ANOTHER SCHOOL/PUBLIC SHOOTING

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from the dailybeast


We Need To Talk About White Culture

African Americans will continue soldiering on to the pews in the wake of the Charleston massacre. But if we’re serious about preventing future tragedies, we must confront some very old demons.

This is a church that was already burnt to the ground by white supremacists once, in that revolt’s aftermath. And now it has been attacked by perhaps the same forces again. As Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the first woman Bishop of the A.M.E. church said to me yesterday, “if we can’t be safe in the church - then where can we be safe?”

It would be disproportionate to the magnitude of this tragedy to reach pat conclusions and then move along. We need to mourn first. We need to sit with the rage and pain, and mourn.

But then we have to come back to this...sickness. That’s what it feels like to me: a sickness. Not just the one-off malady of an insane individual. But a pervasive, gnawing illness that affects him and others in our country in varying, curious ways.

It’s a sickness that clouds the eyes of a police officer in McKinney, Texas - a fearful mania that causes him to see visions of children as armed criminals requiring disproportionate force.

A sickness that choked the life out of a man screaming that he couldn’t breathe - Eric Garner - because that man’s blackness and bigness and humanity were just too threatening to treat gently.

A sickness that allowed a police officer to see a 12-year-old child in Cleveland - Tamir Rice - and assume that the pellet gun this kid was holding was a deadly weapon, and then shoot him dead.

This sickness is the cancer of unacknowledged bias and supremacy. It has been with us since our founding, and civil rights laws, personal achievements and trappings of success for a fortunate few African Americans have not made us well.