I am thinking back to that childhood adage about the hypocrisy of pointing fingers. Remember? When I point my finger at someone else, I always have three fingers pointing back at myself.
Funny how we tend to forget the wisdom of childhood.
Instead of pointing fingers, let’s look in the mirror and pay attention to our own faces.
Today Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has an article at TomDispatchanalyzing the domestic blowback of
Andrea Mazzarino
America’s addiction to perpetual war.
A nation cannot keep itself on a continual war footing, as American has done for the past 20 years, without infecting its citizenry with a self-destructive “us vs. them, where’s the enemy?” attitude. It foments tribalism which spreads like a disease.
As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s — as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.
This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.
I would say that the news clip below is “unbelievable” except that it appeared on the Christian Broadcast Network. A network that conforms its opinion pieces so closely to the conservative, Republican obsession with “law and order” that you’d be forgiven for assuming its commentators all had day jobs as prison guards.
This editorial discussion is supposedly highlighting the importance of the
Jayland Walker
public “having all the facts” about a situation before drawing conclusions or making objections to the work of the authorities.
But then, conservative Christianity has always highlighted the importance of “obeying the authorities,” no matter how abusive they may be.
The matter at hand is the police murder of Jayland Walker in Akron, Ohio and the quick display of community outrage that followed.
The initial police reports, the details of which have not been changed, explained that Mr. Walker was going to be stopped for some unspecified sort of traffic violation.
Mr. Walker then took the police on a high speed chase which ended with him leaping from his car and running away. Police allege that Walker fired a gun out his car window during the chase.
As Walker ran away, his was chased by 8 – 9 policemen who fired 90+ rounds at his back. Mr. Walker never returned fire because, as the police later discovered, he was unarmed. (Duh, the fact that he never turned to fire back while unsuccessfully dodging a hail-storm of gunfire, hadn’t tipped them off to this already?)
Walker’s body was hit by 60+ bullets. He died at the scene.
These were the original facts. They are still the facts.
Mr. Walker is another unarmed black man gunned down for the crime of running from the police who consistently insult, abuse, assault, and murder unarmed black men.
As an African-American friend asked me not long ago, “David, why can’t white people understand why we are afraid of the police? We have good reason to be.”
Nevertheless, these CBN commentators object. They insist that most, perhaps all?, media reports have not mentioned the (alleged) gunshot out of Walker’s car window during the car chase.
However, EVERY report that I have read and watched HAS either shown the relevant video or mentioned the alleged gun fire from Walker on the highway.
In other words, CBN is ginning up an illegitimate, irrelevant concern for their own rhetorical purposes. Can anyone say, MANIPULATION? or PROPAGANDA?
But they all say these things oh so unctuously with such apparent concern…
They also fail to mention the many, many times that the police have been caught LYING to the public in their initial police reports in order to protect themselves and hide their own wrongdoing.
Naturally, the local black community responded with a large, peaceful, public protest demanding answers and accountability.
The very next day these three CBN Christian stooges, doing the half-step shuffle for white privilege, self-righteousness, hard-heartedness, foolishness and stupidity, scold the black community (!) for expressing their grief and anger, while exercising their first amendment right to cry out in the streets for justice.
I am sorry, but I find the entire diatribe to be absolutely infuriating!
Here we see three comfortable, extremely well paid, audacious examples of the poisonous fruit of white privilege dripping with the decay of dead men’s bones, all white-washed and dressed up pretty for broadcast TV.
I am sorry, but this report is nothing but pious hackery, blindingly oblivious to the persistent and pernicious racial/racist dynamic playing itself out over and over and over again in our city streets.
It is also painfully obvious — AGAIN– that something has gone horribly wrong with the way police officers are being trained to handle both people and their weapons.
It’s not a few “bad apples,” folks. It’s the entire system that appears to be rotten.
I could go on, but I will stop now. Watch for yourself. Especially notice the mini-sermon about “unrighteous responses” given in coordination with the film of African-American protesters walking through the streets.
Really?!?!
I have asked in the past. I am asking again. If anyone has a video clip of an unarmed white man being shot or chocked to death by police, please send it to me.
Any adult who does not understand this simple truth has not been paying attention to the way life works. But, then, many of us go through life with our minds closed and our eyes firmly shut.
To these folks, myunderstanding of life is the only possible, the only acceptable understanding. And it probably should be enforced onto anyone who disagrees with me.
It remains the case that, even in today’s America, race, class, education, political, and economic opportunities all play a sizeable role in determining how people evaluate their lives, set their priorities, and consider their circumstances.
Frederick Douglass was an American statesman, abolitionist, author, orator, and an escaped slave. In 1852, Mr. Douglass was asked to give a speech about the significance of the American Day of Independence, July 4th.
As a former slave fighting in the front lines against the institution of American slavery, his perspective on Independence Day celebrations was very different from that of the average, well-off, white person.
Then, as today, race and class matter. They matter greatly. They make all the difference in how a person understands life, and what events appear worthy of celebration.
As I argue regularly on this blog, similarly stark differences in perspective ought to be heard in Christian evaluations of this secular holiday, the 4th of July.
The fact that the average American Christian typically applauds in the front row of this annual standing ovation for American “freedom,” brazenness, and over consumption is additional testimony to our cultural captivity, not to mention our spiritual blindness.
Listen to what Mr. Douglass said:
You can read the complete text of Douglass’s powerful speech here.
Although Douglass’s entire speech is brilliant, for me, the special genius of Douglass’s wonderful oratory is on fullest display in the following excerpt. (The emphasis is mine):
. . . What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour…
Canadian reporter David Doel of The Rational National shares the speech made by Dante Wright’s aunt at the family press conference held yesterday.
We all need to listen to her. Hear why she not only grieves the death of her nephew but is angry over the way he died. She points out details in the shooter’s actions that raised my eyebrows, too.
Afterwards, Mr. Doel goes on to provide excellent commentary, placing Mr. Wright’s murder in its historical context. His challenge must be taken seriously by everyone, please.
On March 13 Breonna Taylor was murdered by Louisville Metro Police officers while sleeping in her bed.
Police had obtained a “no knock” warrant to search her apartment on the basis of a lie fabricated by the police officers. Three policemen broke down Ms. Taylor’s front door with their weapons draw and entered her home.
Eleven witnesses on the scene all testify that the police never identified themselves.
Taylor’s boyfriend was awoken imagining that dangerous criminals had broken into the apartment. He was correct in this assumption. Except these criminals all wore a police badge, which apparently gives any cop the right to do whatever he/she pleases to any African American, without consequences.
Grabbing his registered handgun, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend fired once to let the intruders know that he was armed. The police fired their weapons 20 or more times into the darkness. Five to eight (reports vary) of those bullets penetrated Breonna’s body, killing her.
Ms. Taylor was an EMT who worked as an emergency room technician. She had no criminal record. A search of her apartment revealed none of the things the police were looking for.
Today, the 3 officers responsible for Taylor’s death were all found not guilty of murder.
One officer was convicted of “wanton endangerment” because his shots penetrated into the surrounding apartments.
Since no one (fortunately) in these other apartments was injured, we are left to conclude that property damage is a more heinous crime in Louisville, Kentucky than murder. Especially when the murder victim is a young black woman.
Once again, Louisville has proven that black lives do not matter in America. But, heck, we will happily let others die, especially if they are people of color, as long as the police will protect our property.
Another obvious lesson from this injustice is the need for all second amendment, militia types to sit down and be quiet. Repeatedly, we have listened to these “patriots” warn about the imminent dangers of heavily armed government officials breaking into the homes of innocent Americans.
Well, Ms. Taylor’s tragedy is the literal enactment of every gun loving, militia member’s worst nightmare. So, where are they? Why aren’t they marching through the streets of Louisville condemning government oppression with their long rifles at the ready, locked and loaded?
I’ll tell you.
They are sitting at home on their fat butts saying and doing nothing because Breonna Taylor was black. All they are truly interested in is “defending” their vision of a white America.
I fear that the majority of evangelical church leaders will also remain silent over the grotesque injustice of this entire affair. If they do eventually speak up, I predict that it will only be to chime in with Fox News propaganda to condemn the “looters,” and “rioters” who are “destroying property.”
