Jamala Rogers

The new activists who mobilized the March for Our Lives don’t have a full strategy figured out yet, but I can tell they have been paying attention to the moments around them - like Black Lives Matter. They must be open to constructive criticism about how to move their agenda forward and build an inclusive leadership for their budding crusade.

It’s not just about the growing and more deadly massacres carried out by mainly white males with automatic weapons. I’m talking about police violence, military violence, state executions, domestic violence, sexual violence, gender violence, racial violence, religious violence, intra-race community violence. There’s bullying by all ages. There’s the mayhem and destruction caused by policy and legislation. Violence is most thought of in terms of physical violence, but it’s also verbal, psychological, cultural and social. We Are A Violent Nation.

I know we can find a just and humane resolution to the immigration concerns and to better spend our hard-earned tax dollars. The Mexican government is not going to pay for this wall and neither will there be any private dollars coming from big, greedy corporations. This trump pet project is about to blow a hole in taxpayers’ pockets!

For a while, there were almost announcements about powerful men being knocked off their proverbial thrones by accusations of sexual crimes. There may be some who think the snow-balling effect of women exposing the sexual aggression of men in the workplace is an overkill. The women who have suffered in pain and silence certainly don’t think so.

The progress of Black, Brown and poor people has been sporadic since 1968. The trump administration in its quest to Make America Great Again is trying to take us back 50 years. It’s appropriate that the concept of the Poor People’s Campaign be resurrected.

In the African American community, the silent nature of sexual violence is real. The stats are alarming yet Black women - even mothers of child victims - are less likely to report incidents than white women. Legitimate distrust of the system and fears of betrayal mute the voices of victims but not the trauma.

According to one poll, nearly half of Americans don’t know that the Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. They don’t even know that the little country of 3.5 million residents has been a U.S. colony since 1898 with its indigenous people forced to become U.S. citizens in 1917.

Protests abound because injustice abounds. In the U.S. when people of African descent rise up to resist the never-ending onslaught of racist attitudes, practices and laws, the last thing we want to hear is a critique by those of European descent as to how we should protest our own oppression.

Contrary to popular white conservative beliefs, racial profiling and criminalizing Black youth doesn’t just happen on urban streets in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. It happens to young, Black people on idyllic college campuses seeking for the American dream. It happens wherever there are Black bodies.