is the title of this post
Consider this:
Part of the reason we're seeing so many black men killed is that police officers are now best understood less as members of communities, dedicated to keeping peace within them, than as domestic soldiers. The drug war has long functioned as a full-employment act for arms dealers looking to sell every town and village in the country on the need for military-grade hardware, and 9/11 made things vastly worse, with local police departments throughout America grabbing for cash to better defend against any and all terrorist threats. War had reached our shores, we were told, and police officers needed weaponry to fight it.
and this:
If officers are soldiers, it follows that the neighborhoods they patrol are battlefields. And if they're working battlefields, it follows that the population is the enemy. And because of correlations, rooted in historical injustice, between crime and income and income and race, the enemy population will consist largely of people of color, and especially of black men. Throughout the country, police officers are capturing, imprisoning, and killing black males at a ridiculous clip, waging a very literal war on people like Michael Brown.
and also this:
There was Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., and Oscar Grant in Oakland, Calif., and so many more. Michael Brown's death wasn't shocking at all. All over the country, unarmed black men are being killed by the very people who have sworn to protect them, as has been going on for a very long time now. It would appear that cops are not for black people, either.
There is much more to this piece.
The author is a young African American male named Greg Howard. I never taught him but he did soccer all four years in high school. He was all state in Maryland as a senior, and might well have been all American except he got seriously hurt twice, his senior year by a brutal foul that tore three of the fours Ligaments at one knee.
My new principal who like me helped coach Greg pointed me at this piece, which he says got picked up by CNN. I do not know about that but thought it worth sharing here.
I am interested in your feedback.