Where Is Our Freedom?

Days like this highlight the trauma of Blackness in the United States.

Jefferson both wrote the Declaration and raped his slave, Sally Hemmings, fathering several children.

Eight Black churches have burned in the last week.

The Confederate Flag still flies over the South Carolina state house.

Bree Newsome has spent more time in jail for climbing the flag pole there and taking that symbol of racism and hate down than the people who killed Eric Garner, Tony Robinson, Rekia Boyd, and Mike Brown combined.

There are larger percentage of Black people in bondage today than there were during legal chattel slavery.

And this week the rest of the world finally figured out what Black Americans knew from the beginning, that Dylann Roof was part of a conspiracy.

HE said that he wanted to start a “race war,” and I’ve talked previously about the fact that starting a thing that has been going on since the inception of our nation is not possible. But I want to point out something else in the midst of the praise that the ignorant have been heaping on the Black community of Charleston for hugging and crying and forgiving rather than stepping out into the streets.

Roof wasn’t trying to incite Black people to respond with violence. He was trying to be the started gun for a further wave of white violence against Black people.

And it worked.

But yay America! Let’s cook out and celebrate with loud bangs.

We are being hunted in our own country.

And before anyone wraps themselves in the flag and starts whining about how I’m mean and not patriotic, let me remind you I’m a veteran and you should shut up.

I served this country yet I still realize that it does not love me and it never has. Lots of people have spent a not small amount of time and effort to convince us that we are loved and valued by American society and that we should be grateful for what we have, but they are lying and we know it.

Also, that is gaslighting.

It is clear to us, because we have eyes and ears and live in the world, that out safety and our suffering matters less to White America™ than their desire to maintain the fiction that they are the descendants of freedom fighters. As such, we are told that we shouldn’t talk about not only the historical damage that was done to our culture, but the constant ongoing damage that is done to us as individuals simply because being Black in America is to live in a constant state of trauma that is ignored and dismissed.

But fireworks are pretty, I guess.

Yay?