Where have these church people been? In which hole in the ground have they buried their useless heads?
The wanton hypocrisy of such “spiritual leadership” knows no bounds.
Can anyone honestly wonder why we see African Americans – at least, those who are caught on film – running from the police or resisting arrest? The reasons are obvious. In far too many cases, the police are the enemy.
I would behave in exactly the same way if I were a black man in America today. AND SO WOULD YOU, MY DEAR READER. Admit it.
Jesus commands his people “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Love requires empathy.
Godly empathy requires carrying (or at least sharing) the other person’s burden — the burden of their oppression; the burden of unrelieved injustice measured out to them; the burden of grief, lament, and loss; the burden of struggling for righteousness, yes RIGHTEOUSNESS, on this earth.
This was the message of the Old Testament prophets. This was Jesus’ message, too.
Any so-called spiritual “leader” who does not already understand this point needs to resign now, for you do NOT understand what it means to live as a citizen of God’s kingdom.
Neither do you grasp Jesus’ ethical teaching.
I don’t know about you, but my next task is to check out the airfare to Louisville. I hope I’ll see you there, too.
It is long, long past time for God’s people to mercilessly attack the walls of American racism and injustice.
It’s long past time for a truly righteous revolution.
Raushard Brooks before he was murdered by the Atlanta police
The way our police officers are trained is not only broken and corrupt, it is corrupting and dangerous.
Ms. Johnstone’s explains how an Atlanta cop shot an African-American man in back as he was fleeing and killed him. I have included an excerpt below:
After watching all these protests against police brutality raging throughout his country since the murder of George Floyd, after being confronted with with all the public outrage about police killing black men day after day in news headline after news headline, after his society forced him to contemplate police violence and his role in it, Garrett Rolfe still decided to kill. After all that, he watched a black man running away from him, posing no threat to him whatsoever, and he decided to kill.
The fact that cops are so thoroughly inoculated against public demand that they change their behavior makes a complete farce of the decoy police “reform” agenda that establishment narrative managers have been actively trying to corral the current protest movement into to kill their support for police abolishment.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “riots are the language of the unheard,” because rioting is the only way for the oppressed to grab the oppressor’s attention.
I can’t help but notice that those who are comfortable, content with the
George Floyd
status quo, and not at risk of being brutalized or murdered by the police, are also first in line to condemn rioting.
Let’s face it. A white person, especially a wealthy, white person, is rarely threatened by police violence – unless you are someone like Jeffrey Epstein who threatens to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of other rich, white people.
The hysterical pearl-clutching we are now witnessing from comfortable, white citizens condemning the riots in Minneapolis is the socially acceptable way of condoning police brutality.
After all, these commentators (like Tucker Carlson) have considerable excess energy stored up from their lack of protesting (much less rioting) against the grotesque acts of excessive force used by police as they regularly murder black people in this country.
Members of the white establishment are free to jog down their streets without fear. Whereas, black joggers are always at risk of being shot by white vigilantes, racists who know they can probably get away with murdering a black person (unless a video of their crime happens to go viral).
The video of George Floyd’s murder shows not one but three police officers kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s passive body, pinning him to the ground. His hands are secured behind his back as he repeats his last words, “I can’t breathe.”
The cop looking towards the camera is unmoved, ignoring the dying man’s pleas for help, for just enough room to breathe. His conscience is unfazed as he literally snuffs the life out of Mr. Floyd.
It’s not the first time America has heard a black man’s suffocating request for breath. Nor will it be the last. At least, not as long as there are public officials like this Mississippi mayor who defended the police by saying, “If you can say you ‘can’t breathe, then you are breathing.”
Prosecuting the cops involved is just another sop thrown from the master’s table.
Yes, prosecution and conviction need to happen. But America’s violent, over-the-top policing problems are not due to a few bad apples. No, the bad apples are spilling out of rotten barrels.
Don’t forget that the cop pressing his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck had been reported for the excessive use of force numerous times. Yet, no action was ever taken to discipline him, to address his misbehavior, or to evaluate his penchant for cruelty, much less to get him off the streets.
