Understanding a White Perception

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On Sept. 15, 1963, many of your parents and grandparents living today were already born. 1963 was also the year that a church was bombed on 16th Street in Birmingham, Ala. Ask your parents and grandparents what they remember about the bombing. It was probably the same things that you remember about the churches burning to ashes in Charleston, S.C. in 2015: news outlets covering it for a day or two and Black people carrying it on longer than you would like to hear about it. Black people crying and making statements: “It could have been me” or “Rest in Peace little Black babies” or “How can a white man get away with this?” Then, from a single question, you see Black people flooding the streets with hand crafted signs, stopping people from work, distracting the city with their pain and personal problems. You acknowledge that bombing and burning churches is a little extreme, but Black people are out of control for thinking that an infant’s body exploding to pieces or the burning of the only place that brought a run-down community together to pray, eat, and sing is enough to stop someone else from going to work. Why should a city shut down for Black people?

How about even more recently, with the Tamir Rice case? Why on earth is every Black person crying about a case that has nothing to do with him? Tamir Rice was a Black child with a toy gun. The police received a call that a boy was armed. Black boys should not play with toy guns, right? They know the politics behind Blacks and guns. Black people are always in the news for shooting each other. So, it is safe for the policemen to assume that the 12-year-old Black boy’s toy gun is real. They are always real. That was in Cleveland. Not St. Louis, Detroit, or even Chicago–the murder capitals of America. 

You never stop to think that maybe the fact that Cleveland is never consistently in the news for Black killings is the reason that some Blacks yell “It could have been my child.” You never think that some Black people are crying because they have had a father or brother that was shot and killed by the police, with the only difference being that it was not covered the news because his story had been told before. “He was just another n***** affiliated in a gang,” not a little boy like Tamir Rice. Gang members are not news worthy unless they are going to jail, then it is justice for all of America: all they do is sell drugs, kill each other, and leave their “baby mamas” single – not adding any value to America’s GDP or the city unless they fill a few cells.

But those white men that bomb and burn churches, they deserve a tear or two. They are troubled and trapped in their own minds. So let us raise awareness for mental health. These white men were good children that became victims of the mind. They used to live normal boy lives, playing with toy guns in a game of cops and robbers in the park. I wonder what Tamir Rice was doing with a toy gun in the park on Nov. 22, 2014 when the cops shot him dead. He must have been the robber.   

 

Jones is a senior English writing and women's studies major from St. Louis.