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Today America Showed Us Exactly Who It Is. Believe It.
This is how injustice rots everyone to the core
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
I know I shouldn’t feel this way. I fight it with everything I have. I’ve worked to feel something other than what my most base instincts are pulling at me to feel. My brain tells me to keep these thoughts somewhere in my gut, away from my mouth and the keyboard at my fingertips. But I can’t help it. The voice is still there: Why aren’t police shooting these people?
January 6, 2021, is one of those moments in American history we’ll always remember. One that redefined the country and tore through a bottomless well of facades built on preserving White myths. Trump supporters — whether Proud Boys or MAGA Nation or neo-Nazis or all of the above or anything else — armed themselves with heavy artillery and stormed Capitol Hill. They scaled the Capitol building. They took the House floor. They occupied the offices of sitting representatives. They did this all on national TV and live on Twitter. They livestreamed themselves doing it.
The whole time, I kept waiting for police to shoot someone.
This is how injustice rots everyone to the core. I don’t believe in police violence. Hell, I don’t even believe in police. But I do believe in fairness, and if nothing else, America is sniper-precise at perverting the notion of what’s fair. I’ve spent the last decade watching police arrest, terrorize, brutalize, hunt down, and violate peaceful Black activists who simply want answers for police killings of innocent people. This past summer, we all watched police with shields and tear gas and drawn guns, with tanks, line American streets with the blood of Black Lives Matter protesters.
And yet, today, the entire United States government has reinforced the need for all of those protests — and exposed its own hypocrisy in reacting to them.
When Black people protest in front of a Target in Minneapolis, police arm themselves for war. When White people storm government buildings they are met with selfies and a meager police force. Black Lives Matter protesters were called anti-police and inciters of police violence…
