Absolutely right, Patrick!

I remember when some woman on Fox News proclaimed last year the “everybody knows” that Jesus and Santa were White. Imagine. Santa is a figment of imagination as is a blond, white, blue eyed Jesus.

Today, while using his name, they decry all Jesus stood for, all he taught. They have replaced his good news of live and justice and healing with a prosperity gospel to reinforce their lies. I am sure today they’d be among the 1st to pick up the nails and the thorny crown and extinguish his life. at least they’d be among the 1st to get some to do it for them.

I’d feel sad for their ignorance and hypocrisy were it not based in abject irrational hatred and had it not resulted in 400 years, and longer, of innocent lives taken. And in the death of the American dream of justice for all, equality, liberty. They have made America a shameful joke.

I am sorry for my family’s contribution to the kidnapping and deaths of Africans, to their displacement, to the breakup of their families. I am sorry that I know even more now: an 11th great grandfather helped legislate White Privilege in the Virginia House of Burgesses where he served twice. It causes me great sorrow and cuts deep every time another innocent Black life is taken or when an idiot like Giuliani blames Black Lives Matter for a message of death when it is the intransigence and denial if “my” people who have caused this and continue it. I believe they scream louder now because their power is dying. Thank God. And I do.

I do what I can and will do more to make the truth clear because Black Lives do matter as such as white lives or blue uniforms. “They” hate the government except for the police, it seems, and only because that plays to their narrative of lies and hate. They use Dallas to divide us as they used reparations to White male indentured servants at the very beginning of White Privilege. We cannot let that continue to happen!

Perhaps a hard look at the oil lies that took us into Iraq is more relevant to the the deaths in Dallas than anything else. PTSD and seeing my people killed just for living might make me question why I was deployed several times to protect a land that despised my people. But that would require truth and a mirror that reflects white skin and responsibility. They are too afraid to face truth.

Thank you for your response and for reading my story. I am working on a essay about the truth of America, the beginning of White Privilege and how white disregard for truth, empathy and compassion have led to the new Jim Crow and the new lynchings caused today as punishment for driving, walking, living while Black. I am called to proverbially slap the shit out of my race to accept responsibility, confess and begin a process of reconciliation, even as I watch and hear too many choosing to be blind and deaf to truth. I pray to Jesus, a Black disenfranchised Palestinian who called for justice, peace, love and forgiveness to heal them. And heal me, too, in whatever way I need to be healed to stop these cruel, senseless deaths. And to help me speak out, March, give money and write my deaf and blind Congressmen…and vote.