Over the last eight years a new crop of so called “enlightened” Black people are starting to emerge, the “politically enlightened” that is. These people are the ones that got into politics when Barack Obama first ran for president, but really weren’t into politics, they we’re just into wanting to see Barack become the first Black POTUS. They’re mostly under 35 and are a part of the millennial generation that came of age after the internet became a household thing. They’re part of the microwave, short attention span, self entitled, Twitter generation that thinks things should happen specifically for them and immediately after they say something about it.
This generation of Black people has jumped into social media politics head first with little to no understanding of how politics actually work. They think that because they have an opinion and that there are other people that share that opinion, that they are right about what they think and that anyone that disagrees is wrong. This is the furthest thing from the truth, and it’s the epitome of confirmation bias! But never the less, it’s the lay of the social media landscape.
These social media politico’s have usurped true political debate and replaced it with a millennial mindset which is becoming a detriment to the Black political voice that we once shared. At one point we spoke with one voice politically, but over the past eight years, that voice is being chipped away little by little, election by election. And each election cycle we see more and more Republicans being voted into office who seek to destroy all the progress that our forefathers gained after the Civil Rights Movement. And each time we see more and more black people either no voting, or voting across party lines based off of a flawed but prevalent thought pattern among these voters.
The three things that are causing this is; no real understanding of politics, the “what have you done for me lately” philosophy has been condensed because of their short attention spans, and they don’t understand the lesser of two evils philosophy.
When these three things occur within a person we get what we see today and this group of people are getting larger and larger each election cycle.
1: No real understanding of politics means that you are looking at political parties through a black and white mentality, both racially and as opposites of the same paradigm. So what happens is race is applied to everything along with political party affiliations, which means that they are specifically searching for what each party has done for Black people.
2: Add the microwave mentality to that and these short attention span social media politico’s apply their minuscule understanding of politics, and racial biases with the what have you done for me lately mentality and deduce the Democrat party down to within the last election cycle, as a matter of fact, they break it down to the latest news cycle stories that are being ran day in and day out trying to convince you of this, or that.
I’ve seen so many Black people mention what have they done for me lately when talking about politics than I’ve ever seen in my entire life over the past few years and it shows that they have no actual working knowledge of politics before they became “activist” on different social media platforms. And whats really crazy is that the people responsible for starting this dialog and spreading it are none other than Fox news pundits and reporters. Ask yourself what their agenda is? For those that can’t figure it out, its to divide and conquer.
Republicans only win statewide elections when there is a low voter turnout, or Black voters either no-vote or cross party lines. Whats one of the best ways to achieve these results, convince Black voters that the other party hasn’t done anything for them lately, therefore why would you continue to show allegiance to the party.
3: Because they don’t truly understand the lesser of two evils philosophy, they either no-vote or cross party lines based off election promises, which are mostly pandering. Within the last 100 years, the Republican party has been against every social change that has helped Black people in America. They’ve stood in opposition of Civil Rights, Equal Employment Opportunity acts and Affirmative Action, voter registration, etc. So how can a political party trumpet what have they done for you lately, when they’ve never done anything at all for you period, yet a lot of y’all actual listen to this nonsense and show that you believe it by no-voting or crossing party lines! This is where a true understanding of the lesser of two evils philosophy would come in handy.
The lesser of two evils means that if you have to make a choice between two things, could be more than two things, you should choose the one that is the least bad for you!
So in the instance of a two party political system like the one set up now, you should pick the one that does the least harm to you. This doesn’t mean that you’re voting for evil people, evil is just a metaphor, you’re voting for the person or party that will do the least amount of harm to your position in this country.
Now with that said, which party has stood with Black people for over a century, and which has been in opposition to the progress of Black people, at every turn. Which party is actively trying to get rid of affirmative action? Which party has trampled on voting rights across the country? And the list can go on and on, but you get the picture right?
