Those attending the meeting included Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana and Mayor Chris Coleman of St. Paul, Minnesota, the two locations where police shootings sparked protests around the country.
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Before Garner’s outburst, the town hall was marked by a heated exchange between Obama and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican who has made controversial remarks after police-involved shootings, including the Dallas attack. So that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime….When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we can not simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid…
In one moment last week, she was texting her sister, a police officer, telling her, “Be careful out there. Cops are getting shot”. Among them is Kaylin Luces, who is black and lives near Washington, D.C.
Jeff Mixon and his organization, which he calls Black Lives Matter of Cuyahoga County- an independent group- says his group won’t be at next week’s event. And an off-duty police officer in Missouri fatally shot a man who was trying to enter the officer’s home.
Who ever said all lives don’t matter? And several Black Lives Matter activists were quick to condemn the slayings in Dallas. “I have no idea”, he said.
Rudy Giuliani doesn’t like the sound of Black Lives Matter. “And it pits two equally important interests against each other that weren’t against each other”. Organizers are encouraging everyone to wear black.
“Everyone has unity, the community, they unite together”, Jackson said.
Make no mistake, by taking this Black “suspect” and demonizing and using a killer robot to blow him up in this unprecedented and barbaric manner and without a trial in a court of law is the truest and most literal example yet of a “high-tech lynching”. Too many seem content to appear as heartless enforcers of a status quo centered on racial profiling and state-sanctioned murder.
However, Trump later called himself a big fan of law enforcement and noted that police shootings “get broadcast… and they don’t show all the good work the police does”. There is a significant importance in the BLM movement that goes far beyond the unjust killing of blacks by police and vigilantes, which is why saying things such as “All Lives Matters” or “Blue Lives Matter” demeans the Black Lives Matter movement.
“With a community where you have only 10-11,000 blacks, you still have the separatism”, she says. “This is where we’re stuck….”
Do we acknowledge the ways in which we were the beneficiaries of black Americans’ historical exploitation and incredible sacrifice, or do we ignore that the root of America’s prosperity is its original sin, and that the rights all people of color now enjoy were won through the struggle to end slavery and the institutionalized oppression of black Americans that followed?
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Share with Us – We’d love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article, and smart, constructive criticism. But so are needless civilian deaths, and at some point numbers have to matter.
