25 years have passed since I had my introduction to society. The end of the school year and my ninth birthday were in my sights. Springtime in Chicagoland can not always bring sunshine and flowers, but it does have promise. It was fun to kick people off of when the snow was dirty and taller in December, but it will soon melt, and that sting from the aluminum little league bats won't last long. On the first day of spring in 1997, Chicago was hit with an attempted lynching. The three older white teens beat the 13-year-old to death on the Friday evening. Victor Jasas, Frank Caruso, and Michael Kwidzinski are accused of punching Clark off of his bike, throwing his head into a wall, and yelling racial slurs at him. Clark was put in a coma after they beat him so badly. Jasas and Kwidzinski pleaded guilty to battery and only received 30 months of supervised release, while Caruso was sentenced to eight years in prison for two counts of hate crime. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, racial tension in America never truly cooled, but during the years just prior to Clark being beaten, the thickness of it was something that my elementary school brain couldn't grasp. I didn't understand how racism colored the O.J. Simpson trial, I just wished I could watch one day of television without it being plastered all over the screen. In 1996 I had no idea what a lynching was, but I knew that James was dragged to death in Jasper, Texas, for a murder that was discussed during Black History Month. The kid fell off of his bike. My Huffy bike was my main mode of transportation. I was not allowed to ride it past the Pod where our house was in the complex, but I should have remembered the television shows my parents played for me at school. I felt like I could go anywhere on that bike. I thought about the boy who was hit on his bike. As a child, you fell off your bike many times. There is a scar in the middle of your knee. I knew what it was like to take that tumble, and I rode that bike in the white neighborhood my family and I lived in at the time. Clark's beating lingered in my thoughts for a while. I had a vivid imagination and sometimes it was hard to sleep because I would close my eyes and see him coming around the corner and being attacked by people with the same complexion as my neighbors.
I had been prepared for that realization and was prodded into it by my parents, who were veterans of racism. It was the bike that took me to that place. For those that aren't being pushed in that direction, or have a third-grade revelation about their circumstances, what vehicle is going to take them into the real world?
I loved NBA basketball as a child. I loved the whole production. The game was played by some of the best athletes in the world and the lights went out for the start of the game, which was an epic event I watched like Power Rangers and Spider-Man.
I was surprised when ABC went to the Garden after the commercial break. The players lined up on opposite sides of the court. I thought that we might get to see the player intros. The Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics are both in the second round. Maybe Disney decided to squeeze commercials in elsewhere and give us all of the pomp and circumstance to properly build for an event like Game 7 of the best playoff series in four years.
The P.A. announcer didn't introduce the singer of the national anthem or the starting lineups. The broadcast went to commercial break after he asked for a moment of silence for the Milwaukee and Buffalo victims.
During the first quarter, there would be no cutaways to the Deer District outside of the Fiserv Forum. A curfew was imposed for people under the age of 20 after 21 people were injured in three separate shootings near the stadium on Friday night. The Deer District has seen a mass of people standing shoulder to shoulder for the last two seasons. Imagine that mass in terror trying to flee the premises because they have heard gunshots.
There was a single shooting in Buffalo on Saturday and it was tragic and disturbing. The man was arrested after he pointed a gun at his own neck and was accused of murdering 10 Black people. The New York Times reported that he researched what time of day it would be busiest at the grocery store in East Buffalo, and that he targeted it because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. While those incidents were the most talked about from the weekend, that isn't the only gun violence that took place in America this past weekend.
A 16-year-old boy was shot dead in Chicago over the weekend. In the next she barred people under the age of 18 from being in the city. A person was killed in a shooting at a church in Orange County and at the premier indoor public market in Los Angeles.
Gun violence is an issue in this country that can be manipulated as easily as biblical scripture to prove a point. It is generally accepted that the problem is not the cocaine that was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Tell that to the people who were afraid for their lives over the weekend and those who had a lovely spring weekend and lost loved ones to lead and chrome. There is a group that is experiencing gun violence for the first time. Guns are the leading killer of adolescents and children for the first time in 40 years according to a study.
In the years since the effects of inner city non-white neighborhoods being neglected and discriminated against by the United States and local governments, with highways connecting the suburbs that U.S. government money constructed and would decimate whatever wealth that Black neighborhoods had accumulated.
What is our message to the nation? What has it been like for people to be murdered at home, at schools, at work, on street corners, at places of business? The President offered a feckless message about unity after the Buffalo murders, and it's quite doubtful that those 10 lives lost will stop the crusade of many state and local government officials to eliminate any discussion of the causes that lead to tragedies like Buffalo.
I don't want to live in a society where the state is the only entity allowed to possess a firearm. It would be futile to try and use a gun to defend myself against an attack by an officer of the state, but that option does offer some comfort. The firearms industry generated more than $70 billion in revenue last year.
The causes start this decade with a government that still hasn't taken the proper steps to fix the police lying about what happened. Pull over a bus full of black people with university gear and bother them. They would do the same thing as a Howard University student back home, working late for his uncle while still in uniform. The women's lacrosse program at Delaware State got hit in the head by one of the bad apples from the police department. The ladies were told that marijuana was still illegal in Georgia because the bus was full of athletic gear. A law enforcement officer pulled over a coach bus of college athletes.
The Liberty County sheriff lied about what happened. The personal property of the ladies wasn't searched. The body cameras showed the officers rummaging through the bags on the street. 70 percent of non-white people think that police are not honest, according to a report from 1967. It has been 55 years since that report was released, and the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department is being investigated for having gangs that made it a point to harass citizens. The Washington Post has tracked the number of people shot and killed by police since 2015, and it shows that in the year 2021, there will be 1,055 people shot and killed by police.
When an agenda or ideology is at stake, racism sets the foundation for any life to be ignored. You may not be Black, but you can see how fast some of these governors want race out of schools, and any discussion of sexuality and gender outside of the nuclear 2.5 kids, a picket fence, and a dog family that isn't even affordable for many anymore. Children who aren't going to grow into that group have to figure out their own lives. In the last year, 14 percent of LGBTQ youth attempted suicide and 45 percent had suicidal thoughts. The Ron DeSantises of the world are scared and will eat the brains of heterosexual white children like the beetles in The Mummy.
The children would benefit from strong anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-misogynist training, because a lot of people like Gendron out there get brainwashed by white nationalists and then go out and kill a bunch of people making a weekend run
It speaks to a larger problem when a branch such as law enforcement consistently produces rotten fruit. The powers don't seem to care about a less violent society. The way police and the weapons industry are funded needs to be changed. It would require a commitment to teaching the history of this country in a way that is similar to the way we teach about Russia and Cuba. The sins that are taught must not be repeated.
Some try to navigate around the rot and some try to use it to their advantage. If that is how we feel about violence in America, then why would anyone respect the law?
Walker Texas Ranger had an episode dealing with racist police. If the problem is clear in an episode of a show where Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks bad guys on network television, how can anyone have a true deference towards law and law enforcement? How can anyone respect Black lives if they are treated the way they are while so many people in authoritative roles are not involved in stopping it? Throw in the fact that a lot of states don't want their children mentioned in school and you have a recipe for disaster. If Black lives can matter less than other lives, then all lives won't matter, and we see it every week as someone is shot to death somewhere, many times multiple people at a time.
Is a bike in sight? Is there a vehicle that can take enough of this country to the real world that is made from the periodic table of elements and centuries of hate? Is there a limit to what we can do to stop the commercials for a short time, while a kid is scared to ride a bike at night?
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