1/ I've been sitting on this for a minute, but I feel like I need to say it because it's burning me up inside. It feels like the hits keep coming. First, we had Ahmaud Arbery who was murdered. If it weren't for a tape being leaked to the public, his poor family may have never had

2/ a chance at seeking justice. In the midst of researching his case so that I could write about it, we also have the murder of Breonna Taylor happen in Louisville due to a no-knock raid. As if her death weren't bad enough, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker gets charged because he

3/ defended their home against people he thought were intruders. The police never identified themselves and just kicked the door in. Thankfully, it looks like those charges have since been dropped; however, I want to know when will they look at charging the officers involved with

4/ Breonna's murder? In the midst of watching these two stories unfold, we now have within the span of one week several other instances in which black people have found themselves targets: 1. 9 year old Alejandro Ripley is murdered by his mother Patricia. She drowns him in a

5/ canal; however, to divert police attention, she initially tells them that two black men had abducted her son.2. Christopher Keys, a youth pastor in Macon GA, told police he had been carjacked and kidnapped by two black men, taken to a hotel and robbed of $70 cash and his cell

6/ phone. This ends up being a lie, because he was actually at the hotel after trying to solicit a male prostitute; however, he needed something to cover him so kidnapped by black men was the excuse given. 3. Christian Cooper is going bird watching in Ramble Park (part of Central

7/ Park in NY) and sees Amy Cooper with her dog off leash. Ms. Cooper becomes so incensed at having been asked to put her dog on the leash (which is the rule for that area of the park) that she escalates the situation and calls the cops. While on the phone with the police she

8/ tells them that an "African American man is threatening her and her dog" in the process of doing this, she's actually choking her dog while yanking on his collar. 4. A video surfaces and goes viral on social media yesterday of a Minneapolis police officer with his knee on the

9/ neck of George Lloyd. The first clip that I saw was a little over two minutes and it made my stomach turn and tears fill my eyes. I watch as Mr. Lloyd is attempting to turn his body to the side in an attempt to get oxygen. His hands are already cuffed; therefore, there's no

10/ need for this officer to have his knees on his neck. As if this weren't bad enough, another photo showing a different angle, shows that there were three officers on him. There was the one officer we see callously keeping his knee on his neck, and two others holding his arms

11/ and legs. Why was all of this necessary? They did this for several minutes, resulting in Mr. Lloyd dying. What made this even worse for me was hearing some of the bystanders pleading with the officer to get off of him and to also check his pulse when it looked like he had

12/ stopped breathing.I am so tired of seeing things like this happening and most importantly, I'm sick of some people trying to justify it. Stuff like this happens when you pathologize a group of people and dehumanize them. Black people are constantly summed up by statistics and

13/ pathologized as nothing more than a bunch of uneducated criminals. You have books like the Bell Curve that try and sell the thought that black people are inherently intellectually inferior. You have "red pilled" people on Youtube along with people of the alt-right that teach

14/ white people that they are currently enduring genocide (white replacement ideology). They're taught that their threat is black and brown people. Your actions are going to always follow what you believe. If you have a group of people being taught to fear people that are

15/ different from them for some of the reasons I just cited, it's not surprising to see why we have so many instances of black people having the police called on them for such innocuous reasons like: falling asleep in the commons area in a dorm, attempting to enter a pool at a

16/ complex that they live in, attempting to enter their own apartment building, having a barbecue, etc. We don't see this happening to this degree with any other group of people. As traumatizing as it is to keep seeing things like this and for some of us, experiencing our own

17/ fair share of racism, it's even worse when you're trying to unpack this only to find yourself being gaslit. If you call this type of behavior out, you're accused of creating division. My question to this is: how can I create something that already existed? That divide has

18/ been here, my pointing it out doesn't create it. Calling this out also gets you labeled as having a "victim mentality". The worse one for me though is the accusation that we don't care about "black on black" crime. First of all, this is a misnomer. Intraracial violence is

19/ high amongst all groups because we are more likely to live around people that are the same race as we are. Second, we are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. I find that most people who make accusations like this aren't aware of the actual work going on in

20/ various places to address this issue. Do a 5 minute google search and you'll see that this notion that black people don't care about crime in their community is patently false. I'm going to leave this video here that I hope will be able to better demonstrate what I'm saying:

21/