Read on Twitter
A couple of weeks ago, my friends at @BlackBerea (a Christ-centred, culturally conscious ministry to the Black British community) asked me to do an article with reflections on how a Christian should respond to the murder of #AhmaudArbery.
As the week progressed, the slogan that came up around Arbery, #SayHisName, might as well have been #saytheirnames as the list of stories featuring others unnecessarily slain after Arbery grew.
Is this new behaviour? Hardly. Is it just over the past decade? No - that's just when everyday people started carrying smart phones with cameras and social media and burst the bubble of complacency that America was a post racial society. Yesterday brought more news...
Twitter yesterday morning: a woman calling cops: "an *African American* man is threatening me and my dog". He had asked her to leash her dog in compliance with park rules. She weaponised his ethnicity to appeal to implicit biases, and imperilled every black man in the park.
Twitter yesterday evening: footage of #GeorgeFloyd repeatedly gasping "I can't breathe" while a policeman's knee was in his neck. He died. Seem familiar? Wade through other unarmed black bodies to 2014 when #EricGarner said the same thing before he died.
If you're not up to speed on what I'm referring to, here are the links:
https://mobile.twitter.com/melodyMcooper/status/1264965252866641920
And
https://mobile.twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1265543203362668550
https://mobile.twitter.com/melodyMcooper/status/1264965252866641920
And
https://mobile.twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1265543203362668550
My article was published at the weekend. It will sadly prove evergreen. The narrative is so predictable, the defences and deflections so stale, the results so similar that names could be swapped out and a few details changed but everything else remain intact. May God have mercy.
Are you that guy who says "he must have done something to deserve it", "let’s wait till all the facts come out”, "you can't know this was about race", "well _____ thinks differently and he's black" etc. Read this: https://www.blackberea.com/blog/2020/5/23/love-in-the-face-of-a-lynching
Are you someone who says, "white people don't care", "I've never heard a pastor speak out on these things", "I feel so many things and I'm struggling to process this", please read this: https://www.blackberea.com/blog/2020/5/23/love-in-the-face-of-a-lynching
