On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury decided against indicting the Officer Daniel Pantaleo who choked Eric Garner to death on July 17 in an incident that was caught, in its entirety, on film. Suddenly, New York City isn’t so far removed from Ferguson or Cleveland or any other place where black people are killed with impunity.
According to the Daily News, the decision from the grand jury has just been announced and literally comes just about one week after a similarly ignorant grand jury made of Ghosts of Mississippi extras came to a similar decision regarding the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of Officer Darren Wilson.
At some point, America has to stop being so afraid of black people that they create fearful situations when an African American is just walking down a street or leaving a store. My movements as a human being aren’t to incite fear in white people; I’m just living my life like Brown, Garner and Trayvon Martin were. To be fair, I’m not a large black man. But my husband is, and so is my little (big) brother. I am terrified that some idiot who’s watched Birth of a Nation too many times would murder them because they are afraid.
It doesn’t have to be like this, but as Chris Rock said in New York Magazine: racism and the fear it creates from age old stereotypes are ruining American lives today. Right the fuck now. And it has got to stop.
But the thing is, we treat racism in this country like it’s a style that America went through. Like flared legs and lava lamps. Oh, that crazy thing we did. We were hanging black people. We treat it like a fad instead of a disease that eradicates millions of people. You’ve got to get it at a lab, and study it, and see its origins, and see what it’s immune to and what breaks it down.
Image via AP.