posted April 28, 2015 08:20 PM            

Sadly, there is a disturbing ritual that seems to happen whenever blacks protest for their lives and the unrest that happens due to the condemning nature of white privilege. We fire back with respectability politics, politics that are meant to keep the status quo and absolve the systems that promote racial privilege from taking accountability.

Instead of working towards dismantling a system built upon hundreds of years of racial discrimination, we condemn those who are tired of being the victims. That's right, blame the rioters, not the system. This behavior shows lives only matter if you fit into the paradigm of the majority privilege, and to deviate from this paradigm is a threat that must be squashed.

We condemn those rioting but we do not condemn the police actually killing people. I'm not saying that looting and destroying property is the answer, but why are we focusing on this instead of the real issue at hand?

Society wasted no time standing up to boycott the Indiana legislature, which was awesome, but why are we so ambivalent about the value of African-American lives? We cry outrage over a riot taking place, but why aren't we outraged for Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, or the countless other African-American lives taken without just due?

What about humanity? What about the man whose spine was broken in 8 places while dying at the hands of the police? We are going to sit here and get upset over the fact a CVS got looted, but care less about a black man dying on the street? Out of 100,000 people, we want to focus on the 1% causing the trouble in a highly PEACEFUL protest?

"When you cut the facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty and shoot people dead while refusing to provide answers or justice the people will rise up and express their anger and frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard."-MLK

posted April 28, 2015 08:21 PM            

These two below are very powerful:

This too- notice how we characterize African-Americans in riots, they are thugs, savages, evil, etc. People like Donald Trump are the worst, and sadly a very common example:

posted April 28, 2015 08:23 PM            

And here is the big question we must ask of society: