Ultimately, the root of our struggle is White supremacy and a government that enforces it. Just like how the lynchings of days past were used to drive fear into the hearts of Black people today we have the same kinds of lynchings going on at the hands of the police. Lynching never went away. It just modernized. The Ferguson police left Michael Brown’s body out there for hours for the same reason Whites used to leave the bodies of their Black victims hanging, to remind people who was in power. If we want to end police brutality we first must end White Supremacy and the insufferable hold it has on our country. By doing that we need revolution not reform. We need long term solutions not short sited ones that ultimately only keep our oppressor happy. We need to destroy the government that was purposely designed to fail us, a government that is working exactly as intended. We need to build up a stronger, intersectional government that is built for the marginalized, by the marginalized. Only then will racism and its agents of White supremacy and Anti-Blackness cease to exist once we fully eradicate their presence.
One of the first steps to ending White supremacy is to make sure that our concerns are heard. “Riots are the language of the unheard,” as Martin Luther King so eloquently put as he knew that righteous anger was better than lethargic inaction. Don’t let people fool you into thinking that there is only one way to make yourself heard. Whether through die-ins, sit-ins, vandalism, or boycotting all forms of disobedience are valid. And whether violent or non-violent whenever you are speaking out about the status quo you will be labeled an extremist.
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