I was 17 years old.
I was standing on the street with three of my friends and a guy I didn’t know very well. This street and neighborhood weren’t all that different from the street and neighborhood Michael Brown was killed on.
The guy I didn’t know was there because one of my friends wanted to buy some weed.
We were doing an illegal activity, no question about it. My friend was buying weed from some guy. At 17, none of this crossed my mind, I was born and raised on the North Side of Saint Louis, MO, everyone was buying and selling weed.
While we were standing there, cops rolled up, guns drawn.
Let me stop the story right there, I’ll get back to it in a second.
I was 17 years old, I was in the park with three of my friends. We were drinking and another guy I didn’t know very well pulled up. He was the guy they were buying weed from.
We were doing an illegal activity, no question about it. My friend was buying weed from some guy I didn’t know. At 17, none of this crossed my mind, going to school at Bishop Dubourg High School everyone was drinking and smoking weed.
While we were hanging out, cops rolled up and asked us what we were up to this evening.
You are smart, what was the difference in these two true stories that happened to me?
The way these stories end are both quite different as you can imagine. I am very lucky neither myself nor my friends weren’t another statistic. After guns being drawn on us, we were searched and told that we fit the “profile” of robbers in the area. After figuring out we didn’t pull the robbery we were let go, with no apology or anything. In the park after the cops asked us about our evening, we were warned that “drinking” in the park wasn’t allowed and told to have a nice night, but that was only after the cop asked me, but not the four white guys with me if I was in a gang or sold drugs.
When I listened to the prosecutor explain why Darren Wilson wouldn’t be charged in the death of Michael Brown, I just kept coming back to one thing that had nothing to do with witness statements, forensics, autopsy reportes or anything that happened after Wilson and Brown got into an altercation in the car.
What if Darren Wilson had just treated Michael Brown like a human and not a threat? Criminal behavior should be punished with an arrest, not an execution.
If Michael Brown was a white kid walking down the street in the suburbs, would Darren Wilson’s tone, demeanor and actions have been different? It shouldn’t even be a question because unless you are extremely naive or just an out and out racists you know the answer.
You know why I am scared of the police? You know why black people in general feel uncomfortable not just around the police but white people in general?
We are never given the benefit of the doubt. It’s shoot first and ask questions later. It isn’t protect and serve, it is execute and eliminate. The one of many things about Trayvon Martin’s death that bothers me to this day is that the 911 operator told George Zimmerman to fall back and wait for the police, but black people never get that benefit of the doubt.
12-year-old kid has a play gun in a state where carrying a gun in the open is legal is murdered. A guy checking out a fake gun in a Walmart doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt that he could be harmless and is executed. They are seen thugs, animals and a threat. People assume the worse from black people and it is heartbreaking that so many of these deaths could be avoidable. If you are black you are a suspect, you aren’t presumed innocent, you are always guilty until proven innocent. The scariest thing about it though? The cops seem to get away with it every single time.
It doesn’t matter if Michael Brown was a good kid, bad kid, had his hands up, to his side, was walking towards or away from Darren Wilson. It should have never gotten to that point. Walking down the street and being a petty criminal shouldn’t give you the green light to execute someone. I don’t care if Michael Brown has robbed Bank of America, he was unarmed and Darren Wilson was fully aware of that. Before the fatal shots were fired, Michael Brown had already been shot and was running away with no weapon, exactly where is the threat? How was Michael Brown wounded, with no weapon in the middle of the street supposed to harm Darren Wilson? I read the grand jury testimony were Wilson said Brown looked like a demon and Hulk Hogan and somehow at over 300 lbs with multiple bullets wounds and no weapon was a raging bull that make Wilson feel even after he has shot him multiple times he needed to go in for the kill. Wilson wanted to kill Michael Brown and so he did, it is as simple as that. Why he did it, you can debate that until the end of time, but one thing is clear if he didn’t treat Michael Brown like a subhuman from the beginning, Brown maybe would be dealing with a minor petty theft charge, with the rest of his life in front of him.
