While You Refuse To Look At The Imagery They Are Busy Killing Us…

War is ugly. To many of us the sight of blood is not some­thing we rel­ish. Watching the life choked out of anoth­er human being is ghast­ly.
Seeing some­one kneel on the neck of anoth­er human being until the life leaves his body is some­thing that chal­lenges our con­cept of this thing we call human­i­ty.
Watching a kneel­ing man with his hands in the air end up with a bar­rage of bul­lets pumped into his body is beyond comprehension.

Seeing a man dri­ving along the road with his fam­i­ly stopped and mur­dered as he sat strapped in his car is far too much for some of us to take.
Seeing and unarmed man gunned down forty-one bul­lets fly­ing his way and all he had that caused him to die was his black skin is way too much.
African-Americans are in a state of war­fare, it is against a pow­er­ful force that has demon­strat­ed for hun­dreds of years that it has no com­punc­tion about killing us.

So when we say I can­not watch anoth­er video of these killings I do get that. However, I want you to under­stand that by doing so, you are doing the bid­ding of those who want to see our total demise.
The ghast­ly imagery is sup­posed to shock us and cause us to emerge from our slum­ber. If we con­tin­ue to turn our heads away we will nev­er be inspired to act.
It is exact­ly what those who hate us want us to do, [to treat each killing as an iso­lat­ed inci­dent], not as the sys­temic pat­tern of vio­lence aimed at us because they hate us and want us exter­mi­nat­ed.
All through­out slav­ery, our peo­ple were sub­ject­ed to con­di­tions that some can­not even imag­ine.
Those bar­bar­ic acts were inflict­ed on us by a degen­er­ate peo­ple who were European crim­i­nals. They were giv­en the choice between going to the colonies or face death.

The bar­bar­ic acts that have char­ac­ter­ized slav­ery, the peri­ods called recon­struc­tion, the Jim Crow era, to present-day have not been iso­lat­ed inci­dents of white peo­ple com­mit­ting acts of aggres­sion against us. They were and still, are gov­ern­ment poli­cies cod­i­fied into laws and enforced by what became [police] the thing that emerged out of slave patrols.
If you believe that peri­od of endem­ic gov­ern­ment sup­pres­sion of black peo­ple was a one-off event, then sad­ly we are in for anoth­er 500 years of this tyran­ny and muti­la­tion at their hands.

If you believe in turn­ing your oth­er cheek, if you believe turn­ing away is in your best inter­est, because you can­not bear to see the slaugh­ter of your sons and fathers, sis­ters and broth­ers, cousins and uncles, then pre­pare your­selves for this to con­tin­ue long after we are all gone, go ahead be my guest. Then it will our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, yours and mine, bear­ing the lash­es at the hands of their chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, because they are not going to sur­ren­der white priv­i­lege with­out a fight.

The idea that a peo­ple who have been enslaved bru­tal­ized and mur­dered, who have suf­fered the indig­ni­ties of anoth­er race’s booth-heels on their necks, would appeal to some per­ceived bet­ter angels with­in those very same oppres­sors is a laugh­able absur­di­ty.
Refusing to face the real­i­ties of what is hap­pen­ing now & turn­ing away from the grue­some nature of it all, lit­er­al­ly guar­an­tees that it will con­tin­ue for gen­er­a­tions to come.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, busi­ness­man, researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.