police brutality

Let me begin by saying a name: Charles Kinsey. Mr. Kinsey is the latest Black man to be shot by police while a bystander filmed the incident with a phone. Unlike so many others, Mr. Kinsey — thank the heavens — has lived to tell the tale.

I find myself in this place again. I am numb. I feel empty. I almost have no words.
In 2012, around the time of the birth of my son, I had a similar feeling. Trayvon Martin was killed. I was pregnant with a black male in a world that was not ready for him.

Being an ally means being an ally after the protest, too.

The fact that police killings are calculated by media organizations at all is a victory of the sustained protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet, despite heightened visibility, the killings continue. According to the Guardian, 571 people have been killed by police so far in 2016—3.4 per million Native American and 3.28 Black.

Much of the world is now either aware of or has seen the disturbing video of a police officer brutally grabbing a young Black teenager by the neck, pulling her backward, yanking her out of her desk and slinging her across the classroom.

"Ultimately, it doesn't matter much whether Bland killed herself or was murdered. In both cases, she died because she was hauled into custody for a minor offense that didn't really even merit being pulled over to begin with. Maybe her head injury led to uncharacteristic behavior, or maybe the traumatic arrest triggered a severe PTSD episode, or maybe someone flat out killed her. But, in every case, she died because she was in that police cell."

The Western world defines terrorism through an almost exclusively Islamophobic narrative. In 2002, the first terrorism case tried under the newly-created anti-terrorism law charged a black man with terrorism for attempting to shoot fifteen people and rub Chick-fil-A sandwiches on their faces. Yes. He was charged with terrorism.

For every 100 black women, there are 83 black men. This is not the case in white America, where for every 100 women, there are 99 men, almost complete parity.