I'm sure you've heard about it. A 21-year-old man walked into Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston and killed nine people. The shooter was white. All of the victims, including state senator Clementa Pinckney, were black.
This saddens me. Of course it does. This should sadden everyone, though God knows we've had enough incidents like this to be numb to it by now. And more than that, this has disillusioned me.
Because this shooting, as heinous and horrific as it is, is not the first racially motivated crime to have been committed recently. Heard about the Baltimore Riots? Those began after a black man died in police custody. "I Can't Breathe" became a symbolic phrase after Eric Garner was choked to death by the NYPD. (And he wasn't the only one.) Have you heard the name Tamir Rice? Probably not, because the police probably don't want you to know that a 12-year-old boy was shot and killed by a Cleveland officer.
If I sound angry, it's because I am. This keeps happening and happening and happening again, and each time I hope that this time it'll be different. That this time, people will wake up and look around and see the dystopia we've created, where a police officer walks free after killing a seven-year-old black girl.
At least this time, with this shooting in Charleston, people are paying attention and acknowledging that yes, this monster was racially motivated. But how long is this going to last? Eventually this story will fade--they always do. Some other newsworthy event will happen and we'll stop talking about this one. And when the next incident of police brutality happens, maybe we'll just ignore it.
Because people like pretending. We like to pretend that there's this order of things, that the cops are the good guys, and if they're accosting someone, that person must be the bad guy. We like to think that if someone can just walk into a church and shoot people point-blank, then that someone must be mentally ill, because no one is monstrous enough to just do that.
But we're lying to ourselves. We're pretending, and it's all a facade. Cops can be just as dishonest and, dare I say it, racist as anyone else. Some people really are monstrous enough to go into a church and shoot people. (The Charleston shooter was not mentally ill.)
We like pretending, and when something doesn't match the narrative, we're happy to just ignore it. Media outlets will call a criminal mentally ill, a loner, delusional, anything to avoid calling him a racist and a terrorist. We're happy to listen them, maybe remark on how sad it is, and then wait for the buzz to die down so we can go back to talking about celebrities and cats.
This will happen again, you know. It'll probably happen many more times before we finally wake up and realize what's going on. Ferguson and Charleston will both happen again, I think, and there will be a lot of people who never receive justice.
I'm sick of this. I want to wake up now and find this all to be a bad dream. I wish I didn't feel compelled to pray protection over people on the street, just because they're dark-skinned. I wish I could have prevented some of this, somehow. I wish there was more I could do.
There's not a lot I can do, actually. But I will pray for the survivors in Charleston, and the families of those who were shot. And I will ask you to do the same. Don't ignore this. Please, don't ignore this. Talk about it. Raise awareness. And maybe someday, things will change.
Until then, I'll keep praying and thinking and talking.
God bless.
