POLICE REFORM ALONE WON’T SAVE BLACK LIVES

I’ve been asked for my recommendations regarding police reform so that we won’t have to see African descendants like Alton Sterling and Philando Castile get killed after interactions with police officers.

I can rattle off plenty of recommendations, but they’re all tempered by a piece I wrote on November 26, 2014 titled “AFTER FERGUSON: WHY THERE WILL BE MORE BLOOD”:

[K]illers like Officer [Darren] Wilson and George Zimmerman, regardless of their love or hatred for people of African descent, have a socially-embedded Stay Out of Jail Free card that has been reinforced by years of portraying Blacks as dangerous animals to be feared.

In other words, there’s no amount of police reform or legislation which can erase generations of social programming that depicts African descendants as crime-prone, bottom-dwellers of the world’s social ladder.

What policy can you introduce that will immediately erase hundreds of years of negative media imagery, distorted history, the Curse of Ham and crazy-azz thoughts about super powers?

I recall sharing with you my introduction to bigotry when I was five years old. A White kid close to my age called my older brother and me the n-word.

We knew a lot about African history at young ages, but the n-word wasn’t a part of the home syllabus.

Nor should it be.

But this five-year old racist-in-training obviously had racist elders for teachers.

The kid may have grown up to be a racist advertising executive, journalist, postal worker …

… Or even a police officer …

… plus, the kid may have become a parent who teaches his children racist ideas …

Short of recreating a society, what government-sanctioned policy can be introduced to fix this?

Or like I said last October: “Can you legislate love?”

song currently stuck in my head: “raindown sunrise” – ewan jansen