Sandra Bland Lives In Tragic Technicolor
Sandra Bland was found dead in her jail cell in Waller County, Texas on July 13, 2015. She was twenty-eight years old. Three days before her life was tragically cut short — she had been pulled over by a white state trooper named Brian Encinia for a minor traffic violation.
If Bland had been a twenty-something white woman with very little patience and an attitude to boot — there is no doubt that she would be alive today.
But no. She was instead a black woman with enough common sense to understand what was happening to her. She was “an angry black woman” –unwilling to surrender her rights to a man in uniform.
She knew the person towering over her car with his badge in her face was trained to consider her kind less than human. She could sense the danger ahead. She was scared shitless but she chose to weather the storm.
Black women are conditioned to defend themselves against monsters that threaten every inch of space around them. It’s a reality that has plagued us from even back in the day — when black men watched helplessly as white men habitually raped the spirit out of black women before sending them back out into the fields.
These brutal acts are still being performed without interference or censorship. Only the meek may survive but the scars are worse than the confirmation of death.
This woman put up a brave fight but in the end she paid the ultimate price for her intelligence, self-respect and self-defense.
She was unlawfully carted off after enduring the wrath of an uncouth bully who couldn’t control the urge to physically punish her enlightened mind and soaring soul.
He was determined to throw her in jail. That is the only way racist white men in uniforms with badges attached to them can exert the power they never earned but are legally able to aggressively wield without consequences.
The moment the state trooper vengefully approached her vehicle — Sandra Bland was already dead and buried.
Another black woman bites the dust and justice is left to serve another day.
They say she ended her own life by hanging herself in her jail cell. They dug up her alleged history of depression and used it against her. Her mood swings caused her unreasonable and fiery behavior and eventually led to her demise.
Sandra Bland died because she was a black woman, and any black woman reading this knows they may perish because of this identity.
Our stifling existence is a death sentence that is almost impossible to revoke. And so we die by the grip of our trial and tribulations that recognize us with suffocating pleasure. The air plunges from our bodies. But we survive through the technicolor lenses that portray our plight. Black women like Sandra Bland live in tragic spectrums of the rainbow. So will I, and so will you.
