#tamir rice

You know wtf is going on.

I couldn’t care less about what those of ZERO melanin content are saying in my comment section. It will always be BLACK LIVES MATTER until my black life is valued just as much as my white counterparts. All lives cannot matter until BLACK LIVES MATTER. All lives can not matter until police officers and white men are held accountable for murdering unarmed black people and people of color! All lives can not matter until black people can walk into a hospital and receive the same adequate healthcare as white people. All lives can not matter when you’re shot in the street for trying to deesacalate your AUTISTIC patient. All lives can not matter when a black man can be jogging in his neighborhood but he somehow looks “suspicious” so two white men are allowed to get away with murder UNTIL video surfaced and sent social media into an uproar. All lives can not matter until the police officers that murdered Breonna Taylor are charged for murdering her in her own home on a no knock warrant for someone that they already had in custody. All lives can not matter until the police that murdered Elijah McClain and then JOKED about it on camera are charged for killing an unarmed black man because of a ski mask ALTHOUGH he had a health condition that caused him to always be cold. ALL LIVES CAN NOT MATTER UNTIL WE DON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN OUR REASONINGS FOR WEARING HOODIES, SKI MASK, JOGGING, WORKING, SLEEPING, and PLAYING. ALL LIVES CAN NOT MATTER when you have a grown black man crying out for his deceased mother because he can not breath due to an ILLEGAL chokehold by a police officer who smugly looks into the camera with no remorse AFTER a store owner FALSELY accused him of using a counterfeit $20 bill. ALL LIVES CAN NOT MATTER UNTIL BLACK LIVES MATTER!

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Make no mistake, this was a threat issued by THEIR incompetent president himself. I think he made it pretty clear what he wants to be done.

is America

is America

As people take to the streets of NYC on December 13th to protest institutionalized racism and police brutality, they stand in solidarity with the Black community in a struggle older than this country. It is important for individual participants to reflect on what brings them to the march and what the specific issues are. Below you’ll find ten quotes that may help you through the process. 

On Police and State Violence

“The announced function of the police, “to protect and serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little or no pretext…” - Angela Davis

On Social Responsibility

“…this majority is you. Nobody else can do it. The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” - James Baldwin

 On Civil Disobedience

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” -Howard Zinn

 On Solidarity

“I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”-Eduardo Galeano

 The Collective

"I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life.” - Frances Fox Piven

 On Community, Justice, and Privilege

“If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.”― bell hooks

Feminism Is It

“Feminist focus on women finding a voice, on the silence of black women, of women of color, has led to increased interest in our words. This is an important historical moment. We are both speaking of our own volition, out of our commitment to justice, to revolutionary struggle to end domination, and simultaneously called to speak, "invited” to share our words. It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important.“ - bell hooks

On the power of the victim

"The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.” — James Baldwin

Long Overdue

“And so we must say, now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to transform this pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our nation. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of racial justice. Now is the time to get rid of segregation and discrimination. Now is the time” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

On the distance

“Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are vital but alone are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe.” – Arundhati Roy

Briefly, why race matters: 

1) The logic isn’t that race doesn’t matter, the logic is that individuals can be racist, and systems can be racist and all they require are complicit operators.

2) Unfortunately, the entirety of American history is a race issue. The concept of race in its modern form was born here. It began with the extermination and subjugation of the indigenous people (celebrated in Cowboy and Indian movies) and the violence against the African populations stolen in the Atlantic Slave Trade and plantation life.

Many slaves in the early colonies of the Caribbean were Irish or indigenous, as the demand for slaves grew so did the importation of African slaves. As the African slave population outnumbered the European, the idea of race, an exclusively Black slave population was born.  Resistance to this injustice catalyzed a reactionary intellectual movement that created the modern concept of racial difference in order to validate slavery. 

3) Policing did not begin with Civil Rights, slavery existed in the North, and racial discrimination was the law of much our country until 1964-65 when it was forcibly removed by the Federal Government. For example:

“In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.”

