DeathWhileBlackbyBlack

Roxane Gay wrote an Op-Ed piece for the NY Times addressing why she can’t forgive Dylan Roof.

While the massacre of 9 people has led to a plethora of issues and campaigns on the “back” of such a tragedy, many are focused on discerning the underlying and recognizing the all so obvious racial under and overtones of major players in the status of race relations in America. Interestingly, Sis. Gay has been inspired to write this piece with the very relevant context that although she is not immediately connected to the people or events from this shooting, her Blackness and humanity put her in the very place to be unforgiving: certain things are beyond forgiving.

This article should NOT be ignored. It expresses the very reason that those who cannot fully “gel” with this #Blacklivesmatter movement are resistant.  What Dylan Roof has done is “beneath her contempt”.

I wonder if Black men in a Philadelphia shooting 3 children and 7 adults is beneath her contempt. What “factors” make deliberate actions taken by gunmen to wilfully take lives–whether their shots are successful or not–ace the meeting of this standard?

The color of the gunman’s skin?

The color of the body bags?

The repeated history of unjust killings?

The fact that these patterns of unjust killings continue without end?

When DeathwhileBlackbyBlack occurs what do the answers to the foregoing questions look like? They do not differ when families are mourning their lost loved ones. Hypocrisy is a wicked character trait and is dangerous when one has a voice to fuel it in others.

How is it that since Dylan Roof executed those 9 people in South Carolina, there have been 3 mass shootings of BLACK PEOPLE where murders have been committed, and these events are “normal” news reports?  Because some people have the same make-up of Roxane Gray. They are moved beyond moved when racial animus is involved. The world flips upside down and evil and the “unforgivable” take place when once again, White people continue to do what White people have historically done.

MullOverThis does not expect any SM banter about we must remember the names of those wounded or killed in any of these 3 murders sprees injuring numerous Black people. These very defendents will automatically be defended by the school to prison pipelines, disenfranchisement of the Black family, privitization of prisons meant to keep Black men shooting their own so the prisons can be filled with lifetime felons, and every over-arching institutionalized racism reason as justifications for why we can “SMH”, “Wow”, “that’s so sad”, “We need to do more for our youth”, “We need some more programs to give Black men hope” and every other empassioned commentary in instances of #deathwhileblackbyblack. There will be no memorial and review of who these people shot actually were.  Why?  Because they are the very ones who we visit in jail, love, and “pray for”, not issue unforgivable justifications why the very same act another commits, makes the other unforgivable.

It is clear as day that all of these ills need to include prejudice and hypocrisy. If Dylan Roof is “unforgivable” solely on the basis of his White racist-ness, then all of these other Black murderers out to be the same on the basis of their Black self-hatredness and terrorism to their own.

It is clear as a warm sunny sky that many people hate racism more than they love their own. Their own perish daily, in like manner, but…there is no need to pen articles about the unforgivable acts of Black men who assassinate their own families, associate, friends and those they do not know.

You don’t even have to be religious to forgive. You definitely don’t have to be religious to be appalled by unjust treatment when race is involved, HOWEVER the pendulum swings when a lethal weapon is in the hands of an assailant who kills without cause.

All Black lives matter, not just the ones unjustly taken by White people or police brutality.

MullOverThis