Dallas; already a byword for political violence before Thursday’s massacre – the place where Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F Kennedy in 1963 and shattered America’s post-war innocence. Some may say it was doomed to live through violence since; apparently the worst attack since 9/11 according major American news outlets. Guns. Race. Mass death. America cannot seem to get beyond this divisive toxic mix that seems to just keep cycling through its modern history like a rinse and repeat cycle stuck without repair. You would think after the events in Ferguson and the murder of Mike Brown the police would be cautious before pulling the trigger on unarmed men. Maybe America is prone to repeating history; it has proven to be a nation, which really does not learn from their mistakes. Children are watching their loved ones die right in front of their eyes - Philando Castille. Some children are not even granted the chance to see their dad come home from work - Alton Sterling; but the list does not end there, the body count keeps increasing. Watching someone die through the lens of a mobile phone camera gives most of us a visceral combination of emotions. But seeing the fatal police shootings this week of Sterling and Castile through the eyes of their children stirs an even more raw sense of tragedy and helplessness. “I want my daddy;” these three words by Alton Sterling’s son expresses exactly why we cannot stay silent, why people are so angry despite their skin colour, because the voices are not being heard, nothing is being done and the same children from the same background keep losing the people they love. To Sterling’s son, though, this wasn’t simply another story about a black man killed by police. This was his daddy – and it is now his story. How many more children must witness such destruction, how many more broken homes and families? How many more childhood memories of a police officer shooting their loved ones does it take? But why Black Lives Matter? Well, that’s an ignorant question. For Black Americans, innocence was lost long ago. Violence has been the norm for centuries. A study conducted last year found that black Americans are more than twice as likely to be unarmed than whites when killed in incidents involving the police[1]. The protest at the centre of Thursday’s horror was a response to the “death-by-cop” this week of two more black men. America prides itself on being an ongoing experiment in democracy that guarantees the rights of all. Yet racism remains a fact of every day life. One hundred and fifty years after slavery was ended and 50 years since segregation was outlawed, some black citizens still live in fear of their own police and given the events, maybe rightly so. It always was: racism is its original sin. Ta-Nehisi Coates once observed, “America begins in black plunder and white democracy.” He was right. There are those who argue that black people get arrested or even shot more often than whites because they commit more crime. This overlooks certain problems. The first is a history of institutional racism – of militias, police forces and individual citizens arming themselves specifically out of fear of supposed black criminality. Racism in America has often been official policy, and that official policy has, over the decades, left an imprint on the minds of some white people. There is an irresistible correlation between the dogs and water hoses being turned on civil rights protestors in the 1960s and the invidious “stand your ground” laws that today empower citizens to shoot if they feel threatened. Why on earth are they being arrested for practicing their First Amendment? – “The right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Gov’t for redress of grievances.” One study found that juries sitting on a “stand your ground” case are twice as likely to convict the perpetrator of a crime against a white person than against a person of colour. People sometimes question why the campaign group Black Lives Matter insists on saying “black” rather than “all lives matter” – but the uneven application of the law suggests that their political bias is a rational response to the bias they experience in everyday life. Be it the shooting of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and dozens of others or the ambush of police officers — these raw painful final moments showing the violent end of someone's life are now everywhere. When African-Americans saw what happened to the two Black men they saw themselves — their lectures to their children of what can happen if they do not fully "comply" with police stops, sank on their shoulders like lead. We often think of online activism, as a shallow bid for fleeting attention, but this movement is helping to lead has been able to sustain the country’s focus and reach millions of people. Among many Black Americans, long accustomed to mistreatment or worse at the hands of the police, the past year has brought on an incalculable sense of anger and despair. For the world as a whole, we have come to learn the names of the victims — Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Mike Brown; Mark Duggan, Sheku Bayoh, Faruk Ali, Sarah Reed (the UK is not innocent either) — because the activists have linked their fates together in our minds, despite their separation by many weeks and thousands of miles. [1] http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/ (Twitter - @JUUUKES.)
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