America Is Black
It Belongs to Them
“American is Black. We built it. It belongs to Us.”
I’m trying to think of some slogans, some T-Shirt and bumper stickers to catch he eyes and provoke thinking. Maybe and American flag that Says below it: Black, White and Blue, maybe with black stripe replacing the color of red.
Maybe a flag in those three colors with a saying, Black is for the people who worked and built this land without pay. Payback is Now! We still have not been paid!
Just something other than that damn Thin Blue Line flag I pass in my neighborhood and is on the back of many jacked-up pickups in Texas, which stands for Racist Supremacist Cops are in charge. That at least is my interpretation through my white eyes. (Actually, my eyes are blue, but not like Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye.)
The expression behind the meaning of the cop flag I only recently heard. The flag is changed, apparently without concern that the “most patriotic” Americans are desecrating it, to have black and white strips with one blue strip dividing it. Not even thinking that the stripes are black and white until just now (duh, I’m slow), the saying behind it is, as many of you may already know: All that stands behind us and chaos is the thin blue line (of cops).
It is so white supremacist that it makes me sick now when I see it. It is anti-American. What holds back chaos in a democracy is not cops, but the deep and proud understanding of inalienable rights for all. Civil society is what happens when people respect the rights, ideas, thoughts and beliefs of other. That is what stops chaos. Not cops. Cops are a last resort.
Instead, the thin blue line is the inherent belief in the power of cops. For some reason, cops live a chaotic nightmare of a country, and their firepower combined with moral superiority and their interpretation of the Law is what is enforced. In other words, they believe in an inherent racist structure of Cop Power that must Control the country.
To me, sometimes, most of them seem like uneducated rednecks. I’ve seen enough YouTube videos of cops being schooled by citizens at traffic stops to know most cops don’t know the law, and don’t know enough to call a superior when questioned. They’ve been trained in military take down, not the art of civil discussion. They would rather tell someone to shut up and violate their civil rights. Their “brothers” will have their back. The police union will provide lawyers.
But it is not a brotherhood, and neither is the military. Brotherhoods are something under a king, monarch, or tyrannical ruler. You have to sick together when you’re outnumbered and enforce silence, not create and encourage peace.
In a democracy, it is a civil force that takes its. salary from the people. They are not sworn to protect the people from “dangerous super predators”, who are just black people shopping for groceries. They are not sworn to keep order in a the Shiekh’s Kingdom. They are not supposed to treat black citizens like they are the chaos roaming around guilty, unable to obey the law.
It’s just crazy. That is why something to turn their mind around has to be said. If they think that Blacks Built America, it might make them pissed but it will make them think who really deserves respect. Those who civilly built the White House brick by brick, cleared the land, plowed the fields and harvested the crops by hand that fed the country and provided the cotton to make its clothes — -and still need to paid by the way for their hard labor, their real work under backbreaking and violent conditions created more by man then the wild unknown, “untamed” nature around them.
Or is those cops who demand respect at the barrel of gun, screaming at a black man running away from at routine traffic stops, like in Akron, who are guilty of nothing more than being scared of the thin line the cops just crossed, raging with guns drawn, blasting away with bullets into their backs from trivial reasons unproven, and creating chaos — the very chaos and violence they are supposed to protect us from.
