In a July 18 interview with DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club, Dr. Umar Johnson made this one of many poignant statements: "Before you begin TAKING the Black life, you must kill the IMAGE of the Black life." Now there are those of you who might discredit anything that I'm about to say in this post because I quoted "Dr." Umar, but there is no denying that "the powers that be" within the United States have contaminated the waters of social and political thought as it pertains to Black folks and people of African descent for centuries. Even on Celebrity Family Feud when former WBO heavyweight champion Lamon Brewster filled in the "Black and [blank]" with beautiful, not one person out of 100 people surveyed agreed with him and that serves as a microcosm of America's mindset as it pertains to the positive imagery associated with Blackness. So when you bust down what's happening in the conversations surrounding police brutality and inner city crime, many of the natural inclinations are either for people to hype up how police are killing us but we somehow deserve to be treated in that way or how we as Black people appear to care so much about police brutality but not "Black-on-Black crime". In many of these instances, you have folks who will use numbers and statistics to validate their arguments that we are a violent people who need to be policed and controlled by any means necessary--even by excessive deadly force. Therefore, in Part 3 of "Get Down or Sit Down", I will attempt to annihilate the foundations of those distractions in order to emphasize the need for justice--regardless of whether we are the perpetrators or the victims...
