By Roy Douglas Malonson
Time after time after time, we hear a report of Blacks being senselessly killled. It doesn’t matter if Black folks were lynched over sixty years ago or in the present where they are being killed over a pair of shoes…its senseless. I recently read where a Black 17-year-old was killed in a gated community while he was visiting his father and step-mother. Nevertheless, the shooter is the Neighborhood’s Watch captain, who is White. Trayvon Martin walked to the store to get him and his little brother some snacks while watching the NBA All-Star Game. The Watchman, George Zimmerman, made a 911 call reporting a suspicious person walking in the gated community. Without waiting for police to arrive, reports say that Zimmerman confronted Trayvon, who was on the sidewalk near his home. By the time police got there, Trayvon was dead of a single gunshot to the chest. When police went through Martin’s pockets, all they found were the Skittles he brought for his little brother and a can of Arizona Ice Tea.
This is nothing new. What about what happened in Bellaire? The 23-year-old Black man was sitting in his own SUV in the driveway of his parents’ home was shot and wounded on New Year’s Eve by police who mistakenly believed he had stolen the vehicle.
The only difference between Zimmerman and the Belaire case is: Zimmerman was not a cop, he was a only a Neighborhood Watchman but, the shooters were White, and they had no business shooting them. In both cases, these Black males were in what many would consider to be White neighborhoods. So, the giant elephant in the room is racism. Nobody wants to say it, but, it is. It can happen anywhere, anytime, to any one of us.
This is why we have to continue to educate and inform younger Blacks about when White people would publicly hang Black for petty reasons, etc. Recently, a card was allegedly used as a recruitment tool for the Ku Klux Klan was found in a store in an African-American community. How they got over? The owner, who is from Pakistan, didn’t understand the purpose of the Klan. Once again, nothing is going to change for the Black race when it comes to racism.
