Get Down or Sit Down, Part 2: The Great Distraction and the Erasure of "Black"

The need for understanding and recognition is as natural for human beings as eating, sleeping and dropping three hot ones a day.  (BTW...if you're not doing the latter, then step your whole grains and water games up, slim.  I drop PSAs within PSAs.)  However, Black people, who weren't even legally considered 100 percent human for 78 of their first 246 years in this country, have struggled mightily with those basic human needs more than most other races in American society.  Between erasing and replacing our entire heritage, language, religion and culture, it was clear from the outset that we were a disposable people.  Pepper in some of the most heinous acts in world history including but not limited to all of American slavery, the Black Wall Street Massacre of 1921 that killed over 3,000 Black people and the gruesome murder of 14-year-old Emmitt Till and it was even more apparent.  So when you have groups of people who insist on changing the hashtag as well as the narrative from #BlackLivesMatter to "#AllLivesMatter" or "#BlueLivesMatter", Black people are once again faced with the harsh reality of living in a country full of revisionist historians who don't understand why we've been saying variations of "Black Lives Matter" since forever.  Hence, as I soldier on with Part 2 of "Get Down or Sit Down", I will attempt to unveil how these assertions of which lives matter cunningly detract from Black people's issues...

BECAUSE THEY STAND UP FOR BLACK PEOPLE, BLACK LIVES MATTER MUST BE RACISTS AND TERRORISTS.  Despite this country constantly pissing on the heads of Black people and trying to tell us that it's rain, we have never been allowed to grab an umbrella or a poncho without there being pushback.  Although the FBI's infamous COunter INTELligence PROgram b.k.a. COINTELPRO was originally started in 1956 to discourage the rise of Community Party U.S.A., many of the program's biggest targets for disruption were Martin Luther King, Jr. (especially after the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party.  In fact, the FBI developed a special program in 1967 called "COINTELPRO-BLACK HATE" to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations" that included most of the aforementioned groups and others.  So imagine my annoyance when former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has decided to tap into his inner J. Edgar Hoover regarding his feelings about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Network.  (If you ask many people of color from The Big Apple, that's been the case with "Giu-elz Santana".)  On top of making a lot of the typical blanket statements about what Black people need to do as if he knows what it's like to be Black, Face the Nation host John Dickerson specifically asked Giuliani about saying that BLM has put a target on the backs of police officers and this was part of his response:

Well, when they [Black Lives Matter] talk about killing police officers...they sure do.  They sing rap songs about killing police officers and they talk about killing police officers and they yell it out at their rallies and the police officers hear...and when you say "Black lives matter", that's inherently racist.  Black lives matter, White lives matter, Asian lives matter, Hispanic lives matter.  That's anti-American and it's racist.

I had every intention to address Sarah Palin using the usual coded language toward BLM protesters by calling them "thugs" and "rioters" as well as talking about the ridiculous "We the People" petition to classify the BLM Network as a "terror group".  However, I'm just going to take the time in the next paragraph to bust down Giuliani's farce of a response because he represents a grossly uneducated section of the American population...

First and foremost, the BLM Network does not talk and has never talked about killing police officers; to suggest that they do is a false, incendiary insinuation that they are anti-police when their platform is simply against the imbalanced and unfair treatment of Black people.  The peaceful protest in Dallas should serve as proof that BLM and many within the law enforcement community have a pretty good relationship.  Second, I believe that he's confusing the BLM Network with some sort of rap group because I don't recall anybody in BLM dropping bars, let alone about killing cops.  Third, saying that "Black lives matter" is "inherently racist" is asinine because you need real power to be racist.  Matter fact, saying "Black Lives Matter" is actually standing up against the systemic racism that has helped to beleaguer the Black community; it's to say, "Stop harassing, brutalizing and killing us when we pay you to protect us."  Let me tell it, it's actually one of the most American things to say because America as we know it has largely been achieved through the blood, sweat, tears and free labor of Black folk.  Fourth, and finally, this is a message to Giuliani, Sarah Palin and the 141,000 people who want the White House to designate the BLM Network as a "terror group": stop watching FOX News and these other victim-blaming media outlets for your information.  How about you actually go to BLM's website, educate yourself about their organization, maybe go to one of their rallies and actually see what they're all about in lieu of assuming that BLM is actually powerful enough to subvert the progress of another race or evil enough to use violence and intimidation in pursuit of a political aim.

