Deep Green Resistance member Dominique Christina wrote a very powerful piece sharing her perspective and experience as a black woman in an institutionally racist America where black people are killed almost every day via state sanctioned, extrajudicial executions. Christina watched in anguish and grief and anger and terror as the murders of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore drove home the knowledge that her fierce motherly devotion could not guarantee protection of her children from our unjust society. Black mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters have watched life after life stolen with little or no consequence to the vast majority of the killers.
Christina got involved with Denver Freedom Riders, a movement to attain liberation, self determination, and healing for the black community. She journeyed with other members to Baltimore, to witness and participate in the uprising of anger catalyzed by the latest prominent brutality in an all-too-long string. In her post, she shares her experiences there and relates them to a bigger picture analysis of racism in this country:
My grandfather was born in 1911. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He knew all about the spectacle of black bodies dangling from trees, burned alive, castrated and beaten. What I could not personally reconcile was that I was having the same conversations about the same culture of violence that he was having as a boy growing up in the West End of Little Rock, Arkansas. Nothing had changed. Martin Luther King’s magnificent legacy did not result in black people being a protected class. Malcolm X’s unapologetic, larger than life, tell you the truth to your face way of being in the world did not stop the slaughter.
Both of those men were cut down by bullets in their prime anyway, which should have been all the evidence the following generations needed that this country is willful about its acts of brutality against black and brown people. If we couldn’t be slaves anymore we could be prisoners. We could be disenfranchised. We could be economically dispossessed. We could be squeezed and starved and relegated to barrios and ghettos that would kill us one way or another anyway. We should have known better. But we couldn’t see it…too much blood in our eyes.
Christina’s writing is an important view into the ongoing repression faced by blacks, and what blacks and those in solidarity with their struggles are starting to do about it. Read the whole article and share with friends: Baltimore & Black Lives Matter.