Shooting Of Tamir Rice: Highlighted Passages In This Wikipedia Entry Are Self-Evidently Indicting
"The Deadly Oppression Of Black People: Best Pax Posts"
Until White America looks at Tamir Rice and sees their own children, there will be no racial justice in the U.S.
He was 12, playing with a toy gun, in a locale with open-carry laws. Tamir Rice was executed for being a black boy
In South Carolina, 1944, George Stinney, a 14-year-old black child was so small that he was forced to sit on a pile of books in order to be “properly” electrocuted for supposedly killing two white girls. Stinney would be exonerated 70 years after his execution.
In November of 2014, a Cleveland police officer shot and killed a 12-year-old black boy named Tamir Rice for the “crime” of playing with a toy gun in a public park. This shooting occurred in a locale where “open carry laws” deem it legal to have a gun in public. Tamir Rice was de facto executed. The police gave him approximately two seconds to surrender. An officer shot Tamir Rice almost immediately after parking their vehicle next to him.
The state killed both of those black children.
The sociological phenomenon known as “adultification” deems black children to be treated like adults for the purposes of punishment, incarceration and execution. Adultification is a means to rationalize the deaths of Tamir Rice and George Stinney.
Tamir Rice and George Stinney were also victims of legal murder. Both in the past and present, the black body is not to be protected by the American legal system. Tamir Rice and George Stinney are reminders of how the black body is brutalized, vulnerable, subjected to random violence, and can find little if any justice by the courts. Once and again, unfair treatment of black and brown people is not a bug or error in the American legal system. No, it is a racist and classist system working exactly as designed in a country that was founded on white supremacist violence against people of color.
Tamir Rice joins so many others, lives prematurely ended by the police, and their bodies put in the necropolis of Black Death in the Age of Obama. When protesters shout “Black Lives Matter” it is a statement of rage, protest and a demand for justice at that ugly national mausoleum.
In reflecting on the myriad of circumstances where the lives of unarmed and innocent black people have been stolen by America’s police—while surrendering; following police orders; sleeping in cars; sleeping at home; seeking help after car accidents; opening up wallets; walking down the street; shopping; playing in a park; standing outside; riding bicycles; asking for help with a mentally ill relative or neighbor; breathing air and just being nearby—it is abundantly clear that there is one unifying factor common to all of those examples.
To be black is to be under assault by American society and its legal system.
It is the stigma placed on those who because of an arbitrary melanin count and America’s ‘one drop rule’ are placed on the bottom of the country’s racial hierarchy.
To be black in America is also to occupy a place of fear and threat in the white popular imagination and collective subconscious: “black people” are “scary”; “black crime” is an “epidemic”; the “black family” is “broken”; “black men” are dangerous, violent, hyper-libidinal “thugs”; and “black women” are promiscuous “welfare queens.”
If you are black in America then preemptive violence by the state, its police, their allies, and white folks en masse under “stand your ground laws,” is presumed to almost always be legitimate and justified. To be black is to be guilty until proven innocent. America’s system of jurisprudence is inverted along the color line.
To be black in America is ultimately a state of existential terror, threat and violence.
Unfortunately, because of the limitations and boundaries of human communication and experience, it is very difficult for most white people to comprehend this sense of dread. As such, many white folks default to the just world fallacy, excuse-make for police violence against black and brown people because “the victim must have done something to provoke the police”, or affirm the mouth-bloviating by right-wing pundits that “all you have to do is obey the police if you don’t want them to kill you.”
There are also others who revel in a perverse type of glee when police commit acts of thuggery and violence against people of color. While America is supposedly “post racial”, there are still too many white folks who because of authoritarianism, racism, and inter-racial sadism will always stand united with “the men and women in blue” against people of color. Their type shouts the new white power slogan “all lives matter” and gives money to support racists such as Darren Wilson and George Zimmerman.
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