Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
Juliette at Baldilocks has a strong reaction to the shooting death of Yetunde Price. Among others.
Now professional tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams get the same horrifying lesson in the murder of their older sister, Yetunde Price.
Fame and fortune could not assist these well-known black American citizens in protecting their families from the reaper that plagues the communities of the average black American: We are being murdered, mostly by those who claim to be our brothers.
I wouldn't go so far as to say hese folks claim to be our brothers. They claim we're all in the same mix. And the fact is the majority of murders are done intra-race. And there are further points I can raise to "normalize" the situation she's reacting to.
But I'm not really going to do that.
The fact is Black folks can less afford his sort of thing than mainstream folks can. We live closer to the edge…move in the wrong direction and we can go over where mainstream folks would find themselves in the "warning track." And it's partly because we are NOT all brothers. We are no where near as collective as other ethnicities; the institutions that would have bound us together as strongly as mainsteram folks were either destroyed, disrupted, stillborn or abandoned.
The old maxim "we have to work twice as hard to get half as far" remains true in many areas. Developing ways of mutual respect and support is one of them because in many ways we are the rugged individuals that the American mythology idolizes, from blind pursuit of the dollar to a complete acceptance of guns as the Tool of Heroes.
Posted by P6 at September 15, 2003 09:44 PM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1658