First off, let me tell you this (and to you people who are going to go into an uproar about this, please sit down):
#BlackLivesMatter doesn't mean that other lives don't matter. It's been reiterated so many times that no one should have to say it anymore.
On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling was killed by police officers. Immediately, there was an uproar, because when Sterling was killed, he was face-down on the pavement with his arms restrained. The gun that was in his pocket was not on his person when he was killed, and he was not reaching for it. How can you reach for a gun when your arms are restrained? Just twenty four hours later, another black man, Philando Castile, was shot and killed in front of his daughter while he was reaching for his license. His girlfriend recorded a video of the aftermath while sitting beside him as he lay dying.
As you may already know, the black community was in an uproar over this. There is recorded evidence of both shootings, and with Alton Sterling there is more than one video. There was needless killing involved and I'm not necessarily sure that what happened was protocol. According to the Houston Chronicle, the goals and objectives of police officers are to "maintain visibility, engage citizens, stop crimes, and answer calls." Now, using this as stepping point, this means that the police are supposed to keep people safe. What is so horrible about selling CDs and following directions to get your driver's ID?
Nothing. That's what.
Now, after all of this happened, the shooting of police in Dallas occurred. Now, before I say anything about this: I'm not celebrating the deaths of those police officers. What happened was senseless and unnecessary, and those officers had families, just like Sterling and Castile. I support the good cops and the cops that call out injustice just like I support my people. That being said: the people that didn't comment on Alton Sterling and Philando Castile's death came out of the woodwork to cry out on the deaths of the police.
So, my question is this: why? Why come out now, when you didn't comment on the injustice of two black men that were killed for no reason? Why would you think that being pro-black means that someone is anti-cop? Why would you say that all lives matter only when we black people say that black lives matter? #AllLivesMatter wasn't even a thing until #BlackLivesMatter, and then it was just used to undermine the movement.
On Facebook, ever since Alton Sterling's death, I've only been seeing two things: every single black person on my page, myself included, has talked about the injustice that we face and the "investigations" that we know are coming. I can count on one hand that amount of white friends who have shared what I have. The second thing is that other white people, people that didn't comment on those wrongful deaths, didn't speak up until Dallas. This terrifies me, because I am a black woman in the south, and I have a lot of friends that aren't black. Seeing this has only made me question the friends I made and how they feel about these issues. It also made me think of this question:
For all of you who have black friends and didn't comment on Alton Sterling and Philando Castile's deaths, knowing that the loss of two more black lives were lost and the black community is in mourning, do you really see your black friends as friends? If you see what's going on and think that we black people are being whiny and that we complain about everything, do you really see black people as equal?
When we say that black lives matter, what we're trying to say is that we deserve to be equal to everyone else. We deserve to have a concealed carry permit and a gun on our person without suspicion just like a white person. We deserve to have no bias against us upon immediate contact or sight. We want equal representation in media; we want our cries of discrimination and hurt to be heard; we want the freedom that we were promised with the Thirteenth Amendment; we want people to realize that for all of our lives, there have been laws set up to hold black people back and that we're finally fighting to have our voices heard.
We want people to know that just because the law says that we are equal, society says that we're not, and that is simply because it has been 66 years since Brown v. Board of Education and just a couple of days since a black man has been found hanging from a tree. We want people to realize that the people in the #BlackLivesMatter movement are not terrorists when the Ku Klux Klan are.
