Black America and the Police – The Eternal Requiem

While we are consumed with watching the White House Clown Show directed by the Clown in Chief, black Americans continued to be slaughtered by law enforcement with seeming impunity. While we are finding out the answer to how many white men can fit in one Presidential Cabinet, many black Americans feel like any encounter with law enforcement, no matter how minor or ordinary, could mark the beginning of their last moments on Earth.

While we are wondering when the Senate and House and FBI investigations are going to come to the rather obvious conclusion that the Trump campaign and Trump administration colluded with Russia, the policeman/killer of Philando Castile was found not guilty on all counts. His killer’s defense was that he “feared for his life” because Mr. Castile announced that he was lawfully carrying a firearm and then reached into his pocket to get his license and registration as his killer had requested.

While we are focused on thoroughly unprepared, untrained and inexperienced Jared Kutsher (whose only seeming qualification is that Donald Tinyhands is his father-in-law) travel to Israel on a hopeless and inevitably forlorn mission to broker the peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Charleena Lyles was shot and killed by the police in Seattle having called the police regarding her belief that a burglary was in progress in her own residence.

It should be noted that Ms. Lyles was a black woman. Ms. Lyles was the pregnant mother of four who was described by relatives as “tiny”. Ms. Lyles may have had mental health issues and when the police arrived it is reported that she had a knife. The response of the Seattle police was not to defuse the crisis through verbal interaction or use of non-lethal force. The response of the Seattle police was to shoot a pregnant black mother of four with her children present.

It may have happened in these United States at some place and time, but there appear to be no reports of pregnant white women being shot and killed by the police anywhere. It is hard to believe that police in any jurisdiction would shoot and kill a pregnant white woman in front of her children whether she was brandishing a knife, baseball bat or gun.

What should be clear to black Americans is that throughout the history of this nation black lives simply do not matter regardless of  all the rhetoric, legislation and Constitutional amendments. What should be clear is that there is no way that the United States of America and the Attorney General who is the proud Son of the Confederacy, Jefferson Beauregard Davis III will lift a finger to make even the most rudimentary official inquiry into the death of Charleena Lyles or the acquittal of the killer of Philando Castile.

There is a Groundhog Day feel to this entire situation. Since the days of the Black Codes in the 1600’s to the Slave Codes in the 1700’s to the routine terrorizing and lynching of black Americans from 1865 to 1965, black lives do not matter – certainly not when compared to white lives. And the head fake slogan of “all lives matter” rings false when it is clear that in comparison to white Americans in multiple similar encounters with the police do not die with anywhere near the same frequency as black Americans.

The saddest part of this story is that within a week or a month of reading this column you will be reading about yet another police-induced atrocity involving a black American citizen who did not deserve to die whatever their transgression might have been.

It is said that this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is also the land where black lives do not matter.

The Eternal Requiem

The crime of “Living While Black” has been part of the American criminal justice system since colonial times. Every black man, woman and child in this country is subject to indictment. The punishment for this crime has taken the form of housing discrimination, employment bias and all too many times death. Sometimes it is a slow death occasioned by factors such as environmental racism (see Flint, Michigan) and sometimes the death sentence is carried out by a policeman’s gun.

The recent roll call of Americans of African descent that have died at the hands of police or while in police custody seems never ending because it is never ending. The names of men, women and children who could have been famous for their good deeds, who could have remained anonymous in the ordinary pursuit of ordinary happiness, are known to us because they are dead.

Children like Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, women like Eleanor Bumphurs and Sandra Bland and men like Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Sean Bell are known to us only because they suffered the death sentence imposed for the crime of “Living While Black”. And just now, two more names are added to the eternal requiem roll call – Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile should be alive as this column is being read. They are dead because white police officers murdered them. We know that they were murdered and not killed incidental to some criminal act because there is real time video that undeniably reveals those Baton Rouge and St. Paul police officers to be murderers.

And we also know that without the real time video evidence Alton Sterling and Philando Castile would join the countless anonymous men, women and children who have been killed by the police without witness. And we have to wonder what the real body count is in the reign of terror that targets black Americans everywhere in America?

There are the predictable calls for quiet and restraint in the national black community – and there is simply no reason for black Americans to kill each other and burn down their own homes – or anyone else’s home – upon the commission of another outrage. But we wait, not so quietly and definitely impatiently for calls for quiet and restraint to be exercised by police officers. We wait not so quietly and definitely impatiently for members of the criminal justice system – police officers, district attorneys, prosecutors – to righteously and vociferously condemn this Blue Carnage which afflicts the national black community.

The tears of the parents of the dead, the orphans of the dead, the lovers and spouses and partners of the dead drench the earth of this nation. Justice delayed is no justice at all. And in the case of Blue Carnage, the justice that is called for is not simply convicting the police officers who pulled the trigger. True justice will include transformation of the criminal justice system so that “Living While Black” is no longer a capital crime and every black, woman and child is not an automatic suspect and potential victim.

True justice will mean an end to mass incarceration, but it will also mean an end to the state sanctioned dehumanization of the black community. True justice will mean that black parents will not have to teach their nine year old boys and girls how to avoid being killed by the police. True justice will mean that black teenagers should be able to be as silly and outrageous on 125th Street as white teenagers on Spring Break in Florida without silly and outrageous becoming death defying acts.

And finally, true justice will be known to all of us when the foul heritage of the Black Codes and race-based slavery and Jim Crow and state sponsored segregation and serial lynching is finally and absolutely condemned by every sentient being in this country. It when that true justice is made known that this nation can begin to actually aspire to the high ideals and aspirations that were so eloquently stated at the inception of the Republic.

These high ideals and aspirations have become museum pieces instead of being the living, breathing heritage and culture of all Americans.

Only True Justice and change that.