Let me be clear on something. I would not loot my city, HOWEVER, when people are just as upset over people looting in response to another unarmed black man being killed for no reason, as they are that a LIFE, not a store front, not a police station, not a Target, but a living, breathing human being was TAKEN, you are devaluing black life. You might THINK you are for equality, but subconsciously, you do not think we are your equals.
White privilege is finding sympathy for white murderers who shoot up churches and schools because they were bullied. If you did not post about how disgusted you were at Dylan Roof or the countless white men who decided to take innocent lives, some even CHILDREN, because he was troubled, but you are disgusted and outraged at people vandalizing their OWN—not your—City, you do not value black life as much as white life.
Let me also break something else down: this rioting is so much deeper than simply destroying one’s community. It speaks to a myriad of things and deserves more analysis and reflection than a simple tweet or post of disdain. And unfortunately, many will refuse to do that much because that would require you to care about black life as much as white life, and so this will probably fall on many deaf ears:
- Black people are angry. Rightfully angry. Just like the white male mass shooters are allowed to be angry, and the Amy Coopers of the world are allowed to be angry, for things that are INSIGNIFICANT: because they were told to put their dog on a leash, or because someone’s music was too loud, or because someone was publicly displaying joy in the face of their own misery, black people have and deserve to have a HEIGHTENED level of anger in this country, a country who has NEVER treated us fairly, who has had knees on our necks since our ancestors were kidnapped and brought here. We have CENTURIES of oppression that we are dealing with, in a nation considered the most powerful nation in the world.
And YET and still, black people have not gone on a rampage killing white folk. Do you know what an Amy Cooper would do if she had a knee on her neck, or on the neck of her loved one? If she is angry enough to call 911 on a man for asking her to do what she is SUPPOSED to do, what kind of anger manifestation do you think would happen if her life was ACTUALLY in danger?
White people have so many privileges, including the right to be angry and the right to express their anger, even when the levels are inappropriate.
Black people are not appropriately expressing their anger, because none of you are dead. Black people have not gone on killing sprees killing white folk just because. White people have, killing black people praying and white children learning, this when they have no idea what oppression even feels like.
And when black people usually kill, it’s one of our own. Not random either. But the level of anger it takes to kill another human being manifests in our own personal interactions. We’ve expressed all of our anger, all of our hate bottled up inside us on another one of us.
And instead of anyone even seeing the gravity of what that means, it’s used to display how violent we are. It’s used to look down on us. It’s used to justify the level of fear that you have of us.
But we are not the violent ones.
Our actual expression of anger doesn’t hold a candle to what is appropriate. We are inappropriately expressing our anger, because what would happen if we appropriately expressed our anger?
Black people looting their own cities is no different than a person who has been abused, depressed or going through some form of mental breakdown choosing to cut themselves. Why does one do that? Of course, there’s self hate. But guess what else there is? Beneath all the pain, there is compassion. Cutting yourself is releasing on your own body the rage and pain you feel without hurting another. And no matter what white people have done to us in this country, we always hurt ourselves before we ever THINK to hurt one of you.
- Now some might believe that looting, for many, is just an excuse to take things that don’t belong to them.
Again, this quick writing off without deeper analysis is simply unacceptable.
Somehow Black people are still expected to have some sort of allegiance to this country. Poor black people, who are marginalized both for race and socio-economic status, feel more than any other group in this nation, that they’ve been cheated. Please do not rant to me about pulling one’s self up from one’s bootstraps if you do not know the history of oppression that goes deeper than slavery and Jim Crow. If you do not know about systems that have been put in place to keep us down AND to build you up. If you don’t know what redlining is, please have several seats. If you do not understand drug laws and incarceration laws that have continued to deliberately keep poor brown and black people down, please stay silent. Please do not tell me about your poor grandmothers who came here from another country and made a lane for themselves. No one will ever know the pain and suffering of the black man, woman, child, or family. No one. So you have not earned the right to critique us in any way.
No one knows the fire that burns steadily within us. And pray you never will.
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