So all in all Democrats may not be actively trying to court the Black vote by making empty promises during the election cycle, but they have tried to beat back the Republican progress by regress machine that’s been in full effect over the past three decades and that has gotten worse since President Obama has taken office.
At the end of the day, if you’re one of these people that has no-voted or crossed party lines because the Democrats have done nothing for you lately, or they’re the lesser of the two evils, and you don’t vote like that, you are the reason that Republicans who have never done anything for you are able to win elections. So when they go on to dismantle the hard fought legislation that our forefathers died for, I’m going to need you to STFU and take what’s coming to you. All you gotta do is look at what Rauner is doing in Illinois!
The Jury Ain’t That Grand
So here’s the thing, the media has conditioned us over the years to believe that a grand jury is the epitome of justice. They make it seem as if they hold value intrinsic to equalizing the deployment of justice when justice may go un-served, but the reality of the situation is that it’s just as flawed as the justice system is.
It takes the same biased people that would serve on a transparent jury and asks them to figure out if a person should be charged with a certain crime, but with no transparency.
Like all other things in a racially biased society like the one that we live in, those types of biases seep into every aspect of our system. From hiring practices (Google racism in hiring practices or black sounding name biases), to loans for houses (Google racial bias in subprime loans), to Redlining (Google the term redlining), read The New Jim Crow so that you better understand the racist practices behind mass incarceration, and so on.
What you’ll realize is that racist people control all these institutions therefore they are proliferated with racist thought and biased outcomes, the grand jury is no different than an all white jury of your so-called peers.
As a matter of fact, its even worse, because the defendant doesn’t even get a chance to present his/her side of the story, it’s just the prosecutor in the vast majority of the cases presenting them with the evidence that they feel is good enough to bring a case to trial. It sounds good on the surface, but when you add the fact that the prosecutor has a racial bias, and the grand jury participants have a racial bias, how exactly do we expect the outcome to be non-biased!?
We been conditioned to believe that a “jury” of our “peers” is the perfect way to deliver justice, that the outcome of every single case is in the hands of people that only listen to what the law says and don’t bring any of their biases into the courtroom with them, but the truth of the matter is that it’s almost impossible to check your biases at the door and its been proven time and time again when we see grand juries refusing to indict racist police officers, that murder unarmed Black men, women and children, with the latest being Tamir Rice. A young Black child playing with a pellet gun, who was gunned down within seconds of police officers arriving on the scene. Yet we’ve witnessed grown white men that have engaged with shoot outs with the police being taken into custody alive. How do we quantify that with reason and logic, if justice is supposed to blind and harbor no racial bias? How do we rationalize the fact that a police officer was caught on tape administering a banned maneuver; banned by the police and governmental body, the chokehold, but a grand jury felt that it was a justifiable act?
The law stated that police officers were never supposed to use the chokehold when trying to apprehend a suspect, yet a grand jury sat in a room and came to the conclusion that it was ok and justifiable for the officer to use it on a Black man (Eric Garner) that was panhandling cigarettes! How exactly do we rationalize that a police officer broke the LAW in doing what he did; yet it’s viewed as a justifiable offense, unless racial bias is brought into the picture.
Once you add racism, then it all makes sense, it makes sense that a racist would view a big Black man as a threat!
It makes sense that a Black kid with a pellet gun is a cold-blooded killer just waiting to kill someone, if I’m viewing him through racist eyes!
It makes sense that a Black man (John Crawford) walking through a store that sells toy guns is immediately shot by police officers without them checking to see if the gun was real or fake if we add the fact that the officers who shot him were racially biased or flat out racist!
This is the only way that any of these things can make any sense, period!
I can go on and on saying what makes sense but I hope that you get the picture!
And the reality of the situation is that, a group of white individuals sitting in a room where there is no transparency at all, who harbor racial biases, will in most cases see nothing wrong with a police officer, who has supposedly been sworn “to protect the people and the law” killing and unarmed Black man, woman or child.
At every turn of events we are reminded of this!
