UNITED STATES OF AMERICA — Ever since the first 19 slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia brought in by the Dutch after being captured from a Spanish slave ship in 1619. Black folks in America have been fighting feverishly for freedom and equality. We spent the next 246 years in legalized bondage. Then there was the Jim Crow era that ushered us into the fight for basic civil rights durin’ the Civil Rights Movement.
Fast forward to our present day situation with overt racism and Tom foolery still making headlines. Last week folks were up in arms about Nike making Colin Kaepernick the face of their 30th Anniversary of the “Just Do It” campaign. Folks were burning their own shoes in protest. Kaepernick started kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality, racial and social injustice in America.
However, those that don’t care because none of this has anything to do with them or their’s only want to see football and not the protest for human rights and equality in America. Well…let’s fast forward again to just three days after the announcement of the new “Just Do It” campaign and all of the push back by many of our so-call patriotic citizens. Botham Jean, a black man in Dallas, was minding his own business in his own apartment when an off duty Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, goes into his place and shoots him dead.
On the very day he was being laid to rest, the Dallas Police Department tries to smear his name by saying that they found marijuana in his apartment. What’s so crazy is that anyone that’s black and has been living in this country for more than two days already knew it was coming. It’s the oldest trick in the book of racism in America. Assassinate the man and then assassinate his character. If you make him look like the criminal it justifies killing him.
Let’s keep it real or all the way 100, whichever comes 1st! The officer has already told the lie that she mistakenly entered the wrong apartment. She wasn’t there to serve a warrant or to conduct official police business. According to her she just walked into the wrong apartment.
So why would they need a search warrant after the man was already killed? I’ll tell you why, because they needed to have time to plant some foolishness in that man’s apartment to make him look like he was responsible for his own death. It’s no different than the Michael Brown situation. A police officer wrongly killed a kid for walking down the middle of the street and then they went back to an incident that had nothing to do with what transpired in the street between the officer and the kid. However, if we paint the picture of a criminal it justified the killing of that criminal.
Why am I writing about this foolishness on a sports web site? It’s because of this type of foolishness that Colin Kaepernick took a knee in the first place. When the U.S. Constitution was signed in 1787 black folks were considered three fifths of a man. In 2018 the law says that we’re five fifths of a man but the powers that be still treat us like we’re three fifths or less.
When a man is shot down in his own home and the police try to make him out to be the criminal on the very day that he’s being buried it speaks to the very racism that Colin Kaepernick was protesting. Unfortunately, this is the America that most people will tell us that if we don’t like it we should leave. However, guys like Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and of course, Colin Kaepernick were/are hated for standing up against the racism that poisons us all. Stop me when I start lyin’!