John Brown
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

I REALLY wish more people who are negatively knee-jerk reacting to the title alone would read the article. The title is a little click-baitey (intentionally or not) and I understand why some people got all flustered reading it. But, this article is a really heartfelt, vulnerable account of harm, suffering, desperation, and desecration that occurs continuously when Black lives are taken. It also has really excellent critiques of why most white people have feelings about this particular police killing:

“I don’t give a fuck about Justine Damond because I know that most white people don’t think what happened to her is indicative of an inherently corrupt and unjust policing system. I know that most white people simply think that this situation means that guns should be taken out of the hands of black people, that black people shouldn’t be placed in positions of authority, and that keeping the police force white would ensure that police won’t mistakenly kill “innocent” white people; that police will, instead, return to their true purpose: Keeping white people “safe” by killing black people.

Most white people are not truly mourning Justine. Most of white people are mourning what the killing of Justine means: That Whiteness isn’t guaranteed to protect them and, in the blink of an eye, they can find themselves in the same plight as black people, which they thought the promise of Whiteness was supposed to prevent.”

I know we live in a world of 2 sentence attention spans and technological dominance but you all would save yourselves a lot of grief if you sat down and read the article. It might even take less energy than all that anger, denial, and cognitive dissonance you wasted on the title. It’s a really good article that shows very clearly that there is not only a double standard but that there is also a tokenizing of victims in order to further oppressive agendas. Who actually cares about these peoples lives?

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    John Brown

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