The Hard Truth-Thank God he wasn’t Black
30th July 2012 · 0 Comments
By Min. J. Kojo Livingston
Contributing Writer
Don’t you get tired of holding your breath every time a horrible crime happens until they announce that the perpetrator was not Black? Case in point: The Colorado shootings recently. When they hesitated to reveal the race of the suspect that was captured, most of us knew he could not have been Black. Otherwise his photo, his mama’s photo and all of his cousins’ photos would have been all over the television.
There’s something really wrong about even having to think about that. It speaks to a condition in our society and a trend that we as a race have accepted for too long.
The normal, human reaction when something like Aurora happens should be horror and sadness for the state of humanity and the world. Regardless of your ethnicity or politics, the thought of people going to see a movie, minding their own business and winding up shot, dying or begging and running for their lives should move you. The idea of any three-month-old baby being shot should hurt you and give you pause.
Hardened warriors have been known to wince in anger when they see the work of a coward. Even violence has its distinctions.
But you know the rules. If a Black person did it, we all did it. It’s a reflection on our deficiencies as a race or group. If a white person does it, the assumption is that he/she is the exception to the rule. The fact is that white people commit way more crimes of all types than Black people do. Our crimes get reported more, recorded more and publicized far more than the misdeeds of others.
Yes, racists only see something like this as an opportunity to push their agenda.
There is something profane about that. However racists are not alone in their eagerness to exploit a tragedy that should have us all thinking and praying. Major media only sees a story and ratings to sell ads with. Both political parties are having strategy sessions to see how to use anything about this attack to their own political advantage. Other industries will be looking at ways to make a buck off of the incident. Many of these people have lost their very ability to care about human suffering, death and destruction, they only see opportunities to increase cash profits.
As a Black Nationalist, my primary concern is getting Black people free of the evils of this system and restoring us to our former glories and beyond. I believe this is critical to elevating the state of mankind. Some of my colleagues think that will be enough. I disagree.
While I don’t assume responsibility for changing the hearts of white people I do believe that we live inside an abnormal culture. This is something we should expose, challenge and alter whenever we can. I would hope that white activists and do-gooders would start spending more effort and energy changing their own people and policies and stop coming to “rescue” us from the harm they keep doing.
I believe that Black people must move mentally and emotionally from the place where we accept or even care about the invisible finger that gets pointed at all of us when one of us does wrong. Perhaps we need to extend a finger of our own.
We have much bigger things to focus our emotional energy on than the white racist blame game…
…and That’s the Hard Truth!
This article was originally published in the July 30, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
