The war on us
30th March 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Wendell Allen, 20, is killed by a trigger-happy cop with a single bullet to his chest for getting out of bed shirtless to see what the racket was in his Gentilly home in New Orleans. Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant, is killed by NYPD officers with 41 bullets for daring to reach for his wallet while standing in the vestibule of a NYC apartment. Georgia Southern University student Levon Jones is choked to death by four white bouncers outside Club Razzoo in the French Quarter as New Orleans cops stand by watching.
Trayvon Martin, a Black 17-year-old, is gunned down by an overzealous Neighborhood Watch captain who thinks he is white for daring to walk to a store to buy Skittles while wearing a hoodie. Jordan Davis, also 17, is gunned down by a white customer who takes it upon himself to tell Davis and his friends to turn down the music in the car they are sitting in outside a gas station. Michael Brown, an 18-year-old headed to college, is gunned down for the crime of walking in the street. John Crawford, 22, is gunned down in a Walmart store for holding a toy gun. Ezell Ford, is gunned down by LAPD members for making what they called “suspicious movements.”
Apparently, “suspicious” and “Black” go together like grits and eggs.
Last week, a federal judge in New Orleans tossed out a wrongful-death lawsuit filed the family of a 20-year-old slain by New Orleans police as he headed to his job at Burger King at 5:30 a.m. While the cops clearly saw him as a threat, he certainly didn’t sound at all like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano or Frank Lucas. That didn’t stop them from taking his life.
Also last week, a grand jury in Houma, La., decided not to file criminal charges against a Terrebonne Parish sheriff’s deputy who gunned down an unarmed 14-year-old Cameron Tillman on September 23, 2014.
In case you didn’t get the memo, there’s a war being waged on us.
It’s a war that dates back several centuries.
The thing is, you don’t have to declare war on somebody to engage in war. You simply have to take calculated, aggressive steps to eliminate someone who you perceive as a threat or formidable opponent.
Black men qualify as threats because in the eyes of white supremacists Black men and boys represent genetic and physical annihilation. Mainstream media images of Black men as hyper masculine, physically dominant specimens have generated a great deal of fear among white Americans, along with the sobering reality that Europeans are a global minority in danger of genetic annihilation.
Black women are viewed as less of a threat because they are less likely th physically assault white men and cannot impregnate white women.
There are many media creations that underscore the threats associated with Black men. The early American film Birth of a Nation, in which a Black man accused of raping a white woman is dealt with by the Ku Klux Klan, is but one example of the many books and films that vilify and criminalize Black men. The Richard Wright novel Native Son also drives home America’s fear of Black masculinity. In the eyes of the powers that be, Black men are a constant threat to White America, one that must be neutralized and monitored at any cost.
Schools are designed to miseducate, undereducate, misdiagnose, marginalize, vilify and criminalize Black boys, often sending them to lives of crime, toil in the ever-expanding prison industrial complex or an early grave.
We should remind ourselves that while the media portrays Black men as dangerous and violent, violence can take many forms and be manifested in many ways. For example, the powers that be display their disdain for communities of color and the poor when they underfund public education, cut school lunch programs, slash food-assistance programs, ship jobs overseas, engage in drug- and gun-trafficking, criminalize and deport immigrants of color, allow companies to contaminate the nation’s land, air and water and block the expansion of programs like Medicaid.
If anything drove home the point that war has been declared on us, it was the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and tanks by police in Ferguson, Mo., last fall. The St. Louis suburb looked more like the Gaza Strip, Afghanistan or China’s Tiananmen Square than it did a small town in the American midwest.
Last fall’s show of military force was also a reminder of the 1985 bombing of MOVE’s headquarters by the City of Philadelphia, Pa.
As has been said often, knowing is half the battle.
We know what we are up against, so we have no excuse for not coming up with a workable plan to ensure not only our survival but our growth and progression as a people.
We cannot depend on mayors, governors, legislators, federal agencies, police chiefs or even the president to save us — we have to do that for ourselves.
We can do that by treating each other with respect and dignity and insisting that others treat us with respect and dignity.
One of the most effective military strategies over the curse of history has been to divide and conquer one’s enemies. We cannot allow ourselves to be divided and conquered by our foes any longer. In unity there is strength and power.
There is additional power in harnessing our political and financial resources. Voting alone will not help us unless we use our economic power to move our agenda forward.
It’s been said that the most revolutionary thing Black people can do is love one another. That love will empower, inspire and embolden us to meet whatever challenges come our way. That love will also give us the will and the courage to keep on keeping on when we feel like giving up.
When we grow weary or discouraged, we must remind ourselves that “I am because we are.”
It is too late for us to shield Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant and other victims of racially motivated gun violence from these hate crimes, but we can build a circle of love and protection for those yet to come.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the March 30, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
