On Staying Alive Despite Being Black


LeRon Barton on “The Talk”, and the sobering idea that murdering a black man is almost legal.


On April 7, 2015 the world witnessed the murder of Walter Scott by police officer Michael T. Slager. In the video, Slager is shown shooting Scott eight times in the back. He was unarmed, several feet away, and not presenting any threat of any kind. When it was over, I turned my head and thought to myself, “Another black man dead, another trending topic, just another day living in America. We are wild game out here and the main goal is to stay alive.”

Being a black man in America is to know a couple of things: America does not and has not ever cared about you in no shape or form unless you are dribbling a ball or making a music video. You are feared and you are despised. Every day I am reminded of this. From the glances of disgust, the clutching of purses, and being followed throughout department stores, I’m never allowed to forget what I am.

Malcolm X once said, “I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything.” That’s how I think right now in today’s time. I have lived a good life. I joke with my girlfriend that my chances of survival have increased by 10% because I don’t drive, so I don’t have to worry about a cop pulling me over. What I do worry about however are the younger black boys. The ones that have yet to fulfill their promise. The ones that don’t know quite who they are or what they want to do. The fact these boys are seen as a threat worries me, because we know what happens then. They could be killed before they have even begin to live.

If you’re not black, I cannot describe to you what it is like to walk around like you have a bulls-eye on your back. The closet thing I can tell you is that you are living your life knowing that at any moment your number can be called. That’s it, time’s up. A cop sees you as an enemy, you’re dead, and he won’t even be charged unless someone is taping it. Being black means that killing you isn’t really a crime.

See more at: http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/brand-on-staying-alive-despite-being-black/#sthash.dEiEvrtM.dpuf

by Erica Hellerstein Posted on April 10, 2015 at 9:01 am Updated: April 10, 2015 at 5:08 pm



ST. LOUIS COUNTY, MISSOURI — In 2004, Sean Bailey recalls, he was driving through the streets of St. Louis County en route to a party, when he saw a familiar black-and-white car out of the corner of his eye. He reached for his phone to warn the friend he was following to slow down, but it was too late; the cop blared his siren and pulled up behind him. Bailey, who had a warrant stemming from a failure to appear in court for unpaid traffic tickets, felt a familiar pang of anxiety. He knew exactly what was going to happen next.

“I was like, I’m going to get into this little orange jumpsuit and sit in this cold cell for a couple of days here,” the bespectacled St. Louis, Missouri native recalls, lighting a cigarette and blowing out a thin ribbon of smoke.

The officer ran Bailey’s name and discovered he had a warrant. Bailey was arrested and sent to jail in Florissant, a municipality in northern St. Louis County bordering Ferguson. When Bailey stepped inside his cell, he was greeted with a gust of cold air. It was chilly outside — maybe 20 degrees, he speculates — “and they had the AC blasting.” The interior was grimy, and “there were a lot of guys in there, beating on the cells and calling for [help] and nobody was coming.”

Bailey sits comfortably on the stoop of a red-brick apartment in North St. Louis County while his daughter, who is groggy with a cold, naps inside. The 35-year-old single father is homeless, and for the moment he’s staying in a relative’s place on a noisy street dotted with crumbling corner stores. Since 1995, Bailey estimates he’s been jailed upwards of 20 times throughout St. Louis County — tallying up to more than two months behind bars — for warrants stemming from traffic violations. At least once, he was subject to what some call “riding the circuit” — shuttled to jail in a handful of municipalities back-to-back after the officer who arrested him notified police in other municipalities where he had warrants. Bailey, diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and prone to regular panic attacks, says he once faked a heart attack in his cell just to get medical care.

“A lot of people were locked up with diabetes, high blood pressure, and they weren’t able to get their medicine. I had been locked up for days and I didn’t have my medication,” he pauses. “The paramedics got there and were like ‘he’s not having a heart attack but you might not want to keep him there anymore.’ It’s very stressful.”

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/04/10/3643582/worse-ferguson-week-st-louis-countys-egregious-night-courts/

By Lee Fang @lhfang



Documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge.

Evidence of the fake Facebook account was found in a cache of files provided by the Mall of America to Bloomington officials after a large Black Lives Matter event at the mall on December 20 protesting police brutality. The files included briefs on individual organizers, with screenshots that suggest that much of the information was captured using a Facebook account for a person named “Nikki Larson.”

Metadata from some of the documents lists the software that created them as belonging to “Sam Root” at the “Mall of America.” A Facebook account for a Sam Root lists his profession as “Intelligence Analyst at Mall of America.”



The fake Larson account featured a profile photo that a Google reverse image search shows is identical to a photo associated with a woman who is Facebook friends with Root.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/18/mall-americas-intelligence-analyst-catfished-black-lives-matter-activists-collect-information/