Jordan Russell Davis, Another Statistic I'm now at the place where I am 100% comfortable saying that it is yet again open season on Black people, especially young Black men, in America. With Jordan Davis' murder last week, I fell off the psychic precipice I was hovering on increasingly in the face of more and more of these types of deaths of innocent Black people this past few years. The precipice of hoping and praying and wanting so much to believe despite the evidence that America was not heading backwards at an accelerated pace in this country where the value of Black people, Black lives, is concerned. All while celebrating the nation's first Black president, no less. I'm not sure that any rational Black person can conclude differently at this point. I understand why Jordan Davis' own mother and father feel so compelled to quash any idea that their son's murder was a hate crime or about race (for reasons not too hard to imagine since, of course, in America the minute Black people start complaining about racism being a big problem the majority of white people of all political stripes start tuning out. Makes sense when you know that around 81% of whites the last time someone checked don't believe that racism's a big problem at all even though none of them actually have to live with racism's potentially-deadly consequences for their children). But their denial doesn't change the reality of the situation, when another innocent young Black boy is shot dead for no rational reason at all yet its not even something that is all that surprising:
Trayvon Martin as his parents saw him He doesn't make it. He doesn't take another breath. He doesn't get to finish high school. He doesn't get to go to his prom. He doesn't get to experience his first day on a college campus. He doesn't get to marry the love of his life. He doesn't get to have children. He doesn't get to grow old. He doesn't get to die in peace. Stereotypes of a black male, truly understood. Sorry Biggie, this time it ain't all good. Jordan Davis died when he got to the hospital. He was just 17. Shot by a man who didn't like his loud music and who said that someone in Jordan's SUV pointed a gun at him, so he felt 'threatened.' No gun was ever found, except for the one that took Jordan's life.I'm not so sanguine as Jordan Davis' parents. I know that a person doesn't have to consciously think or shout Klansman epithets to hate, fear and distrust Black people, deep down. Indeed, when it comes to young Black men, most people don't have any conscious thought of hating or fearing them. Yet they do. And I know why, as does anyone morally honest.. . .
Truth be told, when Trayvon Martin died, we knew it would happen again. We rallied. We marched. We protested. We signed petitions. We put our hoodies up. But in the back of our minds we knew that it would happen again. There is no comparison between the deaths of any seventeen year old, as every life is sacred and the families deserve to have their own periods of mourning. So don't confuse this with thinking that I am comparing the two, but something is happening in this country that has to come to an end. We don't want the fear that some have of young black men to be a disease our country cannot cure.
The black male. A demographic. A sociological construct. A media caricature. A crime statistic. Aside from rage or lust, he is seldom seen as an emotionally embodied person.
Timothy Stansbury, dead on a rooftop. It is inarguable to anyone honest that racism is America's original sin, and hatred and fear of Black people part of our national heritage, even though we are long past the point where most Americans are consciously aware of these sentiments within themselves most of the time. (And most Americans, white and Black, do have these feeligns deep within; see any book written by any Black psychologist including Franz Fanon or Kenneth and Mamie Clark, or even a non-psychology text like Carter G. Woodson's Miseducation of the Negro for further details.) It is that part of our culture that allows whites like Michael Dunn (and those people of color also infected by the culture's teaching us all about the defects and worthlessness inherent in Black people) to feel entitled to approach a group of young Black men they don't know in a public place and demand that they accomodate their wishes as it relates to their car stereo volume. It is that part of the culture that then allows men like Michael Dunn to believe he should pull out a gun and start shooting. (After they get into the fully-expected argument and the boys likely exercised their God-given right as free Americans to tell Mr. "I'm Willing to Bet Money that Mofo was Drunk as a Skunk and That's Why He Didn't Stay and Call 911" Dunn to fuck off and die.) With just a few extra shots as the children tried to flee in their car, just in case the message about who really had the power in the interaction wasn't clear in their minds. If folks want to talk about reckless disregard for human life you can't get more on point than a white man's offense with too-loud music (and what my gut says was not just "backtalk" something that every parent of every teenager knows that teens do ' but Lord Have Mercy Black backtalk, which is not necessarily polite to rude white people, but so what?) leading to eight shots being fired into a vehicle with four children in it, none of whom had any weapon of any kind in their possession.
You would think that reasonable people wouldn't have anything left to talk about, other than the possible sentence Mr. Dunn will receive, given that.
Oscar Grant, hogtied but still a threat But, as this is America, that thought would be wrong. Indeed, that thought has even been wrong right here at Daily Kos. To be fair, most here have been outraged and know that there is no excuse or justification of any kind for Jordan Davis' death. But not all. There have been a few insistent arguments about "rude" kids and "loud music" in the diary threads about Jordan Davis, at various levels of haughtiness. It is reading those insistent whinges about "noise" and "rudeness" and "disrespect" all over something as petty as loud music, combined with the offensive yet quite-serious questions asking how Jordan Davis and his friends verbally responded to the white man who got all in their perfectly legal business in a public place as if that somehow matters, that has led to this diary. When even so-called liberal Kossack friends, always at-the-ready to champion their own claimed lack of racist feelings and thoughts, still engage in obfuscation and irrelevancy and deflection rather than weeping inside first and foremost when stories like that of Jordan Davis' death are posted, it is clear to me exactly how pernicious the unconscious disregard of the humanity of the young Black man, and the disregard of the infinite value of that humanity, really is here in America. As long as that is the case, where even the well-intentioned get distracted and deflected from the only facts that truly matter, America will keep killing our children.
It is not that hard to find their stories, the stories of the male, Black, young, unarmed and dead. Really, it's not. Especially the dead Black man children.
Our culture has taught us not to see them, Black men in general and young Black men in particular, as people equally deserving of life.
Darius Simmons, the gun thief (not) Well, I want you to see them. I want you to instead of thinking about them, feel them. Know them. The photos in this diary are just a few of the unarmed young Black men (or Black people armed with something that didn't justify shooting them dead, like a wallet), who have lost their lives to law enforcement and vigilantes enslaved by a narrative of who they might be rather than who they actually were. Just like the 29 young Black people (28 men, one young woman) killed in just the first half of 2012. Most after Trayvon Martin was murdered and his name thrust into our collective consciousness. I want you to look at their youth, their sometimes baby faces. I want you to feel, not just detachedly think, about how old they were when they were ripped from this earth not because they were deserving of death, but instead because someone not like them whether by race or class assumed differently in the heat of a moment'which, considering how few apologies the Black community has received over any of their deaths, this culture clearly says is most important.
So, look at them. See them.
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