BECAUSE THEY HAVE ONE OF THE HARDEST JOBS IN SOCIETY, BLUE LIVES MATTER.  Let me start off this section by asserting the following: I never have and I never will strongly dislike, despise or hate all law enforcement officers.  When I watched a video and saw how kids in North Little Rock, Arkansas ran up to the car of Officer Tommy Norman, it made me think that 1) this is someone who has an actual connection with his community and 2) it reminded me of the Officer Friendly program when I was a kid and wanted to treat officers in that same manner.  Working for the court system in D.C., I have come in frequent contact with D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers and deputy marshals for the U.S. Marshal Service (USMS) and have even become friends with many of them.  I have seen firsthand just how hard these brothers and sisters work day in and day out to truly serve and protect our communities and being an officer of the law is one of the most under-appreciated, underpaid, high-pressure positions in our country.  With that said, I have also had my experiences with several "bad apples".  Some people are introduced to racism and prejudice in America through the grade school and higher education systems, housing projects and the welfare system, the job market, needing a small business loan or just walking down the street.  However, when my previous understanding of racism and prejudice was limited to history books and the Rodney King beating, law enforcement provided me turned book smarts into actual knowledge with several rude awakenings via racial profiling.  To those officers, it didn't matter that I avoided becoming a statistic while on my way to graduating college; it only mattered that I was Black.

So here is why saying "Blue Lives Matter" in the midst of the "Black Lives Matter" movement is troubling.  First, when officers get so offended by Minnesota Lynx players wearing "Black Lives Matter" T-shirts at a WNBA game that they leave their posts, issues of taking misplaced offense and "blue entitlement" abound.  Second, if any man or woman murders a police officer, that person will most certainly be charged with and convicted of murder and get the book thrown at them.  However, if a police officer murders any man or woman, they're not only less likely to be convicted of any serious charge, but they are also suspended with pay while their case is pending, the District Attorney may overcharge and they might not even be indicted at all.  (Qualified immunity is real, people.)  Third, "the blue wall of silence" is what pushes cops to say "not all police are bad" in lieu of "that officer was as wrong as two left shoes and he or she should be fired for murdering that person".  Look at the extensive cover-up in Chicago in the wake of the Laquan McDonald murder going all the way up to Mayor Rahm Emanuel.  Notice how these police unions are quick to defend the actions of their officers and will never admit when an officer uses excessive force, even when that officer being dead wrong literally leaves someone dead.

Let me say this: I am not insensitive to the recent tragic loss of life on the side of law enforcement.  Neither do I condone the actions of Micah Xavier Johnson in the July 7th Dallas shooting that left five officers dead nor Gavin Eugene Long in the July 17th Baton Rouge shooting that left three officers dead.  Much like anyone from the BLM Network or among the sensible members of the Black community, I don't condone any unwarranted violence against law enforcement for three main reasons: 1) murder is wrong no matter who commits it, 2) that type of senseless retaliation cannot be justified and 3) it's counterproductive to the strides that organizations like the BLM Network have made without violence and bloodshed.  Nevertheless, when the President personally attends the memorial for the slain Dallas officers while only sending White House officials to funerals of Black men and women murdered at the hands of police and later holds an arguably pointless town hall meeting that seems to be more comfort to the families of the slain officers, "Blue Lives Matter" is already a safe assumption.  

