Posted by someone going by "djes bellesharpe" on fb the other day and now widely shared. Fuck me but I want to like THIS a hundred times:
in the LA riots in 92, it was essential to have a sign that read "BLACK OWNED" if you didn't want your business torched. sometimes even that wasn't enough.after the riots had been going for a while, my mom and i had been following on the news, she says to me "wanna go watch?" and i said yeah so we drove to south central and...it's weird how beautiful it was...i know that's strange to say but it's like how caged animals will sometimes take to chewing at themselves or pacing in circles and will leave the most beautiful, horrible markings on their bodies and the paths they've carved. how could i enjoy something so painful, like an elephant driven mad by captivity drawing a perfect figure eight in the sand until he walked himself to death or a city, burning, destroyed by its own citizens? it made sense to me somehow and i felt bad about it then but...
...take this: in 1992, riots happened in los angeles because of the excessive force used by los angeles police officers against rodney king and the lax handling of the situation by the judicial system. fast forward 23 years and riots are happening, again, but not because a black man was brutally beaten on camera by white police officers for speeding in a hyundai ("speeding in a hyundai", just let that sink in) and received a lackluster version justice, but now because a long list of black men, women and children (not to even mention the list of non-black people who've experienced this abuse) have been brutalized and even killed by white and non-black police officers and citizens, all over the country, on and off camera for things like "looking suspicious," "knocking on a stranger's door to report an accident," "attempting to report being the victim of a rape," "selling loose cigarettes" or "resisting arrest," a crime that has in recent months and years been elevated such that it no longer deserves a brain and rib crushing baton beating by as many cops as possible but has now earned the penalty of death, on the spot, no questions asked, "i don't fucking care if you can't breathe, you shouldn't have run."
sounds like something a slave master would say.
so we were there, then, and now, we're here. i don't see that our problem of police brutality against marginalized people and especially black men is some thing that has gotten worse and now it's really bad. no. it's been this way, black people have been unjustly handled, abused and murdered at the hands of police officers since the jim crow era. that is a fact. so it's not that the police are more brutal than ever against black men, they are as brutal as ever and thanks to technology and media, we can now see exactly how brutal they are and have been.
i watched the police separately beat both my uncles on the lawn of my grandmother's house in the 80s for "resisting," 4 to 1, batons blazing until they stopped moving. in both instances the limp bodies of my uncles were hog-tied and tossed in the back of cop cars, barely conscious and lumped up like boxers. for resisting arrest, that was a normal thing. my stepbrother was shot and killed by police in the fox hills mall in 1997, he was 19, unarmed and later found to have something like 11 bullets in his armpits, which can only happen in you are shot with your arms in the air. he had no record and was shot on the grounds that he looked like a wanted man (read: he looked black). my mother was suspected of gang activity for driving at dusk with no headlights. smart woman, she drove all the way home before pulling over. she was never given the chance to explain that we were missing spark plugs and couldn't roll down the windows, turn on the radio or put on the headlights; i watched from the window as two police officers shone brights and held guns on my mother, ordering her on loud speakers from a car length away to get out of the car and lie down on the ground. they cuffed and frisked her in her work clothes, she tore her pantyhose which was the part that made me cry...and they made her remain face down on the ground and searched her car. she came inside the house sobbing with that terrible mask of makeup washed in tears and snot, her work clothes all dirty from lying in the street. when she hugged me she said "at least they didn't shoot me, thank you jesus they didn't shoot me." over and over and leaked tears onto me. a woman from our church had been shot and killed by a police officer a month before for reaching for her license. her two babies were in the baby seat.
so. you ask me what i see when i watch a city burn...i see a beautiful thing and i no longer care how fucked up that may sound. this is war, war is what made us citizens of this country and war is the only thing we know to keep that, because we haven't elevated ourselves and neither have our oppressors and opponents.
let's say i go into a random home and take a child from its mother. i kill that child. the mom watches and does nothing. i leave. nothing ever happens to me.
there's something wrong with that story, right?
i watched this video last night: a lion had killed a baby giraffe so the mama giraffe walks over to where the lions are and stomps one of the lions to death. i watched another video, lions had caught a baby wildebeest and were attempting to eat it when the entire pack of wildebeests returned, corned the lions and one by one chased and prodded them with horns until they got the baby wildebeest back, all injured and bloody but able to walk back to the protection of the herd. in another video a lion had a zebra by the snout in about a foot of water, the zebra fought and turned until the lion's head was underwater, choking the lion of air until escape was possible.
you see something like that you say "go giraffe!! stomp that lion for killing your baby!!" or "yeah, if i was a wildebeest, that's what i'd do if lions took my baby." or "i would fight to the death, just like that zebra."
but you don't like riots.
"well, we have a justice system, we're not animals."
1. you're an animal, just like any other and no better with your upright walking, thumbs, complex written language, math and consciousness of self. none of that makes you special, you get born and die just like the wildebeests, when hurt you seek justice just like the giraffes, if in danger you fight and run just like the zebra, you are just a fancy hairless monkey. but that's another argument.
2. if you shoot me 8 times in the back as i run away, you are hunting me, you are treating me like an animal and i don't ever get to see the justice system or anything akin to a sense of justice. all i see is darkness, because i'm dying. you've taken my life and being that you cannot give it back and i had no chance to fight for it or show that i have a right to it, there is no possibility of justice.
you show me a list of hundreds of black men killed by the police and hundreds more abused by the same, a force whose sole purpose is the protection of citizens, you show me broadly acknowledged and unchecked murder, i say there had better be a fucking riot. for my part, i'm a little let down that more people aren't setting shit on fire. i'm still not over trayvon. so you ask me how i feel about a burning city? what is the point of a black owned business in a city where black people are voiceless, unrepresented and liable to be shot at random just for living? if the city can't protect its citizens, i say let that city burn. and not out of spite or race hate or any sense of righteousness, but because the function of a city is the protection of its citizens. failing that, i'd rather raze it to ashes than let it carry forth in negligence. perhaps that is extreme but so is the number of black people murdered by police since it was written into law that we are citizens of this nation. i'm over being cute about the fact that the civil rights movement and its problems never ended, only grew and changed. america was built on hatred of black people. it's been centuries, generations now that people in america of the african diaspora have toiled under this weight. it was one thing then to treat us this way when the law said we were slaves and the violence was openly acknowledged. the law says we all, regardless of race or any other separating abstraction, have rights. so now there is this plague of violence and the oppressors will not even own it, will not even confess their bigotry and the lack of justice in this system? WE HAVE VIDEO OF YOU REPEATEDLY MURDERING US BUT STILL, YOU WON'T CALL IT MURDER? you say not "we will work to stop killing you" but "please stop videotaping us while we kill you, it makes us look bad"?
paint yourself some "BLACK OWNED" signs and expect more riots. #sorrynotsorry
we have well passed a conversation about right or wrong at this point. if i hurt you, it is your job to scream. if i hold you down, it is your job to fight me. if you have no voice and you are going without, it is your job to find some way to make some noise that let's your position be known, even if that means setting your own house on fire. at this point, those people are just doing their jobs.