~~November 28, 2014~~
The Truth About The Ferguson Case That Some People Really Can’t Accept
Adam Mordecai wrote the following post in Upworthy. I feel a need to share this and continue to give a voice to that African American (Black) community in this country. I feel a need to add my “white” voice to their concerns … that’s the least that I can do.
I’ve read post after post about the current (and previous – seems like it’s never changed) plight of the black young men in this country. How many have been killed? Most of them unarmed …. I think we will never know.
~ADAM WRITES~
“Some things I have learned:
ProPublica recently did an in-depth analysis and found that black kids between ages 15-19 are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by cops than white kids of the same age. That’s an insane statistic. That’s per capita, not total. If you are a black teenage boy, you have a 21x higher risk of being shot by police than a white teenage boy.
Also, in 2010, federal prosecutors took 162,000 cases to a grand jury. You know how many DIDN’T go to trial? Eleven.
Mike Brown’s family will never get a state criminal trial to get justice for their son. And the testimony that denied them that right technically doesn’t make any sense. Seriously, go read it.
Police have a hard job. What they do is something I couldn’t ever do. But you know what they rarely have? Accountability. In this case, the prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, always gets indictments — unless it’s a cop. He’s had five cop-involved killing cases and zero indictments. Again, five cases against police haven’t made it to trial at all. He could get an indictment if he wanted one.
The fact that this didn’t at least get a trial infuriates me. But my being upset isn’t that interesting. I’m white. People will take me seriously because I don’t have the “bias” of being black. But actual black people, who live with this every day, are constantly second-guessed because they are somehow “biased.” As though not wanting to get shot by police at a 21x higher rate is a bias. It’s a daily reality of being black in America.
Danez Smith experiences this every day. He is 21x more likely than me to be shot by a police officer. And so he wrote “Not an Elegy for Mike Brown.”
“As it appears in … “
http://www.upworthy.com/the-truth-about-the-ferguson-case-that-some-people-really-cant-accept?c=ag
~~Not an Elegy for Mike Brown~~
~~Published on Nov 17, 2014~~
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