Officer Friendly Encounters That Old Black Magic (police brutality and racism)

[gollygee]

https://www.colorlines.com/articles/officer-friendly-encounters-old-black-magic

The extraordinary lengths to which black and brown people go to kill themselves in police custody are not limited to shooting themselves with magically appearing weapons while handcuffed. We know all to well how officers in Baltimore claimed that Freddie Gray, 25, severed his own spine by thrashing about in the back of a police van.

In the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, police did not claim he killed himself. Rather, Ferguson, Missouri, officer Darren Wilson testified that as he shot at Brown, “He was almost bulking up to run through the shots.”

Wilson’s account of Brown’s behavior in particular is reminiscent of reports on “Negro cocaine fiends.” The media reported stories of cocaine-crazed black men who killed innocent people after imagining that they'd been taunted. According to author Charles Hart, the myth led to the passage of the first drug laws in the early 1900s.

Interestingly, this stands in direct contrast to the trope of the magical Negro embodied by such characters as Bagger Vance in the "The Legend of Bagger Vance" or John Coffey in "The Green Mile." The magical Negro exists solely for the benefit of a white protagonist. Their lives, histories and very existence aren’t valuable beyond their labor and their allegiance to a white person.

[AuntPatsy]

1. We cannot ever forget the sins of the past .....

[gollygee]

2. And it's sadly not just in the past

It's still happening and it's happened since the US was a colony.

[AuntPatsy]

3. True...