If grief was color blind (Connie Schulz about Tamir Rice's funeral)

[Mass]

Please click on the link and read the whole piece. You may want to cry reading this.

If Our Grief Were Colorblind

Hundreds showed up Wednesday morning for the funeral of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

Tamir was black, and all but a handful of his mourners in the pews were black, too. A group of white people was in the balcony, armed with cameras and media credentials.

I point out the lack of white mourners at Tamir's funeral because it illustrates a willful disconnect, here in Cleveland and across the country. We white people, even the good-hearted liberals among us, tend to view shooting deaths of black children as a black problem. We don't say that. Most of us don't even think it. But how else to explain why virtually none of us thinks we should show up at such a child's funeral? How better to telegraph that we, too, have suffered a loss than to disrupt our day and walk through the door of that church?

...


From Deputy Chief Jim Polak's Nov. 29, 2012, letter in Loehmann's personnel file:

"It appears from the pattern developing within our short time frame with Ptl. Loehmann that he often feels that when told to do something, that those instructions are optional, and that he can manipulate them if he so feels it can better serve him. I do not say he is doing this for some benefit, or in an insubordinate way, but he just appears to have the mind set that if he thinks he knows better, (then) that is the course he follows.

"Due to his dangerous loss of composure during live range training and his inability to manage this personal stress, I do not believe Ptl. Loehmann shows the maturity needed to work in our employment.

...
On Wednesday, hundreds of mourners prayed for a boy who should not have died at the hands of a man who apparently should never have been a Cleveland cop.

"This is not a problem of black and white," Tamir's uncle Michael Petty said in his eulogy, "but of right and wrong."

May we prove him right
...

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

1. I cant even IMAGINE burying any of my children at age 12 or ANY age

[rhett o rick]

2. k & r. Thanks for posting. nm

[onecaliberal]

3. Thank you for posting this.