by Leah Grady Sayvetz
On a Tuesday morning in early
November, on my way driving to work, I was stopped at the bottom of Elm street
by a traffic jam, not atypical for 8am on a week day. Thinking nothing of it, I
patiently waited for vehicles to move on so that I could pull out onto Floral
Ave. The car ahead of me seemed somewhat thoughtless in how they had stopped
across a lane of traffic on Floral and did not appear to be moving.
An elderly
black man turned up Elm, having just come from the Martin Luther King Blvd
bridge, and stopped his car next to mine to let out his passenger, a
middle-aged black man. As I saw these two men say good bye, I realized that the
driver of the car ahead of me, a white man, had just jumped out of his vehicle
and was now pointing a gun at the younger of the two black men. It suddenly
became clear that we were surrounded by undercover police.
Dear Officers,
That
Tuesday, did you feel like you did your job well, pursued justice, kept our
community safe, by staging this surprise arrest of my neighbor, a black man?
Had you been told- perhaps you yourselves had even collected evidence to
suggest or confirm- that this individual was committing crimes? Did these
supposed crimes have anything to do with illegal drugs? Were they violent or
nonviolent crimes? I want us to stop and think, first, before even answering
these questions. Before even asking them, really.
For here we are on a Tuesday
morning in rush hour traffic and here is the scene you have staged for everyone
to watch and learn: You are armed white men pointing guns at a black man. What
message does this send to those of us who happen to drive by? To those of us
who are white, does it perhaps reinforce the myth that blackness is criminal?
To those of us who are white does it perhaps reinforce the myth that black
lives don’t matter? I would claim yes. To anyone driving by who is a person of
color, does this scene perhaps reinforce the very real fear that they or their
loved ones could be stopped by the police at any time for little or no reason
at all, to have guns pointed at them, to be interrogated, dehumanized, shot,
killed?
What about black and brown children in the car being driven to school,
who see you with your guns pointed at a black man this morning? You know that
these children hear the news so often of yet another black body slain by police
or security guards with no criminal prosecution of the murderer. What kind of
fear do you think your show of force this morning instills in these beautiful
children? A real and founded fear.
Ok, now if you’ve thought about that, but
you still feel justified because you were doing your job to “fight crime,” I
want us to have this conversation: How can you call ANYTHING that my neighbor
may be accused of a CRIME, when the real and monstrously enormous crimes of our
governments and corporations go unchecked and unaddressed?
The real crime is
every single mother, father, and child without adequate housing. The real crime
is every child not fed good healthy food. The real crime is every youth, every
adult, not employed, not employed meaningfully, not paid a living wage. The
real crimes is mass incarceration of people of color, of poor folks. The real
crime is the theft of trillions of dollars from US tax payers to build weapons,
to invade other countries, to torture. The real crime is our governments’
complete disregard for Native treaties, leaving our Native brothers and sisters
without land, homes, food, work, clean air, clean water, clean soil. The real
crime is the imprisonment and forced slave labor of over 2 million people in
our country, most for nonviolent offenses, for crimes of poverty, for the crime
of being abandoned and targeted by the system, for the crime of being black,
for the crime of being poor. The real crime is so many millions of Americans
who don’t have access to health care. The real crime is Wall Street making
billions of dollars off the whole mess, off of even our visits to the doctor.
The real crime is mothers and fathers who fled here for their lives and their
children’s lives, who are being deported and taken from their families.
The
real crime is our export of violence and poverty to resource-rich countries so
that we can enjoy cheap fossil fuels and cheap factory goods. The real crime is
our flying drones which kill children, fathers, mothers, blowing up wedding
parties, tribal counsel assemblies, assassinating anyone anywhere in the world
without due process. The real crime is our rape of the earth, our extraction of
fossil fuels, releasing carbon into Earth’s atmosphere in quantities to ensure
the planet’s warming and climate catastrophe. The real crime is White Supremacy
which built this country by the massacre, enslavement and displacement of its
original inhabitants, by the kidnapping and enslavement of 12.5 million
Africans (“How Many Slaves Entered The US?” Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jan. 6,
2014. theroot.com). The list of crimes goes on, far beyond the end of this
paragraph, beyond the end of this page. When will our law enforcement begin to
address these?
THE DECOLONIZER
December 2015
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