Update:
The article below discusses the reactions of three African-American journalists to the events in Dallas, Baton Rouge and Minnesota last week.
One of the journalists is New York Times commentator Charles M. Blow.
Mr. Blow has published a video on his Face Book page discussing the history and culture of “protect and serve” in America.
A must-watch.
Original post:
In the wake of a “week from hell,” hundreds — perhaps thousands — of powerful, touching opinion pieces have been written by journalists, commentators, bloggers and “regular Americans”
They have come — and continue to come — in many forms.
Our very own (I say this with pride and appreciation) Clarissa Pinkola Estés expressed her grief and hopes and love in the form of a heartrending prayer — a prayer intended to mourn the dead who “belonged to someone who loved them” and to evoke the best in us because “we are decent people.”
Three of my favorite commentators — all three happen to be African-American — have also eloquently, emotionally and each in his own unique way, expressed their grief, anger and fears.
Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post, Charles M. Blow at the New York Times, and Leonard Pitts Jr. at the Miami Herald unequivocally condemn and bemoan the “madness,” the “killing spree,” the “cowardly ambush” that took the lives of five Dallas police officers and injured six more.
Leonard Pitts: “Eleven police officers shot by sniper fire, five fatally, while guarding a peaceful demonstration against police brutality.”
He calls this “madness.”
The killing spree that left five police officers dead and seven others wounded should be classified as an act of domestic terrorism. The shooter, identified as 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson, apparently believed he was committing an act of political violence. Our duty, to honor the fallen, is to ensure that Johnson’s vile and cowardly act has the opposite impact from what he sought.
This was yet another week that tore at the very fiber of our nation.
After two videos emerged showing the gruesome killings of two black men by police officers, one in Baton Rouge, La., and the other in Falcon Heights, Minn., a black man shot and killed five officers in a cowardly ambush at an otherwise peaceful protest and wounded nine more people.
Like Blow, the other two columnists also decry and condemn the “gruesome killings” of two black men that had just occurred in Louisiana and Minnesota and which — like it or not, justly or unjustly — are connected to the Dallas tragedy.
Pitts calls those shootings “madness,” also:
Two more black men shot down for no good reason in a country that still insists — with righteous indignation, yet — upon equating black men with danger.
That’s madness.
Eugene Robinson, after praising the Dallas Police Department, blasts the “appalling police work” that resulted in the deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn.
As a father and grandfather, I have been deeply affected by what I read and hear are the warnings that so many African-American parents feel compelled to give their sons and daughters should they have an encounter with a police officer.
Reflecting on how two more black men were shot down “for no good reason in a country that still insists — with righteous indignation, yet — upon equating black men with danger,” Pitts writes:
Last night, I called my sons and grandson to tell them I love them, explain to them yet again that they terrorize people simply by being and plead with them to be careful. I am required to fear what might happen to my children when they encounter those who are supposed to serve and protect them.
And he calls this “madness,” too.
Referring to the phenomenon that “So many — too many — Americans now seem to be living with an ambient terror that someone is somehow targeting them,” Blow writes:
Friday morning, after the Dallas shootings, my college student daughter entered my room before heading out to her summer job. She hugged me and said: “Dad, I’m scared. Are you scared?” We talked about what had happened in the preceding days, and I tried to allay her fears and soothe her anxiety.
How does a father answer such a question? I’m still not sure I got it precisely right.
Truth is, I am afraid. Not so much for my own safety, which is what my daughter was fretting about, but more for the country I love.
This is not a level of stress and strain that a civil society can long endure.
I feel numb, and anguished and heartbroken, and I fear that I am far from alone.
Blow is right. Millions of Americans are feeling “numb, and anguished and heartbroken.”
At the beginning, I mentioned that “regular Americans” — along with journalists, commentators, and bloggers — are also expressing their grief, anger and fears.
And perhaps the most perceptive words do come from one such American in Crete, Illinois.
Commenting on Blow’s piece in the New York Times, “soxared040713” writes:
“I was barely eleven when Emmett Till’s waterlogged and unrecognizable corpse was fished out of the Tallahatchie River. I recall thinking “this is what America thinks of us.” I’ve never entirely shaken the image of the photo spread in Jet Magazine. I feared that this atrocity would be acceptable in America all through my life; I had no faith. I never thought, as a boy, that hate could turn upon itself and then obliterate the lives of others in return for the hate visited upon it.
Dallas policemen lie dead this evening, the objects of a hate so unfathomable that it cannot be readily comprehended. They were killed in the line of duty, protecting citizens, guaranteeing their safety and their right to assemble peacefully. If we’re not a country of laws, then we’re all a mirror image of Emmett Till: unrecognizably mutilated, grotesque.
The smoking hate in Micah Johnson is not understandable. African-Americans have endured far more than this poor man has in his brief 25 years. The running tale is 400 years long and the trail is littered with anger and promises broken and lawful denial and legal apartheid. But one does not, indeed cannot, target an individual or a group for retributive justice. America has lurched along, almost drunkenly, for a quarter of a millennium. Yet there has been progress.
We must recognize the pain of the past but we must focus on the faith of the future. We may not love one another; but all we have is one another.
We’ve got to take the chance.”
“We’ve got to take the chance.”
It is difficult to find “truer words.”
CODA:
“While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His assailants–the white woman’s husband and her brother–made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.” History.com
Lead image courtesy flickr.com
