Month: April 2018

“I can’t believe it!  I’m so devastated! My heart is melting right now!  I’m telling you! This guy used to come to our home. Everybody loved this guy…He and my daughter used to go to school together. Ok? I used to cook and I used to feed this kid. I can’t believe it!!”

“I’ve lived here for years. What happened?! NYPD killing people over here now? Talk to us people. We want justice man. We want to be able to walk outside peaceful.”

These are the voices of the people in the Brooklyn community after NYPD officers shot and killed 34-year-old Saheed Vassell on yesterday, the 50th anniversary of the U.S. government’s assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

They could be Black community members anywhere in the U.S., where the police kill African people in epidemic proportions.

And yes, MLK was assassinated by the U.S. government. Omali Yeshitela taught me how King had stepped out of the parameters the government had set for him and was about to take the lead for the Black working class. He’d already spoken out against the U.S. government’s war on the peoples of Vietnam. And if he led the people to build programs by and for themselves like the Black Panther Party was doing, then what would Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, Filipino and disaffected white people try to do?

And Saheed Vassell was part of that despised Black working class. And no, he didn’t have a gun. Just like Stephon Clark didn’t have a gun when was shot at 20 times by Sacramento Police in his grandparents’ backyard a couple weeks ago didn’t have one. And back in 2014 12-year-old Tamir Rice had a toy gun on a playground in Cleveland, Ohio. And 16-year-old Kimani Gray was adjusting his pants when NYPD shot and killed him in 2013. And before that, Oscar Grant, who was flat on his belly, didn’t have a gun either when BART police officer Johannes Mehserle murdered him. Amadou Diallo was holding his wallet when NYPD fired on him 41 times execution style.

16-year-old Kimani Gray

So maybe we can conclude that these police officers aren’t being trained to think since their thinking seems to turn out to be wrong every time.

Maybe we should start understanding how counterinsurgency works because so many have been killed by the police. In addition,  many leaders are showing up dead for the stand they have taken. From Sandra Bland in Hempstead, Texas to Edward Crawford and others in Ferguson, Mo. and Muhiyidin Moye, just recently in New Orleans.

And what makes this all possible is white America. While we focus on other things, the crux of the matter is that there are two Americas, the Brooklyn that Saheed Vassell experienced, and the Brooklyn white people think we want for ourselves.

In Oakland, S.F., New Orleans, Detroit. Again and again, all over the U.S, the people who make these cities so hip are being erased and displaced.

There is no unity except through reparations. This will give us some purpose other than to just consume other peoples’ cultures. Reparations from white people including artists, business people, executives, entrepreneurs and regular people can start to detonate a society founded on slavery and genocide which is imploding right before our eyes.

This is the primary message I want to get out to the world, that it’s time for white solidarity with Black Power.

There’s a white solidarity with Black Power convention happening in St. Louis, Missouri next weekend if you can make it. And there will be more. See more about Black Power Blueprint and how to support here.

Today the sky is various shades of white and grey with a tiny splotch of blue that can not promise to break through. My son and I are in Santa Monica on a short road trip.

While he’s sleeping, I take a walk down Pico Boulevard past Woodlawn Cemetery bumping paths with students heading to class, their black backpacks propelling them forward. A young woman wears fuschia leggings and the color stands out against the grey of the sidewalk and sky.

“Hope the sun comes out,” Ron Dad texts in response to yesterday’s grey pics of the Pacific. It hasn’t, but since we are on a trip to look at the college here, the less than perfect weather seems like a good thing. Get used to the everydayness of things in this new place.  I want to tell my son that there will be days like this. Days when you feel sad and isolated. But then I remember that my son actually likes the overcast weather. He says it helps him focus on creating things. Like mother, like son.

I continue following the colors. I find orange and yellow hibiscus and elegant magenta bougainvillea popping through the cyclone fences, pastel and royal blues on the community mural on the building by the library, a bold gold, brown and white geometric Aztec dancer posed against a crimson backdrop, an orange monarch butterfly, red poppies and a blue and yellow sunrise painted on an apartment building decorated in sections of orange, pink, blue and yellow like an extravagant party cake, lowered onto its side.

Since he’s our second kid, and in a year and a few months he will move out to find his way on his own. And we will have an empty nest. The tinge of melancholy I feel is overwhelmed by excitement for him, all that he will experience, all people whose paths will cross and all the colors he will see.