I have not written in a while…not due to lack of topic, but
due to the fact that I have something planned, then I wake up to some news that
derails my thoughts into a completely different direction…and it seems to
happen every day, so never finish one entire thought.
So, in the wake of the recent events, I will sit down and
finish one rant: BLACK LIVES MATTER.
I woke up to a Facebook post from a relative that said “ALL
LIVES MATTER” and it made me upset. Saying that Black lives matter doesn’t
imply that other lives don’t. That is not what the conversation is all about.
It is about the fact that there are no videos of police officers shooting white
people over a busted taillight, because police officers seem to understand that
white lives matter. It is not an attack on white people. Nobody is asking you
to renounce to your whiteness, or the privileges that come with it. What they
ask is for you to acknowledge this. That you don’t have to worry about your
partner getting killed in front of your daughter, just for having a busted taillight.
That you don’t have to worry about being killed for walking on the street. They
ask for you to listen to their stories and try to understand. Yes, Philando
Castile was armed, but he had a permit, and an open carry permit, and he tried
to make the police aware of this…he did this so that the officer didn’t see his
weapon and jump to conclusion that would get him killed…yet, he is dead. I have
been pulled over twice in my life, and obviously both times I have been asked
to show my license and registration, and both times I have had to reach into
the glove compartment to find the registration and my purse to find my wallet…
and neither time did I think that I had to warn the officer that I was going to
do so. And when I did reach for those, the policer officer did not react with
fear and draw his gun out. I was recently walking around with friends, and we
stopped at a light. There was a police officer standing there, and my friends
kept walking, even though the light was red for crossing the street. The police
officer didn’t do anything, and we joked that they were ballsy for jaywalking
in front of a police officer…but the truth is that they were not ballsy, they
were just white. Michael Brown was stopped by the police for walking on the
street of Ferguson, and he ended up getting killed.
Being white doesn’t make you racist, but denying the facts
without any logic does. Look, if you don’t believe there is a race problem in
this country, go ahead and show me the facts and the figures, but so far, the
ones I have seen point to the fact that there is. And I have heard the
arguments…that black people commit more violent crimes, that Walter Scott was
stopped for a tail light, but then he started running away from the police…. But
there is a lot more to the story. Walter Scott started running when he realized
that he was going to be arrested for skipping on child support, and that
getting arrested was going to make him lose his job, and losing his job was
going to make him miss even more payments. The truth is that we think we earned
our privileges because we finished high school and went to college, but, at
least in my case, this was because I was lucky. My parents made a good living,
so I never had to worry about working as a teenager to be able to afford
luxuries, much less to help put food on the table. I was then able to go to
college, and my parents were able to pay for it. All I had to do was go to
class, and get good grades. My high school wasn’t great, but it offered AP
classes, and honors classes, wchich probably helped get into college. My high school
had money to buy high end calculators for every student in my math classes….so,
do you think that if black people stayed in school, and committed less crimes,
then they would have to worry less about getting killed? then you are right…. let’s
fight for them, to make sure they are provided access to the same levels of
education as we did. That we provide incentives for them to stay in school and pursue
a higher education…because let’s face it, education becomes less of a priority
when your parents are struggling to put food on the table.
Anyway. I leave you with a couple of links to articles that
I found interesting and worth reading…I am sorry this rant is all over the
place…But that is my state of mind this morning …
http://jezebel.com/all-the-greedy-young-abigail-fishers-and-me-1782508801?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=Jezebel_facebook
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