The Black Phoenix Rising

#blackphoenix #BLM

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Stephon Clark, Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Michelle Cusseaux, Freddie Gray, Janisha Fonville, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, just to name a few. All of these lives, gone to soon, some a majority never even made it past forty years old. These lives have been taken in vain strictly by the police. Without and remorse or a second thought these beautiful, young men and women became a hashtag. Ranging from ages 6-50, they all deserved to be here and are gone too soon.

The percentage of unarmed black men are typically 5% higher than those of a different race, such as white or Hispanic. Police violence in this day is the number one cause of death, especially for young men in the United States. It’s crazy to think that going on our most current course we can expect that every 1 in 1,000 black man can expect to be killed by the police.

In some instances, the killing of the black man could be considered something similar to a pandemic. Think about this most recent virus, the coronavirus, there seem to be some factors that seem like too much of a coincidence. Where there are poor living conditions and awful working conditions which directly interconnect with social inequalities and that condition produces opportunities for disease to spread and infect or affect a majority of the black community. Police violence is disproportionately killing black Americans. Due to our most recent outbreak, its makes showing the comparison between a pandemic and the killing of African-Americans a little simpler. A majority of black counties have three times the rate of infections and six times the rate of death as their white counterparts, which are statistics close in percentage, making the similarity in the two stunning.

George Floyd, the man who suffocated to death under the knee of the law, revealed that he had COVID-19, but that had nothing to do with the cause of his health. Could the real issue be the government’s response to hostile situations? I find it interesting that the same populations that make up for the death at the hands of the police which can be categorized as poor, disenfranchised communities, make up the same population that disproportionally makes up the death toll for the coronavirus victims as well. Do you think the government’s response would be different if these plagues directly affected the “middle-class” population? In some instances, black lives just seem not to matter. But maybe we should check the state of their bias minds instead of reflecting their insecurities, you should be able to determine whether or not a police officer is reacting on strictly implicit or explicit bias, something that we will discuss next week, so stay tuned.

-Thank You

JP