Add 9 More to List of the Terrorized
It’s not over. It’s still happening, it’s just changed form. We aren’t safe. The state keeps extrajudiciously killing us, every 3 days another black body is gunned down in the street by the state and they rnt held accountable, although most instances we’ve not done anything wrong.
So many black bodies tortured and killed by police or in detention facilities that America can’t even remember all their names because there r just SO many.
It wasn’t all that long ago. 50’s & 60’s the civil rights movement worked to end Jim crow and segregation, a system under which thousands of black bodies died, many of them men leaving single mothers behind, and then condemning them for being single mothers.
Then came Vietnam, more talk of single mother’s cuz black men were disproportionately killed b/c they made up a lot of the fighting force, b/c most couldn’t get the service wavers for college or marriage; many ppl came back from Vietnam self medicating with heroin for the ptsd they got from the awful things they’d seen.
The 80’s & 90’s brought the drug war which incarcerated yet another generation of black men, while doubling down on the single mom shaming. At present it’s murder by cop on top of mass incarceration.
We make up 13% of the population. But over 75% of the prison population. Most for non violent drug offenses. And not because we do more crime, but because our neighborhoods r more heavily policed.
All this in a structured institution designed to, and predicated on, the inferiority of black ppl.
Meanwhile we’re conditioned to always be conciliatory when on the receiving end of harm from those working for the government and those who still believe in the “old” ideals of the south. Always trying to protect white ppls’ feelings surrounding guilt about the past, their perception that we’re blaming them directly and saying that they owned slaves or propped up Jim Crow.
No one is blaming white ppl today for the actions of their forefathers, or trying to make u feel guilty as though u were responsible for them. That guilt doesn’t exist for ppl who see and acknowledge, and accept the structural racism and white supremacy that was built into our country’s functioning at its inception; the now subtle ways its woven itself into our society. It’s the elephant in the room.
We can’t begin to deal with anything if ppl won’t recognize what larger things r at play, and how they entwine each other and intersect with all parts of our society.
We can’t feel safe anywhere. I see cops and I get nervous. I don’t know what citizens hold those racist ideals and who doesn’t. Any white person I meet could pull out a gun and shoot me dead and I wouldn’t know till they pulled it out. We don’t know who we can trust. And seeing these events happen over and over again, and repeating news broadcasts with no real information, its just disaster porn; It traumatizes us all over again and reminds us how unsafe we r constantly. We’ve been terrorized for generations.
R white ppl scared knowing that if they were in our shoes they’d have already burned this shit down? The same way straight dudes freak when a gay guy hits on em, like they’re worried that gay guy will treat them the way they treat women?
Black ppl r terrified to be in America. Because the ppl who r supposed to protect us, don’t. Or won’t. They actively kill us instead. And we keep getting told to stay peaceful. Stay calm. And for the most part, considering EVERYTHING we’ve seen and the trauma we’ve had to relive repeatedly, we have. We’ve had few retaliatory actions in response to this state sponsored violence and structural racism we’re dealing with on a daily basis.