I believe that if we continue to use Grand Jury’s they need to be transparent, ALL the testimony MUST be available to the public!
The reason why they claim that they are not made public is for the safety of the witnesses that come forward, but the reality of the situation is that they can at anytime redact the names of the witnesses that testified as well as the names of the grand jury members, therefore making the safety argument moot!
They make them private and allow the prosecutor to have free reign because they know that any half way competent prosecutor will be able to convince a grand jury that a prosecutable crime has been committed, as long as there is no defense present and they actually want to bring a case to court. If they don’t want to actually prosecute, the grand jury will almost always come back with no indictment!
It’s playing out right in front of our eyes right now, for the world to see!
Still Serve and Protect!
Over the past few years I’ve heard an echo growing stronger and getting louder every time a Black man is shot by a police officer, and its not what you think. It’s not #HandsUpDontShoot, it’s not #JusticeOrElse, and it’s not #BlackLivesMatter, it’s “if we don’t stop killing each other, they wont stop killing us”!
This disturbing trend is becoming more and more commonplace on social media sites every time a Black man is murdered by a cowardice piece of shit racist cop. Every comment thread will have some racist white person saying he got what he deserved and a bunch of ass backward negro’s saying that if we don’t respect ourselves why should they respect us.
Well for one, it’s their job! They’re supposed to Protect and Serve the public; nowhere in their job description states that they need to RESPECT us first. Nowhere in their job description states that they are the judge, jury, and executioner. But it does state that they are supposed to apprehend suspects and let the prosecutors present a case where the jury determines if they’re guilty.
They are supposed to respect the law, and if they do that they’ll never kill someone that is not trying to kill them first! And the incidences that bring about anger and protest are the ones that are clearly known to be police acting as the judge, jury and executioners.
But what’s strange about this is that this usually only plays out when the murdered individual is Black! We rarely ever see a white cop playing all the roles when it comes down to a white individual, for some odd reason they RESPECT the law and lives when the person looks like them. Over 80% of all white people that are murdered are murdered by other white people! They kill each other all the time, but we never see white people saying that cops wont respect white lives as long as white people don’t respect white lives.
Why do you think that is?
Well I’ll tell you, its because even though white people kill each other all the time, those same white cops still RESPECT white lives, its evident because they don’t kill white people at the same rate that they kill Black people! So us respecting ourselves, and Black on Black crime has nothing at all to do with why some cops don’t RESPECT our lives!
They don’t respect our lives because they are racist and they believe that a Black life is not as valuable as a white life, plain and simple! It’s been like that since we were stolen from our homeland and shipped around the world as slaves! There’s no way we can change that by RESPECTING ourselves! As long as there are racist who infiltrate police departments, it doesn’t matter what we do, they’ll continue to kill us if they can keep getting away with it.
There’s been no time in our history where our RESPECT for one another stopped racist white people/cops from killing us. They simply don’t care about that, they just hate Black people and when given a chance to harm one they will, especially when they can hide behind a badge and the “fear for their lives”. And as I said the only way they will stop doing it is if they are held accountable, and even then some will still do it!
WHAT WE NEED TO DO IS STAY VIGILANT IN EXPOSING THEM; KEEP OUR CAMERAS POINTED AT THEM AND NEVER ACCEPT THE OFFICIAL STORY!
DEMAND THAT ALL EVIDENCE BECOME AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC!
DEMAND THAT ALL COPS WEAR BODY CAMS!
DEMAND THAT ANY OFFICER CAUGHT CUTTING OFF A BODY CAM DURING AN INCIDENT BE FIRED IMMEDIATELY!
DEMAND THAT A FEDERAL LAW BE PASSED SO THAT EVERY PERSON IN THE U.S. KNOWS THAT IT IS LEGAL TO RECORD POLICE OFFICERS AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT IMPEDING ON THE SCENE, AND REMAIN AT A SAFE DISTANCE!
