The Black guy did not belong here; the Mexican will rape our women, that virus—oh the Chinese did it. In one form or the other the commander-in-chief, now from under his bed in the bunker has achieved his goal. America is on fire; tensions are burning, and the conflagration potentially will consume us all. This message is for the gallantry of the peaceful protesters, both black and white, not the paid or ideological self-serving anarchist or the teens wanting the latest pair of Jordans. It is not novel for me to say injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.
In early May of this year, an Austin, Texas park ranger was addressing a group of what appeared to be white teens at a lake about social distancing. The teens seemed relatively calm, with the exception of the expected resistance to spoiling their fun. From the crowd, a 25-year-old man shoved the ranger into the water. As the crowd tittered with laughter and some admonished the assault, the officer rose from the water, turned on his heels, and walked away humiliated. Arrested and later identified in a smiling mugshot 25-year-old, Brandon Hicks was named as the assailant and arrested without incident.
In 2015 in the same lone star state of Texas a 15-year-old black girl [Dajerria Becton], clad in a bikini, because she was attending a pool party, was grabbed by her hair, thrown to the ground, and was handcuffed with a knee in her back. Eventually, it was determined she broke no law and was awarded a settlement, and the offending officer [Eric Casebolt] was eventually allowed to resign.
These incidents are generally viewed through a black and white lens. Blacks saw Hicks getting away with a violation that may have cost a black man his life. The ranger turning and walking away from a potentially life-threatening incident was galling and infuriating to black viewers who remembered the Becton incident. No deaths or permanent physical harm resulted from either incident, but it was another nail in the coffin of the next black victim. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, who all took their last breaths of life between February and May of this year, probably saw the Dajerria Becton incident and shook their heads in disbelief.
I am not touting Joe Biden as a bastion of equal rights; his past will be appropriately critiqued. The man [Biden] who once described his former boss, Barack Obama, as “articulate, and bright and clean” has his faults but he also has the ability to genuinely tap into his compassion. In comparison to Donald Trump, Joe Biden is Reverend Wright. In the midst of over 100,000 deaths due to a pandemic, a majority of which may have been prevented with proper leadership, job losses equaling the Great Depression, and the streets of America on fire, Trump’s response was to quote a racist southern sheriff; “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” My sons are a part of the George Floyd generation, one of them the same age, and each time I write about his death I think of the recent death of my own brother, and I end in tears…
Vote in 2020 for Change.