And Now John Lewis Dies…

AS IF 2020 WASN’T ALREADY BAD ENOUGH, NOW JOHN LEWIS DIES. REST IN PEACE JOHNLEWIS.

Asked by a CBS inter­view­er why black peo­ple are dying at the hands of police, Donald Trump replied in a pre­dictable racist fash­ion, “so are white peo­ple, so are white peo­ple”, what a ter­ri­ble ques­tion to ask?
The sad tragedy in that answer from this most inglo­ri­ous of morons, is that there was (a) no sense of the math involved in the dynam­ic, in that the ques­tion came out of the real­i­ty of the 13% black pop­u­la­tion as against the 60% white stake, and that blacks are killed by white race sol­diers, (police) at 3.5 times the rate of white peo­ple. (b) the igno­ra­mus in chief nev­er both­ered to address the over­ar­ch­ing issue of police abuse and vio­lent mur­der of American cit­i­zens, Black white & brown.

Missing from his answer, was any recog­ni­tion that regard­less of race, police were killing peo­ple they ought not to be killing, and that in and of itself is a pub­lic health cri­sis.
In fact, even as the igno­ra­mus in chief failed to grasp the seri­ous­ness of the cri­sis police pose, not just to the safe­ty and secu­ri­ty of the American peo­ple, but to the sta­bil­i­ty of the American democ­ra­cy, the Minneapolis city coun­cil was vot­ing to declare racism a pub­lic health crisis. 

The Minneapolis City Council declared racism a pub­lic health emer­gency in the city Friday, vow­ing to allo­cate fund­ing and oth­er resources to “name, reverse, and repair the harm done” to peo­ple of col­or in the city. The res­o­lu­tion was unan­i­mous­ly approved near­ly two months after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by Minneapolis police while in cus­tody in south Minneapolis. Days after his death, Council Vice President Andrea Jenkins called on the coun­cil to define racism as a pub­lic health crisis.

The police vio­lence being wit­nessed across America is the man­i­fes­ta­tion of the hatred that cer­tain seg­ments of the white pop­u­la­tion har­bor for African-Americans. That hatred is man­i­fest­ed every day on talk radio, on [Faux tele­vi­sion] and it plays out in the fan­tas­tic fal­la­cy of Karens and Kens whose busi­ness it is to tell black peo­ple what they can and can­not do as cit­i­zens of this repub­lic.
Nothing that Karen or Ken does is is dan­ger­ous as the pow­er police wield, they have the pow­er of life and death, and they are not flinch­ing, nei­ther are they shy about using that pow­er.
The res­i­dent evil in the White House has unleashed that mur­der­ous hatred on every street and boule­vard in America.
Its tox­i­c­i­ty is pal­pa­ble, its con­se­quences severe, and it’s ten­ta­cles stifling. 

Mike Beckles is a for­mer police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer,
he is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
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