BECAUSE WE'RE FEELING LEFT OUT DESPITE ONE GROUP BEING CONSTANTLY LEFT OUT, ALL LIVES MATTER.  It's ironic how Donald Trump loves to excoriate President Obama for not curtailing the high unemployment rate among Black youth and making these baseless boasts of how he's going to help "the African-Americans"--the phrasing being interesting because it's like he's referring to us as things instead of people--while insisting that "all lives matter" at a Radford University rally while kicking out Black Lives Matter protesters at that same rally.  However, since I've already dedicated a four-part series to Trump's nonsense, let's leave Donny Tanner alone for a moment and focus on that picture above.  Whenever my teachers or professors frequently used red ink on my papers, it was usually because I was being corrected for grammatical errors, confusing thoughts or unnecessary points.  The fact that this insensitive vandal went out of his or her way to spray paint "ALL" in red through anything that said "BLACK", it was as if the assertions of Blackness, Black power and justice for Black people somehow needed to be corrected as if they were grammatical errors, confusing thoughts or unnecessary points.  More important, this defacing exemplifies how America continuously tries to cross out and disregard Blackness from its fabric, despite thriving off of it for its relevance.  Nobody would be saying that any lives matter and the media would have no potential social or race war to instigate if Black people weren't publicly adamant about how our lives should matter within a larger society that constantly tells us otherwise.

Perhaps one of the best explanations that I've heard regarding the problem with the "All Lives Matter" agenda comes ironically from a White man.  In a July 12th interview with Roland Martin, anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise contributed this gem:

America has a long history of saying "all" and not meaning it. We said "all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" and we did not mean it, or at least we acted as though we didn't.  So what Black folks are saying and those of us who are not Black but who support the movement are saying is that sometimes, you have to specify that which has been left out...that we have so ignored the Black and Brown experience that when someone says, "Hey wait a minute, we need to talk about this," it's like, "Well, that's reverse racism!  You're ignoring us, denigrating us!"  No, we're trying to add to this thing called "all", and until White America is ready to accept that, we're not going to be able to move forward.

Memo to the "excluded" and offended section of White America: we are well aware that your life matters, too, because we know that's what you're really saying when you utter the phrase "All Lives Matter".  Judging from the manner in which people who look more like you have rigged the system since 1492, everything that has been done to secure your position in America is a result of your attitude that your lives matter more than others.  Therefore, don't try to throw Hispanics, Latinos, Asians or any other racial minority into the conversation as if you care that much about their lives.   The fact that the mainstream media outlets that quite a few of you own have are drumming up this Black people vs. White cops drama instead of highlighting other races who have also faced police brutality or the actual anger that Black people have toward violence in our own community is proof that the main lives you care about the most are 1) your own and 2) the shelf life of that almighty dollar.

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It's as simple as this: anyone who argues from the "Blue Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter" platforms are making me think that Captain Obvious is much older than he looks in those Hotels.com commercials, has been busier in his lifetime than Wilt Chamberlain, wearing fewer rubbers and pulling out less often.  I will never make it seem like the lives of one group of people matters more than another, especially when I subscribe to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s belief that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".  However, when it comes to who has received more concessions in the American "justice" system, it's clear that both White America and law enforcement have way more "qualified immunity" than Black people.  Unless you're talking about officers who are Black or of other racial minorities, none of these groups have been blatant omitted from so many facets of American society as Black people have.  Until that's adequately addressed, then we're going to keep saying "Black Lives Matter" without having to add "too" at the end of it as Newt Gingrich suggested or explaining ourselves until we're Black and blue in the face.  We're not here to make our struggle comfortable for you.  Contrary to popular belief, BLM and the rest of the Black community doesn't hate White people or law enforcement just because we fight for dignity, justice and respect for Black people; besides, somebody has to fight for us when the majority of America won't do it.

Please be sure to come back next week and check out Part 3 of the "Get Down or Sit Down" miniseries, "More Distractions"!  If you haven't read Part 1, "The Loud Pack and the Silent Killers", then here's your opportunity to catch up!