Tag: Black lives matter

Ain’t nothing like a really late apology

6 Comments

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says he wished the league had “listened earlier” to Colin Kaepernick when he began protesting during the National Anthem back in 2016.

Kaepernick has not played in the NFL since he sparked controversy by sitting, then kneeling, during the National Anthem before several games to protest the police shootings of Black men and other social injustices faced by the Black community…

“It is not about the flag,” said Goodell. “These are not people who are unpatriotic. They’re not disloyal. They’re not against our military. In fact many of those guys were in the military and they’re a military family.

“What they were trying to do is exercise their right to bring attention to something that needs to get fixed. That misrepresentation of who they were and what they were doing was the thing that really gnawed at me.”

The protest took place in 2017. More Black lives have ended in police murder.

Yup, things change. Slower than molasses hardly counts.

“Why I’m Absolutely an Angry Black Woman”

Leave a comment


Femi Matti

❝ Because when I was five, my kindergarten classmate told me I couldn’t be the princess in the game we were playing because black girls couldn’t be princesses. Because I was in third grade the first time a teacher seemed shocked at how “well-spoken” I was. Because in fourth grade I was told my crush didn’t like black girls.

❝ Because in sixth grade a different crush told me I was pretty  —  for a black girl. Because in 7th grade my predominantly black suburban neighborhood was nicknamed “Spring Ghettos” instead of calling it its name (Spring Meadows). Because I was in 8th grade the first time I was called an Oreo and told that I “wasn’t really black” like it was a compliment.

❝ Because in 9th grade when I switched schools a boy told me he knew I had to be mixed with something to be so pretty. Because in 10th grade my group of friends and I were called into an office and asked if we were a gang, or if we had father figures. Because in 11th grade my AP English teacher told me that I didn’t write like a college-bound student (though I later scored perfectly on the exam).

And so it goes in a Black American life. And Black lives in many other lands formed by white Imperial economics, greed. Please RTFA. Feel. Learn,

Thanks, UrsaRodinia

Our coppers killed 1,134 in 2015 – you were 9 times more likely to be killed if you were Black

1 Comment


Carrying a dangerous weapon – a camera — Scott Wilson/Getty

❝Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year.

❝Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.

Paired with official government mortality data, this new finding indicates that about one in every 65 deaths of a young African American man in the US is a killing by police…

❝About 25% of the African Americans killed were unarmed, compared with 17% of white people. This disparity has narrowed since the database was first published on 1 June, at which point black people killed were found to be twice as likely to not have a weapon.

❝The Guardian’s investigation, titled The Counted, began in response to widespread concern about the federal government’s failure to keep any comprehensive record of people killed by police. Officials at the US Department of Justice have since begun testing a database that attempts to do so, directly drawing on The Counted’s data and methodology…

❝Regional disparities also emerged from the year’s data. Earlier this month, the Guardian published a series of special reports on Kern County, California, where police killed more people relative to the size of its population than anywhere else in the country. Law enforcement officers there killed more people in 2015 than the NYPD, which has 23 times as many officers policing a population 10 times as big.

Following a spate of killings in recent weeks, New Mexico’s 21 deaths in 2015 represented the highest per-capita rate of any state…

❝Only one of the 21 people killed by police in New Mexico, however, was unarmed. By contrast nine of the 25 people killed in New York state were unarmed, and seven of these were black men.

RTFA. Detailed, well written, the GUARDIAN took on a task long overdue. Neither our government nor many civil bodies have been willing to confront the statistics defining one of the most painful aspects of racism in America.

We can talk all day about the details of law enforcement in a comparatively lawless culture. Anarchy is a well-respected cultural trait. Just not under its own name. The same is true of the racism which remains deadly and rooted in our economic history, our political character.