The Ghosts of Black Men Passed...

We should start from a space of relative honesty about what is going on. It is less than 48 hours after the death of Philando Castile and less than 72 hours after the death of Alton Sterling. We have heard from a lot of people on the issue of shooting young black men.  Have we noticed that the one group that we have not heard from about this issue?  Young black men.

 When this type  of thing was rare (or at least not as often caught on tape, but I will get into that in a moment) the wavelengths were a lot wider.  It would take a solid three or four days to come up with video of the incident.  A week to argue and debate, then several months for the trials of the police and blah blah blah.  It took us years to get through Rodney King.  The issue is not new, the cameras are.

Let's take a look at what happened with Alton Sterling.  Yes it was caught on tape by a bystander.  Oddly, both officers' body cameras fell off during the altercation.  Strange that.  Worse was that it was caught on film by the store's security cameras and we had to wait to see what that produced.  We needed more angles, of course.  Do we remember a time when something like that would not even be shown?
Less than 24 hours later, Phliando Castile's shooting was broadcast to thousands of people in near real time on Facebook.  If you happened to be a friend of his and on Facebook at that time, you could have seen the death of a human being...yay technology.

I am writing today because I wanted to talk about the voice of the black man and how that plays into the media today.  I am not a big believer in the vast media conspiracy on the left or the right.  I think that it is all a big popularity contest.

After the deaths of these two men, we began to say that the violence is not new, the cameras are.  When Rodney King got the shit beaten out of him on camera, many made the comment that it was really just another night for black man in LA it just so happened that someone had the forethought and an empty tape to start recording.

Right now I have a digital camera, two phones, each with cameras, and there is a camera on my laptop pointing at me as I write.  I think I am ready to go if anything happens.  Is this a good thing?  I like that we can document these things, but the only thing is that it gives more to argue about.

Remember the "wavelength" I talked about earlier?  Less than 72 hours away from witnessing the police murder a man on the street, we are in the dark part of that wave as it begins to tail off.  We have done what we can to tear down Alton Sterling...he was a convicted sex offender (the cops did not and COULD NOT have known that when they shot him NOR SHOULD IT HAVE BEEN AN ISSUE!).  Philando Castile worked at a school. He had a gun, but was licensed to have one and by all accounts told the officer that.  As well, he was shot for "reaching" even though the officer asked him for his license.

How do I know that we are at the tail end of the wavelength?  Because we are now talking about who is talking about what happened.  People are posting their regrets and we are talking about what they are wearing and where they are when they offer their thoughts and condolences.  The reverence with which we treat the passing of people has been whittled down to hashtags and frowny faces on fb posts.
Hillary Clinton's email hearings were yesterday and there were those who were, really, saying that she had something to do with these killings so that those hearings would be lost in the news cycle.
The major frustration for me are the voices who will be lost in the shuffle.  Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are going to say something.  Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are going to say something.  People are going to say that they should keep their mouths shut never once acknowledging that maybe we should not shoot these young men.

The point is a sad one, no one cared about these men aside from their families three days ago.  We do not talk about Trayvon Martin anymore and Zimmerman is a kind of hero, celebrated in some circles.  Eric Garner still can't breathe but his dying words are all over t-shirts.  We only care about these men in death.  They only have a voice for a short time and goodness knows that it is not while they are alive.
When I lived in SC, we were at the tail end of three day snow storm.  The power was out at my house and it was warming up during the day, so I went to the local Starbucks to charge my phone and laptop and check my email.  As the sun went down, I headed home. I was walking and stopped by three squad cars less than 100 feet from my house.  The cops blocked traffic, turned on their lights, and held me there in the middle of the street.  They told me that I was asking people for money.  I was not afraid of being shot that night.  I was unarmed. They seemed surprised that I had no warrants.  They also seemed surprised that I lived in a good neighborhood.  The next day, I went to city hall to complain.  They would not even listen to me.  I went to the police station to complain.  Even though they had enough officers to block traffic on a snowy, icy night, they apparently did not have the staff to talk to anyone about what those officers were doing.  Too bad I did not have a camera that night.

See, all the things that led to each of those men being shot are still going on right now.  Somewhere, there is a young man who has not done anything shaking in his shoes because a cop has him up against a wall and he doesn't know what to do. The problem is that no one will listen to him unless the cop shoots and someone has the wherewithal to record it and THAT person has enough friends on Facebook and Twitter to make it go viral, then and only then will that man/ boy have a voice and even then, only until they find out what he has done wrong.