Think about this logically, there was enough conflicting evidence to at least go to trial, but we couldn’t even get an indictment. The whole point of a trial is to sort out the conflicting evidence, but they decided day one Darren Wilson would never be charged and found ways to make it happen. When I read Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony it doesn’t even match up with the initial comments and statements made by his own department. For example, his chief said he had no idea Brown was involved in any robbery when all of this happened, then later they tied it all together. He was well coached and while it certainly could be true Michael Brown wasn’t a choir boy, I am 100% all of this could have been avoided and would have been avoided if Michael Brown was white. I am not a lawyer, but I am pretty sure if the situations were reversed the prosecutor wouldn’t have went out of his way to clear Michael Brown even there was conflicting evidence.
Interesting comment on Reddit about grand jury's, the prosecutor, etc re #ferguson (fwiw) http://t.co/rzbDKlidVM pic.twitter.com/YaKeg6vw3J
— Feenicks (@feenicks) November 25, 2014
Look at that graphic at the top of the page or the one below, you know what that tells me? That the police pick and choose who they want to execute. It is ingrained in their subconscious, black is an ANIMAL, white is TROUBLED. Even when they know the white person is a mass murderer, they will do everything in their power to bring them in peacefully. Why can’t we be treated like that?
Sometimes white people think black people want favorable treatment. That isn’t true at all. If Michael Brown robbed that store, I would want him to be arrested, because criminal activity should be policed. What we want and what we have wanted for hundreds of years is EQUALITY.
I am a reasonable person, I understand that there are times when deadly force is needed, but the reason we have police is because they are supposed to be train to know when to exercise that last resort. I don’t want criminals running around, white, black or otherwise, but I want everyone treated fairly. Death for stealing cigars or looking suspicious isn’t fair.
We just want a fair shake, we just want the same benefit of the doubt that is given to our white counterparts. This goes deeper than just with the police, this is a societal issue. It is something that a white person could never understand. Being black is uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable because you are constantly fighting against the majority who at times see you as a subhuman. You are constantly battling against stereotypes and prejudices before anyone gets to know you. You don’t know how it feels to be on alert at all times, to get that disgusting feeling in the pit of your stomach when a cop is following you. You don’t know how it feels to hear so many “code words” and wonder is someone just being nice to you or really just think you a “smart nigger”. I can’t describe how it feels to get the “LOOK”, I don’t even like walking into certain stores, not because I can’t afford what is in it, but because I just don’t want to deal with people looking at me like a can’t when it shouldn’t matter if I can or not.
I am a reasonable person, I am acutely aware of the issues within the black community some which are self inflicted. I don’t believe in burning up your own community, but you have to understand when you have NO HOPE and NO FAITH in a justice system that is supposed to protect the victim not the killer, it is hard not to react. It is easy for a white family, who never had to deal with any of these hardships to say they are rioting like animals, but simply brush of their riots during something as simple as winning a championship as “fun”. Blacks rightfully or wrongfully are lashing out because a dead body was laying in the middle of the street for almost five hours, seeing something like that doesn’t lead to rational actions.
Criminals come in all races, but only one race is assumed to be criminal before they are assumed to be a human. When I tell you it is an everyday struggle, I promise you I am telling you the truth. I am am middle class living guy with a family and dog, but I am not immuned. I was on a shuttle from the airport to pick up my car from the overnight parking place. The driver when going down the row where my car was at asked what type car was it, when I told him a white woman in the shuttle visibly gasped and look at me with a look that basically said “that can’t be possible”. This is the type of little stuff that over time will cause you to become jaded and hate everyone. It is sad I have to remind myself almost daily that every cop isn’t a bad cop, every white person isn’t racist, ignorant and prejudice. It shouldn’t be that way. I don’t hate white people, I don’t blame THE MAN everytime something goes wrong in my life, I’d just like people to understand how exhausting it can be to deal with the same things day after, month after month and year after year, instead of saying things like this.
@BSO nice job of continuing to pump race bating into the mainstream media! If you're innocent, why are "scared" of the police?
— Matt Harden (@MattHarden2) November 25, 2014
I wish I had that type of privilege of having no worries at all of being shot for doing nothing, sadly I do not.
Some will say that black people are paranoid, but how can you not be when you see this?
So please I beg of you don’t tell us how we should feel, when many of us could have easily been Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin. You can’t understand how difficult it is to know in the back of your head that could be and still can be you laying in the middle of the street and you can NEVER tell your side of the story because you will be in the grave.