Once again, just a damn shame. The attention over the past year or so of all of these killings, what will it do? I showed my students the Rodney King video on this past Thursday. We have had video of police doing this to black and brown people for 25 years. We have known it has happened for over 100 years. Black people have been told over and over to let the system work. Don’t protest too loudly. It’s your fault. We’ve been told to just be patient and not be so forceful even before we weren’t citizens and had no right to protest. For all of the work of Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X so on and so forth, what has it really gotten us. Yes America is the greatest country in the world, but white America needs to wake up and at least have some empathy if not understanding about how black America feels. We aren’t just impatient, we’re desperate. We thought America would understand after Rodney King. We thought it would happen after Tony Sullivan, James Byrd, Eric Garner. It didn’t happen then, why expect it would happen now. I don’t condone violence or destruction of property, but I’m not sorry about it right now. We have twice elected a black man as President of the United States, and black men and women have still been killed, sometimes on video, and no responsibility or accountability is provided. How are we supposed to feel? We’ve tried rocking the boat, but those at the rudder aren’t afraid of drowning. We’ve got the water at the bottom of the boat, struggling to keep our noses out of the water, but those at the rudder haven’t been paying attention for 400 years. Is there any surprise the boat is being rocked harder?

This is not a rant. It is not meant to be a rant. It is a feeling of desperation.