#Justise4All No. 14

⟦On Brussels⟧

Waking up to the news in Belgium this week reminded me of just how insensitive, socially unresponsive, and poorly reported these incidents are. All these "journalists," TV personalities, and politicians...they don't give a damn about the several dozen dead, or the injured. They care about saying something to keep their job and keep them popular with their circle of attention. They care about making sure that you have an emotional response to their nonsense. They care about themselves, and the people to whom they must answer. And you eat it up. You get mad, you get upset, you get scared, all the things that should be secondary to using the two things that can help prevent future incidents like this: your heart and your brain.

With due respect to those who lost their lives in this act of violence, how many people die every day through similar violent acts, and we either don't know about it, or choose not to care? How many people this week committed suicide, or lost their lives due to complications from AIDS, or become victims of rape and sexual assault? All things that each of us can help alleviate or prevent in the simplest ways, many of those ways involving just being kind to people and thinking before we act. But no, we instead wait for the sensationalist theatrics of an admittedly unconscionable crime against humanity to remember just how human we really are. We want the spectacle of death to give us a nudge on the shoulder and force us to re-examine what it is our lives are about, instead of being thankful everyday for the life that we have and using it to make someone else's life better.

I want nothing more in this world then for people to live in peace. I want nothing more than for justice to be done for people who are constantly being robbed of it. I want nothing more than for people to be free. But as long as we are imprisoned by this morbid addiction to death and violence, then death and violence are all we can expect from people who have nothing left to live for. What else besides desperation leads people to think that constant violence and bloodshed will bring them the answers, long-term ones, to satisfy their desires? What else besides the hope for something better in death or perpetuating it would anyone want to take the life of another? And what is it going to take for us to realize just how wrong that actually is?

When you look at the news today, or read your local paper, and they talk about places like Belgium, or Istanbul, or Pakistan, or the ravaged war-torn places of the world like Africa, always remember that you have the potential to be a critical thinker, and that you have the opportunity, as someone who is not directly experiencing these tragic events, to find out just how and why they happen. Pray for the dead, that should go without saying. But it is time that we as a human family stop waiting for tragedy to inspire us to be better people. It shouldn't be a tragic event that spurs us to action to love one another and help each other get free. Your opportunity to stop people from becoming desperate and willing to rob other people of their dignity, their humanity, and their lives, starts right now. Seize that opportunity. Be kind. Think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. Do the research before you condemn anyone. And most importantly, never forget that at the forefront of what so many people are struggling for when it comes to topics like justice and liberation, is love.

#Justise4All No. 13

⟦On Stereotypes, US Law Enforcement, and Ignorance⟧


Though I’m confident I have noted this before amongst friends and social media forums, I must reiterate a very interesting and poignant observation I’ve made when talking bout social justice issues, particularly when it’s about law enforcement as it pertains to Communities of Color in the US. I find this observation to be sad, generally speaking, because while it is certainly subjective in nature, it is no less honest, and one that various colleagues have noted as well.

What I’ve observed is that when speaking about topics like police brutality, corruption, and summary executions of unarmed Black + Brown Americans, in the midst of getting great insight from the many police officers who are family/friends, the most offended, angry, cold responses about these topics, even just as a tertiary social reference, have been from White American male cops. Across the board, my engaging with White officers who are women, and People of Color employed by Police Departments, even if the discussions have been heated, has always rendered a sense of mutual understanding and respect. For myself and many others, this sentiment, unfortunately, has not been shared by their White male counterparts, to the point where I’ve lost a good friend and musical colleague whom I believe is now a NYPD Detective. Quite simply, he told me to screw off; I believe the last text was, “Go back to your bubble.”

When you run up against mental walls like this, one should be able to understand why the concept of nonviolence and peaceful negotiations suddenly become a useless form of disrupting the system to demand justice. How do you fight people who don’t want to listen, and will shut you down from the moment you engage them?

The latest example of this came from a man - a retired NYPD officer - who saw one of my Facebook posts, and responded by saying: “Your ignorance is astounding.” Not one to take petty insults lightly, I engaged him to demand his reasoning. What I got back was a list of his accomplishments on the job and an angry, offensive take on my perspective. There was no hope of getting through to him about the things I inherently understood about identifying as a Person of Color, how that affects my interactions with police officers, or the historic and present-day antagonizing experienced by marginalized communities on behalf of law enforcement nationwide. The cheapest comebacks had to do with “Bad Apples,” and “Black on Black crime.”

For a man who professed his nearly two dozen years on the job, this kind of glancing blow to a justifiable point of debate solidified what I already had been realizing when it came to this specific issue; namely, that there would likely be this kind of response when speaking to/with White male cops about this, and that this stereotypical indignation must be taken into account when seeking solutions to these problems. As far as addressing the original insult, I will say this much:

Calling someone ignorant on the basis of your personal convictions means you not only misunderstand the definition of the word, but you're using your emotional response to what you are experiencing as justification for your insult. Ignorance, in its purest form, has neither a positive nor a negative connotation. It merely means that one does not know or understand a particular person, place, thing, or idea. In fact, society might be a better place if, when its members are told of their ignorance in a particular area, they didn't immediately take it as an insult but as an impetus to learn more about whatever it is their accuser claims is beyond their scope.

I have never, not once, claimed to be someone who knew or experienced the idiosyncrasies associated with being a police officer. Not only would that be ignorant, it would be a lie. I'm a terrible liar. What I do know is that the individual ability to hold other people accountable to the law, as is part of the job of a law enforcement officer, provides that individual with a form of power. What I also know is that power corrupts. What I've come to understand about corruption is that it happens the moment we receive power, and that said corruption doesn't have to be some major scandal at your job. It can be as minor as taking the few privileges and creature-comforts that are not legally a part of the job but that come with the package.

In this country, we are dealing with an institution that is not only inherently racially biased, but that is inherently prone to corruption. And that propensity towards existing above the laws which this institution is supposed to respectfully enforce has prematurely ended countless lives and eviscerated the lifeblood of entire communities. So I find it odd, if not sad, that people would call me ignorant, when far too much research and history proves me right. In the end, how much good you do in any given situation will almost certainly be weighed against the times you're not willing to identify and work to eliminate the things that stop you from doing good, or simply ignore the bad.

Because that, my ‘astounded’ friend, is called WILLFUL ignorance. And "the power of willful ignorance cannot be overstated."