Justice, Police

As The Latest Killer Cop Walks, I Wait For The Revolution

Clearly, asking white juries to be decent is a waste of time.

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Mood

Mood

I do not have thoughts I wish to share with white people today. If you are white, I urge you to close this page and read something about Trump or Comey or about whatever the #WhitePeopleProblems are today. You people, all of you people, are complicit in the systemic murder of my people at the hands of your police, and I don’t have the strength to beg you to care about it today. I certainly don’t have the patience to put it in such a way that your privileged brains would be able to process. Go away, you don’t deserve me today.

For anybody who’s left: when are we going to take the fight to the police, and how are we going to do it in a way that doesn’t get us all killed? We live in a country where cops can shoot us, in the back, and no jury of white people will give us justice. White vigilantes are clearly preoccupied with President Joker. Is it okay to demand a black vigilante? Because simply waiting for white people to follow their own laws around black people doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.

Betty Shelby shot Terence Crutcher on an Oklahoma highway in broad daylight on video. Crutcher was walking back to his car, with his hands up, but that didn’t stop Shelby for being “afraid” of him. In this country, as long as a cop is “afraid” of you, whether that fear is reasonable or not, it’s okay for them to shoot you.

THERE WAS A FREAKING HELICOPTER FILMING HER MURDER SOMEONE

And still she walked. At trial, Shelby said Crutcher’s death was his own fault. AND STILL SHE WAS ACQUITTED.

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The system has failed us, the cops murder us, what can we do about that? How… how is it even possible to meet these murders with a monopoly of force nonviolently, and if it is possible, what is the most effective way to do that?

Tulsa officials called for “calm” after scattered protests broke out last night. The reason Tulsa isn’t on fire is not because black people are “calm,” it’s because we are NUMB. We are so used to this endless parade of white paramilitary shit that taking the fight to the streets seems pointless.

Any white man who mistakes my numbness for calm is playing with f**king fire. Taking the weight of an assault charge feels like the very LEAST I could do. I would relish the opportunity to feel less like a slave today by knocking a white man out. DON’T CARE WHO. I’ve got collision insurance.

Some of you black folk out there, I know you come to non-violence through faith. Your God stays your hand. I am envious of you. At this point the only thing that keeps me nonviolent is… fear. Fear that we’d lose. Fear that they’d get me. Fear that I’d leave my wife and children alone in a world that is out to murder them.

I would never admit this if white people were still reading, but at this point I am nonviolent because I’m afraid of the white man, and terrified of his police.

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I would sooner make chalk-drawings of Muhammad on the streets of Aleppo than mouth off to one of the agents of terror that “patrols” our country. AT LEAST THE FUNDAMENTALIST WOULD GIVE ME THE OPPORTUNITY TO CONVERT. The white cop gives me no such quarter. The cop will shoot me, or not, based entirely on his or her own perceptions of me, and the system will rubber stamp that decision REGARDLESS of anything I actually did.

I wish I could blame my restraint on God, or my respect for the rule of law, or even on a sense of hope. Instead I must live with the knowledge that my desire for self-preservation trumps my desire for justice.

And I am ashamed. Ain’t that a bitch? White cops murder black people, white juries approve of the murder, and I’m the one left feeling ashamed, embarrassed, and ineffectual. White people do not view their tacit acceptance of state sponsored ethnic cleansing as a personal moral failure, but I view my inability to stop them as the true proof of my own worthlessness.

This is how a man gets “radicalized,” I suppose. At this point, any black person, any black person with an actual plan for how to overthrow white power in this country could at least get me to subscribe to his or her freaking podcast. I am fertile ground for any methods, fair or unfair, to protect my children from the white man’s police.

I don’t think I’m the only one. In fact, I’m relatively late to the goddamn party. White people — their cops, their juries, their presidents — have backed me into a corner. They have taken a black “friend,” and turned me into an enemy. A leader who can articulate a clear path to the promised land could use my own instinct to fight my way out of the white man’s corner, in any way he or she deemed was appropriate.

I hope the path to revolution is peaceful, but I am entirely too realistic about white people to make that a requirement.

I do not await inspiration, I await instruction.

Elie Mystal is a political prisoner in Western society. You can reach him in hell.

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