General Discussion

bigtree

(85,996 posts) Sat Apr 11, 2015, 03:30 PM Apr 2015

'We are being killed because we're black and because we refuse to be subservient to angry white men'

What No One is Saying About the Killings of Blacks in America

by Benjamin Dixon

____This is what no one is talking about with regard to the killings of black people. Some white Americans feel as though they have the right to confront us and, if we do not cower before their demands–if we don’t “humble” ourselves and comply–then they become infuriated. How dare we not instantly obey the words and instructions of these angry white men? How dare we respond to them as if we are equal. How dare we demand respect not only from thugs on the street, but also from thugs with badges. No one is talking about this because we aren’t ready to confront the glaringly obvious vestiges of Jim Crow: the idea that black people should be subservient–know their place, hold their head down, and say, “Yes Sir” and “No Sir” –whenever being instructed by any white person who wants to “teach us a lesson...”

Our leaders ignore this. Our media ignores this. Our justice system doesn’t even consider this. All our system considers is, if at the moment of confrontation, whether the person who shot the gun feared for his or her life. And in this regard, black people are stripped of our right to be human. We are stripped of our right to get angry when we feel as though we have been mistreated and disrespected. No one cares if little people with Napoleon complexes come to assert their need for domination over a group of people whom they feel should be subservient to them. And when they find men and women who refuse to bow down, they kill them. And what does America say about this? It tells black people that we should have complied.

The most painful example of institutionalized racism is the fact that our legal system pays little, if any, regard to this truth–especially when the victim is black and dead. A dead black man can have any narrative necessary created about him. It certainly helps that America is so ready to believe that every black man is a potential thug. This helps them conclude in their minds, without any question, what happened...

We must stop minimizing these murders to simply being about black and white and we must unpack what that actually means. While there are some who are killed simply because their skin color is black, most of the cases we are seeing are deeper than that. We are being killed because we are black and because we refuse to be subservient to angry white men who feel they should have authority over us. We are being killed because we are not cowering to the demands of small people with guns who want to be free to speak to us in any manner they wish. We are being killed because we have the nerve to “declare our right on this earth to be men, to be human beings, and to be respected as human beings.”

read more: http://thebenjamindixonshow.com/what-no-one-is-saying-about-the-killings-of-blacks-in-america/

W.E.B.B.I.E DuBois @fivefifths
Excerpt from Baldwin's "A Report from Occupied Territory", written in 1966