- Things like a pervasive and persistent disparity in how laws are enforced on black people as compared to white people.
- Things like a legal and cultural predisposition that official acts of violence are above suspicion.
- Things like the execution of young black men for such crimes as walking through the wrong neighborhood or listening to the wrong music or not showing enough deference to the powers that be.
Monday, December 15, 2014
Black Lives Have Always Mattered
I've just made my first ever visit to Birmingham, Alabama, where fifty-one-and-a-half years ago Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed for his role in organizing nonviolent protests by black Alabamans against the unfair, inhumane and fundamentally unjust policies of their city. While King was in prison, men, women and children of color were attacked on the streets of Birmingham with dogs and fire hoses. Their attackers were police and fire fighters; the attacks were sanctioned by the commissioner of public safety.
These things happen. I like to think they don’t. I like to think that they used to happen but we know better now; that we’re wiser and more enlightened than the people who decided fifty-one-and-a-half years ago that attacking children was the right thing to do. We like to think that, unlike those silly old Southern racists, we always handle power and authority responsibly, that our motives are more pure, that we are always acting for the greater good.
But history bears out that at least some of the time - certainly more of the time than we'd like to be true about ourselves - we’re not. Sometimes we participate in (or we affirm or we tacitly endorse by our silence) things that are horrific and fundamentally unjust.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Both Inspiration and Cautionary Tale: Excerpts from Middling
What follows is an excerpt from the Winter 2021 edition of Middling, my quarterly newsletter on music, books, work, and getting older. I'...
-
Every now and then I come out of my shell and risk ridicule by suggesting, ever so softly, that in the pantheon of the Marvel Entertainment ...
-
OK, I'll admit it: I've become a semiregular viewer of Joel Osteen (of the clan Osteen!). He's on TV every Sunday right after Th...
No comments:
Post a Comment