Let’s talk… Is my skin toxic?

Hiya!

I wonder if your day went fine because, well… mine didn’t.

I’ve been holding onto this for a while now, and it’s not because I didn’t want to talk or write about, but it’s because I was anxious. I wasn’t sure how it would sound coming from me or what it would look like. But here goes.

If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should therefore protest openly, everything… that smacks of discrimination and slander.

Mary McLeod Bethune (1975-1955) “Certain inalienable rights, what the negro wants”.

Today the hashtag #JusticeforGeorgeFloyd was trending all over Twitter and Instagram and so I decided to see what had transpired. My heart sunk. George, an African American, died under the cruel and constricted grasp of a white officers’ knees over his neck, for an alleged forgery and resist of arrest. I wish I could post the video here but just follow the hashtag or google it. You won’t miss it. The video footage from the nearby store showed that he wasn’t resisting the arrest but he kept exclaiming amid muffed breaths that he couldn’t breathe, and that he just needed the officer to get off him so that he would enter the police car but…

For the past few years, the African American culture interested me and I picked up onto it. This directed me to books such as We’re Going to Need more Wine by Gabrielle Union, (check the review here https://resolutescribbles.com/2020/05/18/book-review-were-going-to-need-more-wine-gabrielle-union/), Maya Angelou’s Letter to my daughter, (check the review here https://resolutescribbles.com/2020/05/20/book-review-letter-to-my-daughter-maya-angelou/), Trevor Noah’s Born a crime, to mention but a few and movies such as Just Mercy, The Hate You Give, Queen and Slim, Blue, When they see us and This is us, and oh my! The depiction of the disparity between the races is explicit.

See, for the past few months I’ve been preaching against Ideological Neocolonialism all over my social media pages and University thanks to an amazing Nigerian author I met on Twitter that came to our Uni. But it goes beyond that. In the West, its worse. Its actual, overt and uncovered-up racism. In Just Mercy, Jamie Fox, the lead character was prosecuted for a crime he didn’t commit and was on death row for years until the truth was revealed. It was based on a true story. The black man was the easier target to frame because no one would believe in his innocence.

In a Grisham book I read last month, The Guardians, one of the clients of the organization that fought against wrongful convictions, was framed for raping and killing a white girl in the neighborhood without any substantial evidence. The all white jury however, was so quick to pass the guilty verdict in order to ‘secure’ the neighborhood. Dirty white cop business involved with a drug cartel, chose the black man as the victim. 23 years later and after his near death with the needle, he is acquitted on a wrongful conviction and fresh investigations started.

Thinking about all these stories, all triggered by George’s death (RIP), my heart is scorched with so much ire and agony because it seems like ‘we’ shall always be the venom. The outcasts who are criminals, under-educated and not worthy of the time and attention. Its been more than decades since slave trade and the Scramble for Africa, and even with the independence, there are still subtle traces and aspects of the stereotypes and racial divides. Why? Why is it that when a white man commits crime in Africa, he is put in a first class prison cell and escorted with a whole convoy to the jail, while sipping on coffee or a soft drink, BUT when a black man commits a crime in the West, it’s the needle that beckons him or outright death.

But first wait, scratch that…

Let’s talk about the fact that even in Africa, when an African commits a crime or is allegedly accused of committing a crime, the brutality with which he is arrested by his fellow ‘black’ officer is so crude that when compared to how the white man is treated, leaves some unanswered queries. Let me speak for Uganda in particular, just recently, the enforcement of the lock down and curfew by the LDU’s on the streets was so crude and I remember watching a clip by NTV filming police men battering a woman sited on a boda-boda until she fell and rolled on the road, to oncoming cars. Why? Why all that cruelty? At about the same time, I was walking around my neighborhood and saw these white men and Chinese driving their cars around with four other people in the car, without masks, without a sticker or anything to show that they were essential workers. They weren’t stopped. No one asked them why they were not following the Presidential directives. Why?

Yes all #BlackLivesMatter but do we as Africans treasure our lives too?

I was so enraged by the conduct of the police man towards the deceased George, and all these movies and books I read about the brutality of the white dominance towards the blacks that I forgot about my context. We might not have racial divides but what we have is worse. Black skin against fellow black skin. It tears my heart out of my skin. Every day we see human rights violations and brutality being perpetrated by our very own governments towards its people and so, the conservative white man isn’t the only one to blame. Our governments are too.

Once we get to the point where we value the life of each person, where the color of our skin isn’t the determining factor of the privilege we will get or the school we will go to, when we get to that point, will we then live in no fear.

Until then, let’s not stop creating the awareness and recording all forms of violation. If the courts of law will not give us the justice we seek, let the world know. I’m sure someone out there will get the message and something will be done.

Its starts with us. Value your neighbor and love them like you do yourself, and the seeds of tribalism, race, color, sectarianism will not hatch anymore.

RIP George and all other African Americans and black men and women who have been caught in this cycle. The good Lord will avenge you.