So many eerie haunts of the Trayvon Martin case; not just the date when it happened: 3 days before the anniversary of his 2012 killing-but also this Apartheidesque presumption that any black person can be stopped/questioned at any time, even by a civilian. nytimes.com/2020/04/26/us/…
That's just one reason the whingeing over the #1619Project and @nhannahjones winning the Pulitzer is so laughable. Looking at the grossly outsized death rates of black people from COVID19 due to structural racism-infused factors and the fact that black people still don't
experience the basic sense lf freedom to be in public spaces without fear of harassment or death, not just from police but even from our fellow citizens, who feel perfectly free to question our presence in even our own buildings, in parks or jogging around... how do you doubt
that the pernicious legacy of slavery has not lingered like a vicious hangover, over every speck of our history?
That past people so want to erase includes America being, just like South Africa, a country where the life of every black person was seen as clay in the hands of any white person - rich, poor, man, woman or even child. They were free to compel, command and even kill us at will.
That's what America was literally built on: the desecration of American indigenous & African indigenous life, because neither was seen as inherently valuable and in the case of black people, even as fully human. That's the history. It just is. And it lingers in so many ways.
Every time we try to escape it, something like what happens to #AhmadArbery happens, and we are back in Hell again; forced to again remind folks of what should be obvious: #BlackLivesMatter. So we return again to the beginning that I guess we never left. Ugh...
