• This Is What Domestic Terrorism Looks Like.

    Mack Lyons Wednesday, August 13, 2014 , , , , ,

    It's been established throughout history that there's nothing scarier to many Americans than the sight of a black man with a gun, let alone a large group of black men armed to the teeth.

    In light of Michael Brown's death at the hands of an overzealous police department in a racially charged tinderbox of a town, it looks like I'll have to amend that, as follows:

    It's been established throughout history that there's nothing scarier to many Americans than the sight of a black man.

    Of course, it's not so much "fear" than it is an ingrown, almost reflexive need for "control." Today's highly-militarized law enforcement are the runaway slave patrols of the new millennium - if they're not busy funneling a growing number of able-bodied black men and women into the prison-industrial complex and the permanent underclassery that it entails, they're busy with displays like these.Walking around in full military-surplus gear. Firing tear gas into private homes. Aiming AR-15s at innocent passersby.

    Make no mistake: this is state-sanctioned terrorism. It's something black America has long since been intimately acquainted with, from the moment the first batch of African slaves were dragged off the boat.

    Throughout slavery.

    After Reconstruction.

    During the Jim Crow era.

    During the Civil Rights era.

    During the so-called era of "colorblindness" and "post-racial America."

    Up to today.

    And yes, there are people out there who not only support this state-sanctioned terrorism of black souls (because they're assumed to be criminals who probably definitely deserve it), but they revel in it.





    It's a small taste of the shit sandwich black America has had to deal with for generations on end. And there's no end to it in sight.

    This and other acts of state-sanctioned terrorism is a cancer. This is the cancer that is slowly but surely killing this nation. It metastasized early on, up to the sloppy and life-threatening surgery that was the American Civil War. It went into remission with Reconstruction, but flared up in its full glory with Jim Crow. Chemotherapy came in the form of the Civil Rights movement and after that, everyone thought it would finally stay in remission and eventually disappear.

    But like any virulent cancer, it never leaves. It just bides its time until the conditions are right to spread. And spread, it has. And it keeps spreading.

    The cancer won't go away until America is finally ready to acknowledge that black life has the same worth as a white life, and that a black life deserves just as much protection. Until then, this country will remain in hospice, slowly awaiting the day when the cancer swallows it whole.



    Tell us something we don't know.