The state prosecutor is already talking about the extenuating circumstances that may work in the policeman’s favor when the case finally goes to trial.
Week after week we see the class-based, racist, violent culture of America’s law enforcement establishment. All of it testimony to the fact that our police academies, training, and supervisory mechanisms are all broken. In fact, the entire policing establishment of this country needs to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
Our police are too militarized. They are obviously trained to protect themselves first instead of serving their communities.
Too often they approach the public as it we are the enemy – an attitude entrenched by America’s ludicrous cross-training with the Israeli military, an army which exists only to pulverize Palestinians. It’s no wonder that pulverizing people of color has become a weekly news item for us.
The well-known “solid blue wall” of uniformed unity, where all cops are expected to cover for other cops no matter their crimes, weeds out the honest men and women who refuse to conform to the prevalent culture of might makes right.
What else can we conclude but that there is an element in police culture that condones sadism.
Let’s be honest. Power is intoxicating. Holding power over others can be an elixir to certain pathological personalities. Giving a gun and a badge to someone with an authoritarian personality, twisted by psychopathic tendencies, is a recipe for policing disaster.
Put that person in an environment where his love of control and leanings towards violence are rarely if ever rebuked by his peers (because they have been weeded out as unfit weaklings), and you have what we see in America today.
The police murder people in our streets with seeming impunity.
God’s people need to wake up.
The comfortable white church must shake off the scales of its class-based slumber. The police don’t look at us and assume that we must be criminals, unless perhaps you are among the white under-class struggling to survive. Whereas, that is exactly how they look at people of color, and the poor of all colors, who dare to get too uppity.
Our black, Latino, and Native brothers and sisters live in a completely different world. Frankly, had I been born and raised in their world, I probably would be rioting, too.
Now is a time for white leaders, especially white leaders in the Christian church, to stand up and shout like hell, to rock the boat and insist, not just on prosecutions against murderous cops, but on a complete overhaul of the American system of policing, as it currently exists.
The problem is not a few bad apples but a nation filled with rotten barrels, all spilling rotten, racist, violent thugs into our streets cloaked in blue uniforms. (No, I am not describing all police officers. But don’t evade the point by resorting to straw-man bluster.)
Now is not the time for white Christian leaders to condemn rioting.
Now is a time to repent for our decades of inattention, while we ignored our fellow citizens of color, refusing to take their stories seriously.
Now is the time to listen to the stories of non-white Americans and to confess our self-centeredness that says, “If it doesn’t happen in my neighborhood, then it ain’t my problem.”
Except, wherever the Image of God is being oppressed in this world, it IS the Christian’s problem.
Whenever flagrant, systemic injustice digs its privileged knees into the exposed necks of people loved by God – in a supposedly “Christian country,” no less! – God’s real people must see our national illness as the church’s problem to address.
No, now is not the time to condemn rioting.
Now is the time to condemn the establishment’s war against the poor, the weak, the sick, the powerless, and the marginalized.
Now is the time loudly to condemn social injustice. Now is the time to condemn the power-brokers who exploit their power at the expense of the powerless.
Now is the time for Christian leaders of all colors to stand and shout together, “No more. We demand change. We demand justice for all. And we demand it right now.”
Now is the time for Christian leaders blessed with the expertise, ability, access, and opportunity to roll up their sleeves and work for a more equal, more just society.
Hardly a week goes by without another story appearing about a black citizen, often unarmed, who is killed by the police.
Botham Jean
The latest story concerns the death of Botham Jean. Mr. Jean was shot in his own apartment by an off-duty police officer, Amber Guyer.
Amber Guyger
According to officer Guyger, who lived in the same apartment complex, she mistakenly entered the Mr. Jean’s apartment after dark. Seeing a menacing black man standing in what she believed was the front room of her apartment, she shot him.
Pause for a moment and see how many obvious questions that very odd scenario raises in your mind.
A neighbor, however, reports that he heard banging on Mr. Jean’s door and then a conversation between Jean and Guyger. Ms. Guyger is alleged to have yelled, “let me in.”
