When you are an online contributor sometimes it is very difficult to find motivation to write. What is a subject I have not covered before, or a subject that I can revisit? After some hemming and hawing you eventually find the spirit and write about a subject that matters to you, or you can always go to the good old book of faces, or Facebook and peruse until you find an image or comment that makes you just sit back and wonder about the people who you call friends, an image much like this one:
I have seen my fair share of racists and bigots, I have seen people wearing the Rebel or Confederate flag with pride and I have accepted their views. But this picture epitomizes much of what is wrong with this country. Supporting images like this shows those around you exactly what kind of person you are. To compare people who are attempting to protest modern day injustice and compare them to a group that terrorized their ancestors since 1915 is completely absurd.
To think that anyone can see this image and agree with it speaks to some of the horrors in this country. Imagine having to be cautious and make sure that whatever you are doing you do not look suspicious because someone might come out of their house and accost you prior to shooting you, as you walked to the corner store, or you might be shot at the park playing with a toy gun, or any other number of circumstances where a person of African descent is shot.
Arguably the most interesting part of all of this anti-black violence is the fact that when it happens people are so quick to defend the officers or assailants. They post pictures, some not even real, demonstrating that this individual was not so innocent and share their criminal record.
The response when an individual is gunned down while pinned down by two officers should not be well he was a gangbanger and should not have resisted arrest, especially when he knew he had a gun on him. The response should be an outcry for justice that this man who was pinned to the ground is now dead because an officer got tired of fighting with him and tried to use his pistol as a threat to end the struggle before pulling the trigger.
While we are denouncing the victims in these instances the Stanford Rapist who, I have spoken on before in a similar article, gets his swim times and his nice school photo published after being caught red handed raping an unconscious woman, an act that disturbed the witnesses, before being handed down a 6 month sentence. Yet we claim there is not a race divide. How can we make such a statement when images like this circulate the web?
As an African American male these sort of images truly disturb me. I am watching as innocent men are gunned down with no truly good reason; they simply questioned the direction from an officer. Now I know that officers of the law deserve respect, but when you become violent over a simple question then perhaps you do not deserve respect, and the fourth amendment presents us with the right against an illegal search and seizure, meaning that an officer must have probable cause, more than just you fit the description of someone causing a raucous or look like you are up to no good.
I guess I find it interesting that many of the same people that are against the Black Lives Matter movement, are pro the second amendment and argue that taking away their guns is taking away a right afforded them by the second amendment. So here you have people who are essentially standing up for their right to live, their right to walk the streets in public without being harassed and gunned down and they are wrong for even speaking out against these injustices, but your right to carry a semi-automatic weapon is more important? We are talking about the lives of men and children gunned down in the street in senseless police violence.
And what is arguably most interesting about this comparison is the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement was meant to denounce so many tragedies that have occurred in the past several years unlike the KKK wo are responsible for some of the worst travesties that African Americans have experienced. Are there bad apples among them? Absolutely just like with the Westboro Baptists not everyone that share beliefs have the same intentions.
All the Black Lives Matter movement was meant to do was find justice for those who have none, people killed unjustly only to have their names dragged through the mud afterwards to make it seem like their death was not a tragedy, but the end result of the way they lived whether they were doing wrong at the time or not.
