By Chris Ricchetti | 10 June 2020
For black Americans, state-sanctioned mass brutalization and mass slaughter are four-hundred-year-old atrocities that persist and pervade. Insidious, irrational white fear perpetuates these atrocities and precludes any meaningful redemption, healing–or even superficial reform–from taking place.
If you are a white person who feels any condescension, judgment or condemnation whatsoever toward the woman in this video–especially if you feel inclined to justify, defend or rationalize your negative feelings toward her–then your mindset and emotional dis-engagement are contributing to the problem. If you are not moved by her grief and pain and rage, then, for the sake of us all, please take a long, honest look inside yourself, and seek to understand whatever is blocking your compassion–and begin to deal with it.
If you think she is advocating “lawlessness” and you feel offended by that, rather than feeling morally and spiritually offended by the four hundred years of unspeakable cruelty and suffering to which she so richly and authentically and eloquently gives voice, then you have your work cut out for you, in terms of your own moral and spiritual development.
Please open your heart to the haunting realities of the very real human suffering that is all around us, and allow yourself to be moved. This will benefit YOU, as much as it benefits anyone else.