That’s an open question for the floor. Whoever wants to answer. I’m torn.
I just saw a video of a young man face down on the lawn, arms outstretched, crying and pleading for his life. There are about 10-15 cops all with their guns drawn, seemingly waiting for him to flinch in the wrong direction so they could unload their weapons into him. A 90-year-old woman (reports said her age) in a pink housedress walks out, using a cane, and goes to comfort the man. As soon as she gets to him, the cops move from their positions behind their protective barrier of police vehicles and rush toward the two, taking Granny to the ground in the process.
Everybody in the video is terrified. The cops are not in danger. The old woman certainly poses no threat. The people recording the encounter are pleading with the police to put down their guns, and the man face down on the lawn is audibly crying.
I’m frustrated and enraged and upset and SICK OF THIS COUNTRY and I don’t want to see videos like that. I don’t post videos of police brutality anymore — we know what they look like and I don’t need the trauma in my face.
But the video is necessary to even hope for justice, because cops lie. Further, the outrage from the video is necessary to put pressure on the powers that be to actually do something and not sweep it under the rug. For centuries, Black people have been at the mercy of the angriest white man in the vicinity, be it a slave owner, a slave catcher, a Klansman, a vigilante, or a cop with a badge, and it’s always one man’s word against another — and we know whose word matters more. Video helps level the playing field. It doesn’t always work out in our favor, but when there’s video, we can see what happened. The Internet helps level the playing field even more, because it’s not enough that a handful of people in power see what happened — those people cannot be trusted to do what’s right without supervision, and the public is there to be outraged and supervise.
So what do we do? I’m tired of being traumatized, but the videos have to go viral or nothing happens. Without getting people online upset enough to make noise to the people in charge of doling out “justice,” we might as well be in 1920, waiting on a white man to make up a reason to kill us for sport while another group of white men in a jury box pat him on the back for another job well done.
I hope Granny is okay though. I would link it, but I’m tired. You can look for it if you want.
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