Nooses: A Wake-Up Call to Save Our Children – Represent Our Resistance

That was forty-four years old. It is not fire hoses our children face, but they do face unfair punishment in the public schools and longer sentences for non-violent crimes. Our children face poverty and unemployment. Despite voting rights (slowly eroding away with the violent practice of caging and plain thievery of votes) and hate crime laws (at best mild and ineffective), domestic terrorism against Black Americans, particularly our children persist today.

The idea of disengaging from mainstream America would perhaps frighten some Blacks who have inherited the “American Dream” and think “our children” refers exclusively to their individual children whom they have urged to stay clear of anything that reeks of blackness. Be successful in school in order to enter the halls of Harvard or Yale and “get over” with that successful position of power—like the man. Those Blacks who would object to any idea of deliberately disengaging Black Americans to re-think our future have benefited from America’s primary value: Get rich or die trying. As Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison informed U.S. Attorney Donald Washington, King did not struggle and die for Washington to buy a big house and drive a Lexus. These Black people have already maneuvered themselves away from the Black masses. Or so they think.

As it is, our children do not have the right to fulfill their human potential. They don’t have the right to be, to love themselves and their heritage and they have had to witness Black adults capitulate to white power, white values. Neighborhoods of Black youth are treated by this white power structure as farm animals slated for a literal death or a spiritual death as they are herded off to prison industrial complexes. The white power structure profits from these deaths of our children. These young people on their “release” from prison don’t have the right to have their votes stolen, thus participate as citizens in this country.