#JusticeForSandraBland
These are a few things that I haven’t heard mentioned yet, but bring into question the cops motives and the alleged suicide. Read them and let me know what you think.
1) When the cop finally got her out of her vehicle, why did he instruct her to stand where he told her stand. At first pass the average person would say, so they won’t be in the street, and they could avoid traffic, sounds legit.
But now juxtapose that with your own experience or those that you’ve witnessed and you’ll realize that most, upwards of 95% of the time when a police takes you out of your car, they instruct you to stand at the back of your vehicle.
This cop deliberately instructed her to stand in an area where the police camera could not see exactly what was going on. When she moved to put her phone on the car he made sure he told her to come back to the area where the camera couldn’t see what was going on and he searched her off camera. Had he done like most cops and told her to stand at the back of the vehicle, everything would have been on tape.
So he knew exactly what he was doing, making sure that his actions were off camera but in a position where he could be heard! Notice where he is standing, with her just out of the view of the camera, then by the time he throws her down they are both outside of the camera view!
2) If the tape was not doctored or edited like the officers claimed, then why do we have continuous audio overlay. A glitch in the upload of the footage that results in looping of the film would have looped the audio also. There is no possible way for the audio to play straight through while the actual video footage glitches, if they are on the same file. The only way for the audio to play straight through is for it to be on a different file which means that you would need video editing software to separate the video from the audio.
So the software glitch story is fabricated, thus once again proving that something outside the ordinary happened that they are trying to cover up!
3) A News source reported that she was found in a semi standing position. Yes you read that right, semi-standing
This means that she supposedly hung herself by leaning over until she died. What they’re trying to tell us is that her will to live, the strongest urge of any living creature wasn’t there in any capacity, because all she had to do was stand up and she would have lived. Then all of a sudden they come out with a story that she told the arresting officers that she attempted suicide a few months earlier. Which by the way means that the officers should have put her on 24 suicide watch, which means that they should have taken any and everything out of her cell that she could use to harm herself. Which means that there should not have been a plastic garbage bag in the cell. They are at the very least complicit in her suicide for allowing those objects to be in a jail cell with her. And let’s be clear here, no one, and I mean no one has ever used a plastic bag to hang themselves, ever. If a plastic bag is used, the individual always puts the bag over there head and suffocates to death!
4) The media showed a garbage can during the spot and said that the plastic bag was similar to the one seen in the picture. Thus helping to create a narrative that made it seem like the the garbage can and bag were the ones in the cell with her, and that the the garbage bag was big enough to kill herself with!
5) In the footage that shows the paramedics rushing to her cell, something struck me as strange. The cell that was directly in front of the camera was empty, but they had her in a cell in a dark corner where she was once again conveniently out of camera range. Which once again begs the question, why put her in that corner where they knew no footage could be taken of what went on? Notice the empty cell, why don’t they have garbage cans in this one!
6) If they have footage from inside the station of the paramedics coming in to try to save her, then that means that they should also have footage of everything else that transpired in the that area from when she was put in the cell up until the paramedics wheeled her away dead. And they also said that the footage doesn’t show anyone going into the cell that morning but they haven’t released any of that footage.
But guess what, they already have their lie in place for when they say that the footage is messed up or gone, remember the glitch from uploading the dash cam footage, it’s already in play!
7) And lastly where’s the dash cam footage from the second officer on the scene, the lights were on so why hasn’t that footage been released! The second car had arrived on the scene before the this was taken, but if you listen to the first video put out, you can hear when the second car arrived and the lights were on in this video, which means that the dash cam should have been activated in the second car also!
So as I sit here thinking about the fact that I found 7 reasons why there’s a problem with this story and I’m not a crime scene investigator or a lawyer, I have to believe that the justice department has noticed these things also, and are preparing to look into the death of Sandra Bland. Another Black face in this every growing collage of Black men and women who died in the custody of those who swore an oath to serve and protect!
If you think that I have valid points and that the justice department should investigate this incident, please share this with your friends and family and call for justice for Sandra Bland.
#JusticeForSandraBland
African + American =
For some time I’ve considered writing a post about this but never found the motivation to actually sit down and start writing, but the other day after addressing a post on Facebook and getting the typical response from so called “conscious” black dudes, I decided to finally pen this post.
So here’s the thing, Black people in this Country, the United States of America, have no true identity! We are the homeless, we are the disenfranchised, we are downtrodden, the oppressed! We seek to belong to something greater than this existence that we have right now in this place, in this space and time. We long for the glory days of our ancestors as if that is all we ever had or ever will have. But I tell you that right here, right now, is all we have and will ever have, here in this country in this space, and in this time. Nothing else! The past is gone, yet it resides within us, and the future is yet to come, but it also resides within us. So with what we have right now, which is the past, the present and the future within, we should be able to create a future similar to our once glorious past!
But in order to get there, we need to come to a realization, one that will piss a lot of you off and others will accept wholeheartedly, and have no problem with.
And that realization is the cold hard fact that the descendants of slaves, with African blood flowing through their veins, that we call African Americans, are Not Africans! Neither are we truly Americans!
We are an amalgamation of these things, these nationalism’s, these concepts, and these ideologies, and because these ideologies are viewed as opposing ideologies, our programming tells us that we need to embrace one or the other, not both. This programming is taught to us by our parents as children, “right vs wrong”, “good vs evil”, “if you’re not with me you’re against me”, and re-enforced in church as the “you can’t straddle the fence” sermon. We’ve always been taught that you have to pick a side, and if we don’t, we’re the one in the wrong, there is no neutral position in life. But this is wrong when it comes down to the African/American debate! I chose to use the examples above to show how the thought process is indoctrinated into our psyches as young African American children, not to debate good and evil or right and wrong!
This is why when we’re confronted with two seemingly opposing ideologies we quickly pick sides. Our programming says its either one or the other, and you will always pick the side of your highest understanding, the one that instills pride in you, which is actually the one that makes you feel the best about your Self. Therefore when one has to choose between African/Black, and American/White we choose to identify with the African/Black first. Those that don’t choose Black first have been considered to be the sellouts and coons back in the day therefore the “real Black man or woman is the one that embraces Africa over America! These so called conscious Black people lay claim that there’s no middle ground even if your mother was white and your father was Black, you must self identify as Black, ask any biracial American. But what they don’t seem to understand is that that very understanding is what the white man, or massa had during slavery, the one drop rule! And if you choose your white side, you’re considered a sellout, a coon, and a host of other derogatory names that seeks to take away your Blackness. And even if you don’t identify as white, or if you have two Black parents but don’t identify with being African, you’re put in the same category, because you have to pick a side, and if you’re not on their side then you’re against them, simply because you’re not with them.
So here we are in 2015 claiming to be conscious Black men but that conscious thought is built directly off the slave traders understanding of who we were to be in this country. The slaves were never meant to be Americans, and generations down the line we are too far removed from our African ancestors, that we are not Africans either, we are an amalgamation of the two. We are now a new people, a people manifested from the remnants of a great race that saw itself decline to the point of colonization and slavery to finally be back in control of our own destiny once again!
Malachi Z York called us NuWabians, some say we are the Moors, Hebrew Israelites, Egyptians, but I say we are all and we are none, therefore we must create a new understanding, a new people.
You can call yourself and African, an African American, or just a plain ole American, that’s up to you, but I will from this day forward, address myself and those in this diaspora in the US, as Afrimerican!
Afrimerican: A people forged from the lowest point of mans existence as slaves, that fought to be free, earned that freedom and began to build. We have fought those that oppose us for over 400 years and we have made great strides. Our birthing pains have been great and there are still more to come. But we must understand and incorporate into our thinking that those that fight against and resist change will always end up on loser’s side of history, it’s inevitable. Therefore we will always be victorious in our quest to change the things that ail our people, it just takes time!