How Long Must We Wait?
Daunte Wright, 20, Brooklyn Center, MN, was killed during a routine traffic stop on April 11, 2021, by Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kimberly Ann Potter. Officer Potter claimed to have mistaken her Taser X26P (which weighs 0.74 lbs. with a charged cartridge and 0.47 lbs. without) for her Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol, which weighs 2.02 lbs. fully loaded and 1.38 lbs. without a magazine. Officer Potter was not a rookie handling her first traffic stop. She was a 26-year law enforcement veteran and former head of her department’s police union, who was, in fact, on training duty with a rookie officer that fateful day.
Wright lost his life over several hundreds of dollars in unpaid fines related to a misdemeanor drug charge (marijuana possession, which has been decriminalized in the State of Minnesota since 1976 for amounts under 1–½ ounces) and a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge. News of a bench warrant issued to Mr. Wright was sent to the wrong address, resulting in being unaware of his perilous legal status, a status that became a death sentence carried out by a veteran cop who should have known better than to reach for her service weapon as she cried out “taser, taser, taser” before the fatal shot to his chest.
What is so maddening about this incident is that is does not even begin to rise to the highest level of ire and outrage. Not in this gun obsessed, ammo-sexual country, many of whom citizens believe any infringement on their right to possess, own, carry, and discharge their weapon against a perceived threat brought on by immigrants, people of color, liberals, and the government. Provided, of course, such government is run by Democrats, socialists, agitators, anarchists, and atheists (as opposed to the God-fearing, love of all that is white Jesus, evangelical Christian who “blew off a little steam” and, with little to no resistance, stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th at the behest of their god-on-Earth representative, Donald J. Trump).
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Kyle Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, took a long rifle across state borders to confront peaceful protesters in Kenosha, WI, protesting the officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake, 29 and black, by Kenosha Police Officer Rustin Sheskey on August 23, 2020. Rittenhouse, fueled by the rhetoric of a dog-whistle blowing right-wing media and avowed white nationalists like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, on August 25th shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and wounded Gaige Grosskeutz, 26, all with his illegally possessed Smith & Wesson M&P AR-15.
Rittenhouse, facing murder charges in Wisconsin, is free on bond and is a fundraising goldmine for every white-wing terrorist and extremist group in America (including several fraternal police orders and GOP politicians). He is seen as the boy hero embodiment of all the white-hot anger aimed at the left and those who are anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-AAPI hate, and anti-hypocrisy. Blake gets to spend the rest of his life as a paraplegic, permanently confined to a wheelchair. Sheskey was reinstated to his job and free to learn nothing from his impulsive action and malicious wounding as he has been given license to menace Kenosha’s black community with his gun and privilege.
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I’m tired.
I’m tired of being black in a country I’ve lived in all my life, a country I love, but a country that does not come close to loving me back. I’m exhausted from having to walk quietly, speak quieter, and act nonexistent, so not to upset the authorities or raise undo attention to myself which may result in my being harassed, ordered to comply, and potentially murdered by an official of the state with accountability to no one for their homicidal acts. I can be summarily shot for failing to properly genuflect to unreasonable search and seizure attempts by outrageously racist and dangerous individuals, as was the case of the traffic stop of Army 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario, 26, black and Latino, by Windsor (VA) Police Officer Joe Gutierrez in December 2020.
Nazario, who had committed no crime, was peppered spray, had his life threatened, was assaulted, and handcuffed before let go with no charges but told in no uncertain words that if he kept his (nigger) mouth shut and played along, his Army career wouldn’t be ruined. The outrage over Gutierrez’s cowboy over-the-top policing antics led to his dismissal from the Windsor police force. Good riddance to dangerous rubbish but how long must we wait before true police reform comes and the spoiled fruit grown from the branches of a rotten tree are completely removed.
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The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 16, 1963, penned a longhand response to religious leaders questioning the tactics of the civil rights movement which was causing the standing of the U.S. as global moral authority to diminish greatly. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” rebuffed criticism of the movement’s use of nonviolent protest and demonstration to hold up a much-needed mirror to the hypocrisy that is the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor, all yearning to be free…”
Dr. King wrote, when challenged to answer why the Negro pushed so hard for their rights when America was still not fully ready to embrace its darker brethren:
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim…when you see the vast majority of twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky…when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you…when…your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’…when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”
There can’t be two Americas for if there are, there is no America. We can’t be the shining beacon of light and hope for democracy across the globe and continue to deny basic rights and freedoms to all of America’s children. Not just those who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower but those who crossed the Middle Passage on ships like the Desire in chains.
I’m tired of being tired. I don’t want to feel like I can’t live in the country I was born in the same manner as my white friends. I want to be afforded the same rights, freedoms, and protections without the persecution, harassment, and threat of death that is every looming and always present.
America, how long must we wait?
