The president should hold a BLM -police town hall

[jtuck004]

13. Please read this to understand how wrong and overpriced such advice is.

 Respectability Politics Won’t Save Us: On the Death of Jonathan Ferrell
You can do everything “right” in America, but if you’re black, racism will always pose a threat to your life.
 By Mychal Denzel SmithTwitterSEPTEMBER 16, 2013


 Jonathan Ferrell is seen in an undated photo provided by Florida A&M University. Ferrell, 24, was shot and killed Saturday, September 14, 2013 by North Carolina police officer Randall Kerrick after a wreck in Charolette. Ferral was unarmed. (AP Photo/Florida A&M University).

When they went on the air this weekend, CNN anchor Don Lemon and comedy legend Bill Cosby, known not only for their day jobs but also for their unrelenting critiques of black culture, may not have been aware of the killing of Jonathan Ferrell. The 24 year-old former football player at Florida A&M University was shot and killed by Officer Randall Kerrick of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police in Charlotte, North Carolina, this past Saturday. Ferrell had been a car crash and then ran to the nearest house to find help. The woman inside answered the door, believing it to be her husband on the other side. When she realized it wasn’t, she immediately closed the door, hit her panic alarm and callled 911. She reported a man attempting to break into her home. When the police arrived, Ferrell approached them, presumably still trying to get help, at which point one of the officers fired his stun gun, which was “unsuccessful.” That’s when Kerrick fired his weapon, hitting Ferrell multiple times, and killed him.

Having a stranger knock on your door in the early morning hours is surely frightening. And Ferrell did fit the description of a man reported to the police as attempting a burglary. But did it ever cross the mind of anybody involved that he might not have been a burglar—that he might have been an innocent bystander, needing some help?

The tragic aspect of this is, as a young black man in America, Ferrell probably knew in that moment he couldn’t expect anyone to help him. He was likely very aware that knocking on a stranger’s door might backfire. But he took the risk anyway because he needed help. For that, he was killed.

Which brings me back to Don Lemon and Bill Cosby. Lemon and Cosby are not pioneers in the field of respectability politics—the idea that one can overcome racism (or any other form of oppression) by way of your personal actions, presenting one’s self as a citizen worthy of respect as defined by the dominant cultural norms and standards. They stand in a long tradition that includes Booker T. Washington and Elijah Muhammad, while also sitting alongside contemporaries such as Condoleezza Rice and President Barack Obama. But they cause a stir every time they say things like“…the reason why I’m giving you this information is because I was living in the projects. I was not taking care of myself in terms of managing my education, and once the door opened and I saw quote, unquote, the light, I started to become very successful,” as Cosby did over the weekend. When someone of his stature says,“It is not what they weren’t doing to me, it’s what I wasn’t doing. It’s a very simple thing,” he does more harm than the good he thinks his “empowering” words do. The problem with these comments is not that they don’t reflect his truth, but because they erase an even larger truth about racism.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/respectability-politics-wont-save-us-death-jonathan-ferrell/


You say you don't support racists, but you should know this is their number one excuse, that someone ELSE should have acted differently.

I don't know about anyone else, but if the Barneys with the guns could have acted differently we wouldn't be having these conversations.