And so policing (especially on the local level) existed to maintain the status quo, that status quo was slavery, later that status quo became Jim Crow, and today that status quo is racist and class-based oppression.  

4) That being said, the systems that were in place don’t just go away. Nothing illustrates this point better than how quickly Angola Plantation became Angola Prison in Louisiana, to house Louisiana’s new “criminal” class of free-Black people shortly after emancipation. Criminalizing Blackness was of course a means to recapture a population and force them back into bondage and labor.

5) Think of the colonies throughout the world: are the colonized not themselves policing their own people in the interests of racist and exploitative regimes? In British India, the Imperial Police force was comprised largely of local Indians and Burmese, subordinate to European officers. Yet the colonial paradigm remained racist and exploitative.

In the contemporary American context, police officers can be of many ethnic or cultural backgrounds. The POC police officer need not be racist for their actions and the system to be racist, they need only be complicit with racist orders– and by being complicit they become part of the racist structure.

Twitter: @bodega_gyro_ao 

It is hard to believe that we are having conversations like these in 2016. It is harder to believe that countless, innocent black men lay cold on the pavement at the hands of public servants 52 years after the Civil Rights act was passed, it’s hardest to believe that not every person is upset about it, some even defend it.

“Black Lives Matter” How does that offend you? What does it say about you if it does? Black Lives Matter doesn’t say that every other life doesn’t matter, it is a cry for help as they feel theirs do not, maybe never have. What does that take from you? What about a group of people crying for help to be equal makes you feel less so? I’m White, I do not understand black struggle.. why should that hurt me to admit? White privilege exists despite your reluctance to admit. This isn’t black supremacy it is black.. scratch that… human equality.

Most police are dedicated, brave, selfless, deserving public servants who I am thankful everyday are there to serve and to protect, but sometimes, just sometimes there are ones who do not serve and do not protect. I understand not all cops are bad just like I know all Muslims aren’t terrorists, all White Christians aren’t Westboro Baptist Church and every black man isn’t Micah Xavier Johnson. All cops are not bad cops, some people are just not fit for such a tough position. I am not fit to be a professional football player, Kylie Jenner is not destined to be a singer, Kim Davis is not meant to be a county clerk and Donald Trump is not fit to be President. In the same way that racist people, people who abuse the power and brutalize and/or people who act predominantly on fear are not fit to be Police Officers.

“More white people were killed by police than black people.” Rightfully so, considering 13% of US citizens are African American while Caucasians make up 63%. With that being said 37% of unarmed people killed by police were black in 2015 despite black people being only 13% of the U.S. population. Nearly 1 in 3 black people killed by police in 2015 were UNARMED. 1 in 3. What if your child was at risk of being that 1 in 3. Would you be stomping the streets? Would you hold up a sign and protest? Would you scream out as loud as your voice will let you “MY CHILD’S LIFE MATTERS!” I would, and no one could stop me. No one should try. People tell me how ridiculous and un-American these Black Lives Matter protests are, apparently they need to pick up a history book or better yet pick up the Constitution that contains the Second Amendment Right they defended so fervently one month ago and tell them to look up one paragraph.

It’s okay to have a gun if you’re a white patriot with a broken tail light but not when you’re a black one. Everyone deserves Second Amendment Rights even those on the no fly list, but not Philando Castile. Everyone deserves a right to be told hands up before cops shoot, but not Tamir Rice. This is America, the police are not our judicial system they do not count as a jury of 12 peers or a judge. Police do not have the right to try, convict, sentence and execute black people on the sidewalk. The media will tell you “Oh, he had a traffic violation in 1995 and has a Facebook picture with his middle finger in the air.” He also had a family, a life and basic human rights.

“All Lives Matter” you are right, they should, but all lives cannot matter until the black ones do too. If you think that all lives matter help fight for the black ones. Find your legislator http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and get involved www.blacklivesmatter.com

Tamir Elijah Rice June 25, 2002

A “Pro-Life” American can NEVER convince me that they give a shit about children (born or un born) this is about all about judgment, ideology and control. If American culture truly honored the lives of children… Tamir Rice would be alive. Period