Six million ways to die
22nd December 2014 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
The life of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was tragically cut short after he allegedly whistled at a white woman during a summer visit to Mississippi in 1955. Yusuf Hawkins was chased to his death and killed by a mob of white teenagers in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York because he was mistaken for the new Black boyfriend of one of the murderers’ ex-girlfriend. Michael Griffith died in the Howard Beach section of Queens, New York because he got off the subway in the wrong neighborhood. Levon Jones was choked to death by four white bouncers in New Orleans’ French Quarter for daring to ask questions about the club’s dress code. Justin Sipp was gunned down by New Orleans police as he traveled to his fast-food job before the sun came up. Adolph Grimes III was gunned down by New Orleans police while sitting in a car outside his grandmother’s home in New Orleans’ famed Faubourg Tremé neighborhood. Oscar Grant had the audacity to think that he and the mother of his child could celebrate New Year’s Eve by taking a train to a downtown celebration and paid the ultimate cost. Sean Bell, 23, had the nerve to think that he deserved to spend a night out on the town in New York City before getting married and was riddled by police with more than 50 bullets in 2011. Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant living in the Bronx, made the fatal mistake of purchasing a wallet that looked like a gun to police. Trayvon Martin was killed by a Neighborhood Watch captain because he dared to venture outside of his father’s home in a gated community in Sanford, Fla., for a bag of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. Jordan Davis, also 17, was also shot to death by a white customer who thought he and his friends were playing the music in their car too loud. John Crawford III, 24, was gunned down by police in an Ohio Walmart for attempting to buy a toy gun. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice met the same fate for playing with a toy gun at a park near his Cleveland, Ohio home. Ryan Stokes, 24, was killed by Kansas City cops in July 2013 for hanging out with his friends in a ritzy mall that reportedly did whatever it could to make Blacks feel unwelcome.
The lists goes on and on and on. This ain’t even the tip of the iceberg.
Though some people are still inclined to disagree, racism appears to be the common denominator in all of the aforementioned cases. How else do you explain the relatively rare cases of cops killing armed or unarmed white people or the growing number of times that grand juries refuse to indict officers for killing unarmed Black people who posed no tangible threat to those officers or anyone in the vicinity? How do you explain the federal government’s failure to protect the constitutional rights or people of color and lawmakers’ blatant refusal to even admit that a problem exists?
Racism means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It means that white elected officials can think they have the right to tell Black people to focus on Black-on-Black violence rather than police brutality. It means that public officials can build community centers for senior citizens and schools for Black children above toxic landfills. It means that local governments in majority-Black cities can get away with systematically blocking Black businesses from the contract bidding process. Racism means that people outside of communities of color can get away with firing thousands of Black teachers, administrators and staff persons from a majority-Black school system and break up the school system to allow the local white business community and the out-of-town profiteers to seize control of lucrative public school contracts. Racism means that police can get away with killing Black, brown, red and yellow men, women and children as long as they say the feared for their lives or thought they saw a gun.
Finally, racism means that every segment of white society can do whatever it pleases to Black men, women and children, with the understanding that Black people “have no rights that white people are bound by law to respect.”
Noted Washington, DC psychiatrist Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, M.D., author of the critically acclaimed The Isis Papers: The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation, defined racism/white supremacy as “the local and global power system and dynamic, structured and maintained by persons who classify themselves as white, whether consciously or subconsciously determined; which consists of patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and work) for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet Earth — a planet upon which the vast and overwhelming majority of people are classified as nonwhite (black, brown, red and yellow) by white-skinned people and all of the nonwhite people are genetically dominant (in terms of skin coloration) compared to the genetic-recessive white-skinned people.”
In her insightful writings and lectures, Dr. Welsing explains why and how Europeans, a global minority, continue to dominate the global economy, politics and virtually every facet of human life. The system of racism/white supremacy gives people of European descent an unfair advantage over people of color.
That “advantage” can be seen and felt in the way law enforcement agencies treat people from communities of color and the way cops and whites who take Black lives are significantly less likely to be charged or receive harsh sentences for their crimes. It can be seen and felt in the way elected officials continue to get away with practicing “taxation without representation” in their dealings with Black, brown, red and yellow people and the myriad of disparities between whites and people of color. Finally, it can be seen in the way the Supreme Court blatantly refuses to protect the voting rights of nonwhites and the poor, how education and housing officials continue to get away with depriving people of color of their constitutional rights and the way the justice system continues to deprive people of color of equal protection under the law.
None of the above comes as a shock to anyone who has taken the time to study the system under which we live. While it’s important that we demonstrate our dissatisfaction with the lack of justice in the justice system and the government’s refusal to enforce the U.S. Constitution, it’s critically important that we change our behavior, harness our power and organize ourselves accordingly.
Continued protests and chants of “I Can’t Breathe,” “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and “No Justice, No Peace” are great, but we need to also put in the work, commitment and dedication needed to make these sentiments more than catchy slogans.
We can start by mentally detoxing, weaning ourselves off of mental junk food and getting back to reading African-centered books in order to attain knowledge of self and a sense of purpose. We need to return to loving, trusting and valuing ourselves and rejecting messages from those outside of our community that tell us that we are defective, inferior or unworthy of being fully protected and represented by the law of the land and those elected to govern us.
We need to become single-minded about amassing wealth and learn how to use our economic might to push our agenda forward.
We need to stop allowing ourselves to be misled, confused or distracted by people who look like us but have no love of self, knowledge of self or sense of purpose. Earning hundreds of millions of dollars or becoming famous does not make anyone more important, insightful or clear about who he or she is. It does not make anyone a natural spokesman, advocate or leader. In fact, in a world where money is used to seduce minds and control the actions of the masses, the opposite may be true. Every brother ain’t a brother and every sister does not have your back. Be vigilant about the messages you allow to enter your psyche and think for yourselves.
As we come to the end of a very tumultuous year, let us be mindful of the fact that we don’t have time to waste. Stakes are high and we can’t afford to allow anyone outside of us speak for us or establish priorities for us.
As a people striving to be recognized and respected as free human beings, we need to do that for ourselves.
That’s my word.
This article originally published in the December 22, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
