A Brief by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper
One of the first two books I read in my life that woke me up to the ugly reality of racial hatred in the United States of America were Black Like Me and To Kill A Mockingbird.
Bull Conner’s cops and dogs go after black people fighting for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963
One would think that there has been some progress in racial relations in America since those two seminal books were published n the early 1960s, and that seemed be the case when America elected it’s first black president – Barack Obama – more than six years ago.
Yet what you continue to watch is ignorant old white people, mostly uneducated and mostly from the Midwest and south of that country, and creeps like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, who embolden them with their hateful rhetoric – gathering at Tea Party rallies and screaming the line; “We want our country back!, which is code, of course, for we don’t want a black guy (notice I am trying to avoide their more popular “N” word – in our White House.
If we need any more proof that things still have a long way to go in race relations in the U.S. (and Canada, for that matter) check out the news around a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri earlier this August, 2014. Regardless of what he did in a convenience store around any shoplifting there, he was shot to death by a cop in that town, while unarmed, and left there like road food for the crows for several hours after.
The cops there, almost totally white in a town with a majority of black people, have trained military style weapons on the protesters, reminding any of us who were alive of the civil rights protests in America from the early 1960s. There were even cop dogs, glaring their teeth at the protesters, just as big cop Bull Conner had dogs attacking civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama in1963.
This August, mostly white cops sick themselves and a snarling dog on black protesters in Ferguson, Missouri. They were protesting over a black man shot in the streets.
America may think it has come some way in race relations since the Martin Luther King years, but what in hell is this?
Indeed, most of the old, grey hair white people in certain states in this country continue to hate people of colour so much that this shit is allowed to go on. Why else would most of these ignorant assholes continue to believe the Sarah Palin/Donald Trump garbage that their current president – Barack Obama – was born in Africa and has no business serving as the country’s president?
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