerlessness of someone else demanding that their race determines your existence. Not just that they don’t like you. But their “race” accords them all the things I list above. Feel how insignificant you are.
Are you capable of feeling that? If you cannot, then you are so embedded in white supremacist culture that you cannot comprehend your identity without it.
Instead I hope that you can imagine it and that incredulity you feel right now, maybe even a tinge of fear, the absurdity of it, that is you just starting to get in touch with white supremacy that is so embedded in this culture.
Imagine that it was a bunch of black male militia that stormed the Michigan capitol, what would your reaction be? With big guns and covered faces?
Would it have been as mild and as benign as, “O, its a white militia group!”
You see, there will always be young black men killed just because the white supremacist thinks it is their job to eradicate the threat that black people pose by just breathing.
That is not going to change. Unfortunately, and I hate to say this, but this is not the last post about a brutal black murder even if the two men are brought to justice. That just puts a band-aid on a seething, grotesque seeping death luring cancer.
Accept the fact that we live in this cesspool of white supremacist culture and that Black people cannot dismantle it all by themselves. Your outrage is not enough. You have to do something. Your people created this and your people will have to take it down.
What are you going to do today to actively:
1. Identify
2. Name
3. Withdraw Support
4. Demand Change
5. Contribute to Changing
6. Daily Contribute to Changing
7. Create a New Reality
That eliminates WHITE SUPREMACIST CULTURE!!!!
It permeates the justice system so justice is not real justice for Black and Brown bodies.
Don’t just talk to your kids about the killing of a 24-year-old innocent Black man in Brunswick County, Georgia. Talk to them about what white supremacist culture is and how you have inherited it and you probably all have some blindspots to it. Talk about how it shows up in your home and how you are now, as a family, committed to eradicating it because it only produces victims. You are a victim of it because it limits you to being a violent, oppressive, entitled conspirator to the system.
Every time you call the cops to protect your body or your property, first think if you are upholding white supremacist culture and if a Black body will be killed because of your phone call.
The only non-negotiable is to erase white supremacist culture.
No platitudinal mourning today. Not today.
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