The Texas rangers are investigating.
Call me kooky, but forgive me for not trusting the police to police themselves.
Mr. Jean’s mother.
Mr. Jean’s family describes him as a Christian man, active in his local church. He had never been arrested, nor had he ever had a run-in with the police, that is until officer Guyger shot him dead.
Ms. Guyger was arrested briefly and released on her own recognizance after only a few hours. She seems to have used some of that time to scrub her computer. I wonder why. Oddly, she forgot to erase her Pinterest page which contains a good deal of hateful, violent and racist material.
Mr. Jean, on the other hand, has suffered from post-mortem character assassination. The police quickly obtained a warrant to search his apartment. Apparently, in Dallas, Texas being the unarmed, black victim of a police shooting — in your own home, no less — is reason enough to be suspected of criminal activity.
The police didn’t discover any weapons but reportedly uncovered a bag of marijuana.
Excuse me again if I take another moment to pause and wonder if that bag was planted by the officers conducting the search. After all, for some police departments, planting evidence is more common than shooting unarmed people in their homes (see here and here).
Only in the twisted world of Fox News is the ex post facto discovery of a bag of marijuana relevant to the killing of an unarmed man with no criminal record.
But, of course, we can’t forget that Mr. Jean was black. Neither can we
NYC action in solidarity with Ferguson. Mo, encouraging a boycott of Black Friday Consumerism.
forget that this happened in America.
Several recent studies reveal that black Americans are 2.5 to 2.7 times more likely to be shot by police than are white people. The disparity becomes even more striking when we turn to the shooting of unarmed people.
People of color compose about 37% of the US population, yet they make up 62.7% of the unarmed victims shot by police.
Another study investigating police killings from 2014 to 2015 concluded that:
“The disproportionate killing of black men occurs…because of the institutional and organizational racism in police departments and the criminal justice system’s targeting minority communities with policies—like stop and frisk and the war on drugs—that have more destructive effects.”
Demonstrators march in protest against a grand jury’s decision on Monday not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014, in New York. The grand jury’s decision has inflamed racial tensions across the U.S. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Obviously, something has gone dangerously wrong in the way America’s police officers are being trained and the atmosphere in which they do their jobs.
All lives do not matter in America today. All lives are not equal here. Some lives count more than others. Mr. Jean’s death and the behavior of the Dallas police department is only the latest evidence.
Many who sneer at the Black Lives Matter movement are moral posers, pretending to a superior moral judgment by pasting “All Lives Matter” (the moral universalists) or “Blue Lives Matter” (the ethical particularists) bumper stickers on their cars. Tragically, such protests simply reveal how very, very deep are the wells of ignorance and incipient racism in white America.
To insist that “all lives matter” is to fain innocence while whispering behind a raised hand that “black lives don’t matter.”
Such reactionary slogans are rhetorically camouflaged “f**k you” bombs, equivalent to the old segregationist signs directing “Negroes to the Back of the Bus.”
Honestly, to insist that “all lives matter” in response to a movement led by African-Americans working to change a society where people who look like them are shot, killed, and arrested by police at wildly disproportionate rates is a stunning display of white privilege in and of itself.
It is a bold-faced lie to say that all lives matter in the United States.
That is why, as a Christian, an evangelical, a disciple of Jesus Christ, a citizen of God’s kingdom on earth, and the grandfather of a precious little black girl, I believe that every follower of Jesus must stand up and say, YES, BLACK LIVES MATTER.
Some months ago, I asked my son-in-law what it was like to grow up black in America.
I had recently watched the following video about this question, and I wanted to know more about his own experience growing up in the mid-west. Did his parents have similar talks with him? Please watch:
“Yes,” he said. “They did.”
“My mother would never let me go out in anything but my best cloths. She told me that I was always representing my people, and I had to be careful that I made a good impression. I couldn’t let others get the wrong idea about me, to think that I was a trouble-maker because of the way I dressed.
“As I became older, she would remind me to always be polite and cooperative when the police stopped me while driving. I had to be careful not to give them a reason to feel threatened or make them nervous.”
