I Can't Breathe, You Can't See

Preface: I know that the majority of law enforcement officers are honest, hardworking good people who are out to make a difference every day. To the great officers out there that I interact with – even occasionally – thank you for your service in making our world a better place than we found it. As a former teacher, I know what it is to have your chosen profession questioned daily and lumped into one band of stereotypes. However, we do have some rogue cops who for one reason or another think they are above the law or have an inferiority complex that has never been truly dealt with who do sully the profession. This post (as with all of my other blogs) are derived from my experiences, hopes, wishes, desires, and more toward a more authentic equality than a colorblind system that tends to avoid the pursuit of justice. If you don’t see color, then you certainly do not see a Henderson State-educated 36-year-old husband, friend, co-worker, neighbor, etc. as much more than another big black man with a deep voice.

Thoughts? Be constructive, not trollish. pic.twitter.com/JAQCpAT616
— A. Cedric Armstrong (@cedteaches) December 9, 2014

Order rooted and maintained by fear, intimidation, violence, brutality, and incarceration is both cruel and immoral. Justice is order’s intended soul mate yet serving justice is twice as hard as doling out fear. Black America knows this better than anyone else with our twice-as-hard spirit: the one of having to work twice as hard to even be considered, and often our reward is a menial prize that we still have to fight tooth-and-nail for. If we’re satisfied with just getting in the door, then we’ve lost our way. More so, having a few dollars, a house on the hill, and being seen on television nightly does not mean the race is over; instead, each can be considered a deterrent  thanks to the predatory nature of greed and power. While there is nothing wrong with being able to provide a better lifestyle than the ones we were afforded, do not let the titles and little bit of power fool you into thinking this is what equality is about. If that is the case, then we have lost our resolve to take the road less traveled a la Robert Frost and our complacency will cost us dearly.

The legal proceedings and maneuverings that have sparked protests in Ferguson, Sanford, New York, Cleveland, and throughout our nation all expose our monumental failures to build and protect the gains of our parents, grandparents, and countless relatives won during the civil rights era. We know that not all of the evidence presented in every case was legitimate, as are each grand jury’s members truthful or representative of the communities they were commissioned to serve. What price are we willing to pay for our children and next generation?

#wakethefuckupamerica pic.twitter.com/9dyeqCfjhE

— A. Cedric Armstrong (@cedteaches) December 9, 2014

Toward the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned a Poor People’s Campaign – a connection for the working-class with the African-American twice-as-hard spirit designed to defend civil-rights legislation from inevitable backlash. He visualized the poor, vulnerable; the downtrodden unifying to uproot the political seeds deigned to grow income inequality. Sadly, he was murdered before it came to fruition.

Unfortunately, we are unaware the People’s Campaign was Phase 2 of a four-step civil rights movement and further lost in the woods about Barry Goldwater’s emphasis of Law and Order being the bedrock of pushback toward civil rights.

Law and Order – the American political strategy of choice of the past fifty years – did not put Goldwater in the White House. Historians know that he got his ass handed to him by President Johnson, losing every state but Arizona, but his emphasis is what brought President Nixon to the Oval Office and former actor Ronald Reagan the California governorship in 1968. It also justified Nixon’s War on Drugs, harsh sentencing requirements (crack offenders were locked up twice as long as cocaine violators), the dehumanization of black offenders, the Mulford Act of 1968, and the preference of order rooted in fear and punishment. Law and Order also provided America’s mass incarceration. As a result, the ten years of progress have produced at least a handful of useful laws that have been thwarted by fifty years of legalized mass incarceration and inequality.

This is segregation by incarceration (SBI), pitting the police vs. the African-American community. No flyers, no press conferences for those who opposed the end of an American apartheid system in Jim Crow, none of that. Segregation was not about to lie down and concede defeat and pledge support for racial equality. Its newer and not-so-evil-looking strategy was to take down the blatant whites-only sign and trade them in for strategic enforcement of criminal laws that pack poor people behind bars and inevitably break up the traditional pathways to upward mobility.

SBI is much worse and corrosive than Jim Crow ever was. One unintended benefit of Jim Crow was it forced black people to build and rely on our own economic, educational, and social systems. SBI is like diabetes – a silent killer with no benefits. It extinguishes hope and in effect, litters society with a multitude of grown-up boys who become parasitic not only on the affected families but also the areas they live in. In short, segregation by incarceration has left African-Americans distrustful of law enforcement via decimating the black family structure and placing a cultural rot that prison culture and black culture are synonymous.

Once capitalism got into the incarceration business, lawmakers and states began racking up profits in untold dollars without mention of the lives damaged in the process. Most states have private prisons which are often run more shoddily than the worst state institutions in their heydays, and now even corporations have thrown their hats in the ring employing people in the most dangerous situations all in the name of saving money to have a cheap labor force! Where do people get picked up? On the block, that’s where. The drug war has constructed an environment conducive to prison life and the yards; think about the codes of silence imposed.

Why did the gangs accelerate in growth in California in the 1970s and ‘80s? Why was gangsta rap born in Los Angeles?

Because Ronald Wilson Reagan planted that seed of Law and Order in California first.

Aside from Bernie Madoff, what happened to the white-collar thieves and corporate thugs whose greed nearly destroyed the national economy and put a standstill to the 2008 presidential campaign? Most of them have their jobs and some are lobbyists to the same lawmakers who turned a blind eye to their looting. Worse, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has made a link that loose cigarettes are worth more than a black man’s life – and this is what the Republican Party is trotting out for President in the next cycle? In an act of bipartisanship, even our original “first black president” Bill Clinton instituted draconian three strikes and mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines as a measure to get Southern whites on board with Law and Order. Look below and read the LBJ comment and tell me if this is accurate.

LBJ was right about enough Arkansas voters. Thank you for voting the way you did. pic.twitter.com/g96f65f4e7
— A. Cedric Armstrong (@cedteaches) November 5, 2014

I can’t breathe, but you can’t see.

America is still a place where race trumps self-interest, where the middle-class and poor have more in common with each other than the one percenters we keep voting in. Just as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson does not speak for all black people, I would surely hope Rush Limbaugh and Tom Cotton are not representative of all white people. I’ll trade you Charles Barkley and Ben Carson for Phil Jackson and a pack of Ramen noodles (I jest), but you get the point. To maintain a perceived superiority, some people are willing to lie on the grenade of unfair justice in order to claim they are the chosen ones.

Why do you not see? Is it because your rose-colored glasses are tinted to a prescription that only limits to those inside of your immediate world? What about lumping all people unlike yourselves to a neat little box (ex. my black/white/gay/Asian/Hispanic/atheist/fill-in-the-blank friend)? Or does it not matter because it isn’t in your homogeneous villages?

Justice is not blind – history has proven that through the posthumous pardons and blank apologies. America is not.

Open your eyes.