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ugh my stomach is sick of all these videos posting between cops and people who have been "wrongly accused". i mean yes there are times when tempers are thrown. but if everyone would just keep calm and answer calmly and just respect officers doing their job...maybe they wouldnt be so on edge...maybe they wouldnt get so afraid that you are gonna pull a gun out on them and they wont get to see their families again. just every body please take a breath and relax. tthey just wanna keep us safe.
so on today i wanna thank not just the people that fight over see or here on our home ground. for putting up with immaturity and making sure families are reuinited every night saftely with their loved ones. especially when this winter weather is coming."
Somebody--a friend of mine on Facebook--posted this today. And I am so angry that I don't even know where to START. Firstly, she, like me, is Caucasian--she's never been racially oppressed or judged in her life. Secondly, she has made the leap from "wow, some people have been hurt by police officers" to "well maybe if they weren't so fucking immature and just did what was asked of them, they wouldn't have gotten hurt". That's the same thing as arguing a woman deserved to be raped because she wore a short skirt--it's not cool. It's wrong. She is absolutely, incontrovertibly wrong.
So I wrote back. I shouldn't have; she had a break-up today, but.... equality is one step at a time. It's belief. I confess it, right here and now: I had to go out of my way to conquer my (almost entirely unconscious) behavior around African American people. It took about a month of smiling at strangers, no matter their race, and talking to them and learning to love them. I'm fine now. I had to recognize it was a problem--and it hurts me very bitterly to admit that it was--and grow the fuck up. All Americans are good Americans; I hope I can say that I had to push aside the behaviors I was raised with. It's so slight, the tiny things that add up and amount in Racism--but we have to make that effort. We owe it to our countrymen and countrywomen to do this, we owe it to all human beings to do this... and it disgusts me that there's such overwhelming denial that this is a thing.
Here's what I wrote back:
"Okay....I know you're having a bad day, but this really bothered me and I had to talk to you about it. It isn't an issue of maturity, Molly. It's an issue of Racism and poor judgment in some of our police officers. I'm certainly not saying that all of those people acted fairly, but that's a two-way street. The idea is that acts of Racism aren't fair; it can be as an unwarranted set of suspicions based on skin color. It can be as simple as blowing things out of proportion in your head because the other party involved is another race, one that has earned a "stigma" of dishonesty, and shooting him. For those people, people who, unlike you and I, belong to those races and really do deal with this on a day-to-day basis, it absolutely IS an every day fear. Will white oppression, which is very much alive today, end up killing someone today? Will a young boy or girl be shot for walking home in the dark? It's a thing they have to live with. You and I, we'll never have to "deal" with that level of... judgment. So, in closing, I get that there are irresponsible members on both ends of that spectrum... but this post made it sound, very much, like you blame the "wrongly accused" people. Which bothered me. I'm sorry, I just really wanted to say something about this."
We all have to do our part for tolerance...
That was mine. That, and being unable do delete this annoying-ass heart emoji that she had at the end of her post.
heart emoticon
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