I now know that his mother waited nervously for him to return home every time he went out, praying that her son was safe, that he had not been pulled over or arrested, detained or questioned for the crime of being a black youth in a white neighborhood.
When I was a growing up, my mother never once warned me about behaving myself because I was a representative of my people.
She never made me wear my nice clothes when I went out to play for fear that someone might see me as a trouble-maker or criminal-wanna-be simply because of the way I dressed.
I never gave a second thought to “being friendly and polite” to the police when I was driving, no matter the neighborhood I was passing through.
But then, I am white.
And that, my friends, whether you are willing to believe it or not, makes all the difference in this country of ours. There ain’t no such thing as a post-racial America.
When I first posted the above video on my Facebook page, an old acquaintance angrily commented that she found it highly offensive! Why? Because these black folks were complaining about the way police officers treated them…
Of course, my friend was a church-going, white woman.
Yes, folks. Black lives do not count for much in white America. Discrimination is alive and well. Racism lives, to some degree or another, in all our hearts. Simply recall the very abbreviated list of recent incidents listed below:
Starbucks closed 8,000 of its stores earlier this week as it provided racial sensitivity training seminars for all its employees. This after employees in a Philadelphia store called the police on two black men sitting at a table waiting for a friend.
The two young men were taken away in handcuffs for the crime of waiting at a table without first buying a cup of coffee. Honestly, would that ever have happened to a white customer — who wasn’t filthy, drug-addled and brandishing a weapon?
We all know the answer.
MSNBC recently hosted a televised forum called “Everyday Racism in America” where average black Americans told their stories of coping with everyday racism as a matter of survival.
Black men, women and children continue to be needlessly assaulted, shot, wounded and killed by police officers across this country. 31% of the people killed by police in America are black, even though they only compose 13% of the population.
Perhaps you were as shocked as I was to learn about Gregory Hill, the father of 3 now-orphaned children. Mr. Hill was killed by Florida police when they shot at him through his garage door. Someone passing through the neighborhood, picking up their child from school, called the police to complain that his music was too loud.
If Mr. Hill had been white would he be dead today, shot and killed for drinking a beer and listening to loud music inside his own garage? We all know the answer to that question.
In 2014, the Bundy family staged an armed standoff after commandeering a public lands facility. Brandish high-powered rifles, they threatened to shoot any law enforcement officers called to the scene. Not only were none of the Bundys or their armed supporters ever shot, but early this year their case was dismissed from court.
Compare that to what happened in a Florida court’s treatment of Mr. Hill’s family.
When Mr. Hill’s widow filed a civil suit against the police, not only were the police officers who killed her husband found not guilty, but she was awarded a whopping settlement of $4. 1 dollar per life (counting the 3 children), which was later reduced to 4 cents because 99% of the blame, according to the court, belonged to Mr. Hill.
For those who have the eyes to see, the brutal evidence is self-evident every single day. Black lives do not matter in this country. Well, in Florida, they are worth something. About 1 cent each.
Every Christian in this country, but especially every white Christian in this country, must make it our duty to stand with our brothers and sisters of color and do whatever we can to speak out and oppose this ingrained, systematic, unreflective wickedness that sees the other as less than themselves.
The multi-ethnic, inter-racial church of Jesus Christ ought to be in the front lines of this struggle.
basis of 
are secured behind his back as he repeats his last words, “I can’t breathe.”
It’s not the first time America has heard a black man’s suffocating request for breath. Nor will it be the last. At least, not as long as there are public officials like this 
entrenched by America’s ludicrous cross-training with the Israeli military, an army which exists only to pulverize Palestinians. It’s no wonder that pulverizing people of color has become a weekly news item for us.
them are shot, killed, and arrested by police at wildly disproportionate rates is a stunning display of white privilege in and of itself.
of 3 now-orphaned children. Mr. Hill was killed by Florida police when they shot at him through his garage door. Someone passing through the neighborhood, picking up their child from school, called the police to complain that his music was too loud.
none of the Bundys or their armed supporters ever shot, but early this year their 
children), which was later reduced to 4 cents because 99% of the blame, according to the court, belonged to Mr. Hill.