Shanice Sandiford
Contributor
This is anything but an attack on the legacy that is Martin Luther King Jr. Rather, this is a wake up call if you will, for us as a black community to stay vigilant and aware that we are still a long way from achieving King’s dreams.
The recent uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore make this very clear, as the very people meant to “protect” our men and women are attacking them. These uprisings defined what it means to be black in today’s society.
With police brutality, mass incarceration, and continuous discrimination, it seems as if society has gone backwards to the time of the civil rights movement, undoing all of the progress that was made. I guess because King was given a commemorative day and black people were given a month of acknowledgement, society has had a bad case of amnesia and has forgotten that their entitlement is part of the problem.
Black riots have become synonymous with criminality, violence, and thuggery because that is all the media seems to see when concerned and frustrated people assemble to protest against state-sanctioned abuses of power.
On the other hand, sports fans can get drunk and wreak havoc on communities because their favorite team wins or loses, which the media frames as rowdy hooligans. Is their cause more just?
I’m a little confused, you see, because even when we marched peacefully you set dogs and firehoses on us and told us we were the violent ones. We never struck first. Our actions are in response to the history of police brutality that goes unchecked, but we fight back and are slain. We speak out and are detained, because as some ignorant folks insist, “you silly child, racism doesn’t exist.” I say the name Sandra Bland and Michael Brown, and you say, “use of ‘reasonable’ force.”
Our assembling is meant to disturb the peace, to shake the people who weren’t shaken by needless deaths. Our demands for fairness and equality shatter your fallacious belief that racism has been eradicated. Progressive and optimistic people say, “slavery happened so many years ago, don’t hold onto the past,” but how can we not when the past bleeds into the present and my siblings bleed in the streets?
Yes, we have made a lot of progress towards change. We have formal legislation that protects minority rights, such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the amendments to the United States Constitution, however we cannot be naive in thinking that because we have these pieces of legislation, racism is obsolete.
King, Charles Kenzie Steele, and Fred Shuttlesworth peacefully fought the issues of their time and succeeded in bringing about change. However, we don’t hear about the instances of violent protest that also took place. Journalist Raven Rakia notes that these myths “conveniently forget to mention that while [King] was leading nonviolent resistance in the form of sit-ins and marches, ‘riots’ were raging through America’s black ghettos.”
History books sanitize and whitewash events, promoting nonviolent protests as just and right because such methods don’t disturb society. What’s worse is that mainstream media privileges violent protests over nonviolent methods. A thousand people marching peacefully in Ferguson are likely to get less coverage than a mass of people protesting in the streets.
The media creates a demand for sensational violence, reporting on such instances to then turn around and condemn rioters. In doing so, as writer Willie Osterweil notes, there is a “strong division between good protestors and bad rioters” and “ethical nonviolence practitioners and supposedly violent looters, the narrative of the criminalization of black youth is reproduced.”
No authority has the right to label or legitimize our actions. The only way to break the cycle of misrepresentation is to ensure that all ways of existing are represented. King had a dream that his children would not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. We are still on the road to achieving that dream and if you believe that patriarchal, racist, and hateful bodies will step aside without being shoved or open their eyes without having them pried open, I’m sorry, but you’re dreaming.
