Devante Bryant, Linda Frickey, and...
We Explore the Origin Causes of These Deaths, Theirs and Many Others
Covid raged and cities burned “mostly peacefully” coincidentally wherever Black Lives Matter held protests. It was the now-infamous summer of 2020. George Floyd, career criminal, in May, had induced his death by eating drugs he had just purchased, presumably with actual money, though he had attempted to purchase cigarettes at Cup Foods with a counterfeit $20 bill. Just as he must have figured it was better to spend the real cash with the plug, he also must have figured it was better to eat these drugs in his pocket than to allow the Minneapolis Police to find them. After demanding to be removed from the back of a squad car, citing fake claustrophobia, and then demanding to be laid down upon the pavement, a demand granted him, George Floyd succumbed to his drug overdose while a cop kept a knee on the shoulder - not neck - of this super-framed 6 foot 7 inch erratic drug-filled hulk of a man.
Everyone knows the Hellfire visited upon this country as a result of George Floyd’s choices, and, never to let a lucrative opportunity go to waste, race-hustler Ibram Henry Rogers, more recently known as Ibram X. Kendi, responded to the internationally-witnessed Floyd overdose by inciting anger, inspiring rage, and publishing this in The Atlantic Magazine, on the 1st of June:
Black Americans are constantly stepping into the toil and terror and trauma of other black Americans. Black Americans are constantly stepping into the souls of the dead. Because they know: They could have been them; they are them. Because they know it is dangerous to be black in America, because racist Americans see blacks as dangerous.
Should the reader remain unmoved by prose as riveting as “They could have been them; they are them,” Rogers continued, bat in hand, swinging at any white skull within reach, while he repeatedly compelled you to “ask the souls”:
To be black and conscious of anti-black racism is to stare into the mirror of your own extinction. Ask the souls of the 10,000 black victims of COVID-19 who might still be living if they had been white. Ask the souls of those who were told the pandemic was the “great equalizer.” Ask the souls of those forced to choose between their low-wage jobs and their treasured life. Ask the souls of those blamed for their own death. Ask the souls of those who disproportionately lost their jobs and then their life as others disproportionately raged about losing their freedom to infect us all. Ask the souls of those ignored by the governors reopening their states.
The American nightmare has everything and nothing to do with the pandemic. Ask the souls of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. Step into their souls.
Be certain, assured Rogers, that these stepped-upon and overly-queried souls died by white racism, racism that is the cause and conflict of the nightmare that it is for black Americans as they suffer from sharing space with white people.
Whether stepping into souls or asking things of them, do not forget that neither Breonna Taylor nor Ahmaud Arbery nor George Floyd died of Covid-19.
Is Rogers’ not a decrepit view? A defeatist and even deadly view? Very many amongst us are in toil and terror and trauma, stepping into souls all the time?
Really.
Rogers’ views, as elsewhere, dominate among the New Orleans black elite and their white allies, too.
Consider the perfect example provided by the white, statue-toppling, former mayor Mitch Landrieu. Not sated by removing silent hunks of metal that never kept anyone from cracking open a book or completing their math homework, Mitch pulled down the heartstrings of Steve Jobs’ widow, and out poured money, gobs of it, to be put to use founding the Rogers-inspired E Pluribus Unum, created for the singular purpose of heaping guilt upon white people. Ignore, of course, the $660,000 Landrieu has “earned” from his non-profit; the eye should be ever-kept on the prize that is anti-racism and, of course, the conversation that is always resisted and never, ever had about the cause of every black American’s nightmare: white-perpetuated racism.
And consider the disfigured example provided by the black, deeply disingenuous current mayor, LaToya Cantrell, who, in June of 2020, wrote an open letter to all the people of New Orleans ostensibly to empower anti-racist protestors. In truth, and very obviously so, she used her “open” letter to target and publicly scold purple-haired narcissists who descended on her Broadmoor neighborhood. Cantrell wrote that anti-racism protests “… cannot be about storming angrily into a residential neighborhood leaving my daughter feeling terrorized, a 12 year-old black girl, whose mother rose from the epicenter of the crack cocaine epidemic, whose family did not come from a place of privilege.” Though she began her letter highlighting the “… opportunity to reshape our world and build a new and better society that respects and uplifts all people, including the women and men who are the backbone of our cultural economy,” she instead could see no further than her own family sufferings: “My father was a victim of the crack epidemic. My stepfather was another casualty of the same scourge — which ran unchecked by those in power, while it decimated the black community. My brother was system-involved and turned his life around. My stepbrother was system-involved and taken from us by violence at 18.” Nothing says “Black Lives Matter” like listing family members who have died by drug addictions, and perish the wonder about the connection between the mayor’s crack problems and every other black American’s racism nightmares. Perhaps there’s a point buried in there somewhere, known only to Cantrell, but the letter is a baffling mess created by a self-obsessed, unserious and small-minded individual.
For all its flaws, though, the letter strikes the right tone by parroting all the right phrasing. As disjointedly and haphazardly tossed about in the original as reproduced here, the mayor wrote: “systematic racism,” “structural inequality,” “reshape our world and build a new and better society,” “marginalized,” “effective advocacy and meaningful action,” “real work,” “holding power accountable to create time and a safe space for this badly needed dialogue,” “to be an activist in this moment is a sacred and a serious endeavor,” “doing the hard work,” “Black Lives Matter,” “this is not a story about privilege and power,” “equitable,” and again, of course again, “the integrity of all of our people, in a way that continues to insist: Black Lives Matter.”
Despite all her trifling efforts at seeming to care, presenting herself an agent of change and progress, never mistake LaToya Cantrell as someone who cares about the people of New Orleans, and especially the black people of New Orleans. Mitch Landrieu doesn’t care either: the statue-targeting craze began with him, garnering his ego and his bank account more attention than even he could have anticipated. Rogers’ income is far beyond what’s deserved: nobody’s 6th-grade writing style should land them the directorship of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. And BLM churned $90 million out of the rage they inspired in the summer of 2020.
Indeed, if Cantrell, Landrieu, Rogers, or BLM are sincere, if there is an ounce of truth in their protest and scolding, in their “ally-ship” with black Americans, if there’s any “stepping into souls” going on, if white-perpetuated anti-black racism is truly what ails our culture, then why do both Devante Bryant and Linda Frickey lay in their graves, victims of black murderers?
What is the upstream cause of the vicious killing of a black 9-year old boy and a white 73-year old woman? And of everyone they represent?
This series will continue…
Postscript: Mitch’s older sister:
