This Is Why We’re Mad About the Shooting of Mike Brown, Kara Brown, Jezebel, August 11, 2014
As a black person in America, it’s getting exhausting to still have to explain, in the year 2014, your right to exist in this country. To explain that you are a human being whose value sits no lower than anyone else’s. To explain our basic humanity. And perhaps worst of all, to explain exactly why we are outraged.
We shouldn’t have to explain why it’s not acceptable for unarmed teenagers to be gunned down by the police.
We shouldn’t have to explain why even though Mike Brown’s life didn’t matter to you or a Ferguson police officer, it mattered to someone.
Political Ambitionz az a Rioter, RobtheIdealist, Orchestrated Pulse, August 12, 2014
Following the insurrection, participants continued to discuss the uprising in political terms. DeAndre Smith said, “I believe that they’re too much worried about what’s going on to their stores and their commerce and everything. They’re not worried about the murder.” The second man added, “I just think what happened was necessary, to show the police that they don’t run everything”. The first man then interjects, “I don’t think they did enough”.
In a second interview, Smith expanded on his belief in the riot as a viable political strategy.
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Smith identifies what so many “anti-racists” and leftists fail to understand — that racism is not an issue of moral character. He recognizes that the broader economic order facilitates and benefits from racial subjugation, and so, he’s looking for ways to intervene and disrupt that process. Not only is this a more substantive form of political analysis than what is often offered on the Left, but it’s perhaps the only way to successfully address entrenched racial hierarchy.
Racism in Politics-Putting Skin in the Game, Burr Deming, Mad Mike’s America, August 12, 2014
Some of us inwardly apologize for our own unthinking acquiescence in the demeaning of gay people. We might find it easier to acknowledge at least the possibility of other unexamined biases. Not everyone has that advantage. Not everyone chooses to see it as an opportunity.
Some racism is like that. It is unexamined except superficially. We skim along the surface of a single assumption. Racists are unspeakably evil. We, and those we include in our circles of friends, are not evil. What could be more clear? They, and we, are not touched by racism, except in our rejection of it.
Most bigotry is not binary, turned off and on as you would a light switch. A line drawn between racism and good will can be fuzzy. Sometimes it is so blurred it is not a line at all. It can be more like a rheostat. The light shines and dims in degrees as the dial is slowly turned.
