StarfishSaver
StarfishSaver's JournalJohn Pavlovitz: "One Day in Two Americas: The life of Derek Chauvin and the death of Makhia Bryant"
As Officer Derek Chauvins fate was being decided by a jury in a Minneapolis courtroom, Columbus, Ohio Police were deciding 16-year-old MaKhia Bryants in front of her house. Unlike him, for her there was no careful deliberation, no meticulous processing of information, no measured and sober judgment, no beyond a shadow of a doubt certainty, no prolonged time of waitingonly an immediate death sentence.
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This prolific violence isnt fundamentally about funding or training or a broken system needing repair or a national reckoning white privilege and white supremacy (those things are all certainly true and need to be addressed with ferocity and creativity). But at its core, this is about a collective heart sickness that so dehumanizes black and brown human beings in the eyes of law enforcement, that it allows them to act in haste and with recklessness and without hesitation, because they believe no accountability will comebecause it so rarely has.
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From the moment he slowly and deliberately murdered George Floyd in the street in May of 2020, Derek Chauvin received every benefit of an America designed to protect people like him: a heavily redacted initial police report, steady political resistance to charges even being filed, fierce legal representation afterward, and a small army of conservative white Americans who repeatedly assassinated Floyds character postmortem and tried to make a nation believe a white officer over their own eyes.
In a few minutes yesterday, MaKhia Bryant received what young people of color have so often received since Americas inception: total disregard by those charged with protecting her (those she trusted to keep her safe)and now in the aftermath of their failure, the salivating partisan television hosts and neighborhood bigots, who will engage in the wildest of intellectual gymnastics and desperate story-spin in order to make this radiant, fully alive 16-year-old honor student somehow responsible for her own termination.
Two nations are not sustainable and should not be acceptable for us.
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2021/04/21/one-day-in-two-americas-the-life-of-dererk-chauvin-and-the-death-of-makhia-bryant/
In Columbus, a cop shot a 15-year-old girl 10 SECONDS after he arrived on the scene
He gets out of the car at 6:42 - he fires FIVE SHOTS at 6:52.
The people he fired at obviously posed no threat to him. They were fighting with each other. Several other people were standing nearby watching and did not seem to feel that they were in any danger.
No - he does not get the benefit of the doubt. No - this was not the girl's fault. No - the cop was not at any risk, much less under any threat. He shot that child in cold blood for absolutely no reason.
The journey toward civil rights and social justice is always two steps forward, one step back
Today we took two giant steps forward.
We will take some steps backward, but I'm not worrying about that today.
Today, I'm celebrating those two giant steps we just took.
It may be hard to understand what white privilege means until considering what it DOESN'T mean
Silent thread for people of color and our allies who are pained over unjustified police killings
FYI: attempts to explain away, distract from, or dismiss these feelings are neither appropriate or welcome in this thread.
Austin mass shooting suspect arrested: He's a former cop
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/19/austin-shooting-stephen-broderick/
If cops in a wealthy Chicago suburb got a call that someone was shooting at passing cars
And when they arrived, they found a 13-year-old white kid running down the street and they ordered him to stop and put his hands up and he immediately stopped, dropped what could have been a gun, turned around and put his hands up and they shot him in the chest less than a second later, no one would be insisting that the cop was justified in shooting him because the kid had tried to run, or he turned around, or he may have fired a gun gun earlier, or shouldn't have been out at 2:00 in the morning.
What would you do?
Imagine you are a 13-year-old kid in a group of older people who are being chased by the police. You have a gun, but you don't want to use it and you don't want to get shot. You just want to go home. You're willing to be arrested and deal with the consequences if that means staying alive.
As you run, a cop yells for you to stop. You immediately stop. The cop then tells you to put up your hands.
What do you do?
I wonder how this cop behaves when cameras AREN'T on
No, actually, I don't.
https://twitter.com/chris_notcapn/status/1383080099235442691
We resist, we get choked. We comply, we get crushed to death. We surrender, we get shot.
White folks break the law, resist arrest, assault the police, loot, destroy and kill - and they get Burger King, bail money, and GoFundMe pages.
And you wonder why we "keep making it all about race"?
https://twitter.com/SpillerOfTea/status/1382949625825464320
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