Yuletide hate
19th December 2016 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
So I’m drinking a cup of morning coffee and reading an article I saved from the previous day when I hear a news report on the radio about an NFL player whose home was burglarized and vandalized by someone who felt the need to leave the image of a swastika behind and a message that told the athlete and his family to “Go back to Africa.” Given the current racial climate in the U.S., particularly in the wake of the election of President-elect Donald Trump, and the many incidents during which law enforcement officials and white civilians were allowed to get away with taking the lives of unarmed Black and Brown men, women and children, I’d be lying if I said I was surprised or upset.
I immediately thought about all of the Black and Brown athletes and celebrities who tragically believe that their hefty paychecks and fame make them immune to the kind of vitriolic hatred and insults that other people of color face every day.
Giants fullback Nikita Whitlock told police that his apartment was broken into by someone who scrawled “KKK” and “Go Back to Africa” on his wall.
“This just re-establishes that no matter where you are, no matter who you are, this can happen to you,” Whitlock told a New York television station.
Amen to that.
Hopefully, all athletes and celebrities of color, particularly those who criticized San Francisco Quarterback Colin Kaepernick for kneeling down for the national anthem, will learn that living in a mansion or having a “MTV Cribs”-worthy lifestyle does not mean that white supremacy is a figment of the mind or that any of us live in a post-racial America.
As the late, great Dr. Frances Cress Welsing was fond of saying, “You will learn.”
Meanwhile in the Dylann Roof case involving the 21-year-old white supremacist who slaughtered nine Black worshippers at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, prosecutors made public for the first time the contents of Roof’s journal and his videotaped two-hour confession,
Those in the courtroom on Dec. 9 got to hear about how Roof thought about killing Black drug dealers but figured they might shoot back and eventually settled on Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church because there would be no white people there, church goers were less likely to be armed and because it was the oldest Black church in the South.
“I knew that would be a place to get a small amount of Black people in one area,” Roof said, later adding, “They’re in church. They weren’t criminals or anything.”
Roof also said he wanted to kill Blacks because they raped white women daily, laughed repeatedly as he described his actions to investigators, decided to allow one person in the church to live so that they could describe the hell they experienced during the massacre and meticulously fired 88 shots in honor of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, whose last name begins with the eighth letter of the alphabet.
The good news is that Roof was convicted last week — the bad news is that there are a lot more Dylann Roofs all over the USA. While some argue about whether he should be sentenced to die, I say let him live. Let him spend the rest of his life behind bars and see the death and destruction he and others like him have caused and continued to cause. Let him see the pain in the eyes of his loved ones who his hate also impacted and look into the eyes of other killers whose only motivation was an unbridled hatred of anyone and anything that is not white. Leave him be.
We should be mindful of the fact that the Mother Emanuel AME massacre, Trayvon Martin murder and many of the other fatal shootings of unarmed Black and Brown men, women and children occurred while President Barack Obama was still in office.
Now that President-elect Donald Trump is poised to succeed Obama, only God knows how much more cold and severe the “Winter in America” that the late, great Gil-Scott Heron sang about is going to become.
One thing is for sure: There will be little room for error in Trump’s world — at least not for people of color. We better arm ourselves with the power and benevolence of the Most High, whatever we call him, take a crash course in learning how to love ourselves and love and protect one another and understand that in the face of oppression and the harshest of winters, all we got is us.
We will either hang in there together or we will simply hang.
Harambee, y’all.
Anyway, I got some questions for y’all. Here we go:
• How do you think Recovery School District executives are going to spend those whopping bonuses they receive this Christmas for finally breaking ground on the new Kipp-Booker T. Washington High School for Black children atop a toxic landfill that contains at least eight deadly metals including lead, mercury and zinc?
• What is it about some of us that makes us not care or react when something is placed in someone else’s community or somebody does something to somebody else’s children?
• After the current district attorney refused to bring charges against a Marigny homeowner who shot a Black teen in the head even though police said the youth posed no imminent threat to the man and his family and the D.A. continues to refuse to bring charges against the former NOPD officer who murdered Henry Glover less than a week after Hurricane Katrina, shouldn’t we already be vetting replacement candidates who have demonstrated a commitment to justice and a willingness to stand up to the system that has allowed mass incarceration to continue more than 150 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation?
• Who elected Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand to choose our leaders?
• What would Jefferson Parish business leaders say, think and do if Black and Brown residents of Orleans and Jefferson parishes decided to not spend a dime in Jefferson Parish for an entire weekend?
This article originally published in the December 19, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
