Vendor Writing

Black Lives Matter

By Tyrone M.

Fifty years ago Martin Luther King was in Washington on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Here we are again. Not only has something not been done, it got worse. The police departments in this nation have a code. They don’t tell on each other. What they need to do is weed out these racist cops. And if they have a problem with stress and acting up, they don’t need to be cops. You have to stop it on the local level. Congress needs to enact some new laws about chokeholds, and that knee on the neck, that is illegal. When other comrades see this, they need to step up.

There’s no justice in America. When you have justice, everybody comes together. Everybody needs to come together and address this problem. You have a president that tear-gassed protestors who didn’t even have a bullhorn — they were just having an orderly protest. He gassed them and ran them out of the yard, so he could go across the street and hold up a Bible. That’s idolatry is what he did. People say we gotta get him out. We could get him out and somebody else could still pop up at a local level. Racism pops its ugly head up.

We all are God’s children. If just one race, or certain people address it, that is not going to help the problem. It’s going to add to the problem.

In my lifetime, I have never seen different colors and different races come together like they did in Martin Luther King’s day. Everybody is getting tired. If somebody is a racist, they’re not just affecting me, they’re affecting you and me. It’s a horrendous thing. It shouldn’t have happened. But it happened. We as a people, we got to do something about it. Just staying at home and googling and hashtag this and hashtag that, that ain’t doing nothing. You got to step up and do something about it — any injustice. You got to come like they are, can’t come one or two thousand, you got to come five, 20, 30 thousand. You got to come peaceful. You got some renegades, people running around here taking advantage, breaking into jewelry stores.

America has always been the bedrock of racism. Anybody over 15 know that. But what they don’t understand is when you try to keep a certain people down, you’re keeping your own self down. Nobody is better than nobody.

Why are these people acting like this? When regular people act like this we say he or she is racist. You got government officials acting like this, like our president and these racist cops — if you got a problem with people of color, get the hell off the police. They need to start screening more. There’s a lot of racist people that are getting on the police force. They’re masquerading as police, when in their heart they’re hateful. Some people just hate people, it doesn’t matter the color. What we need to do as citizens is anytime we see racism pop up its ugly head, we need to jump on it right then. Everywhere you’re at. Whether it’s at your workplace — somebody tell an off-color joke. Ain’t no use in laughing. Say, “Hey, what’s wrong with you? You ain’t got nobody in your family colored?” Don’t stand for it. I don’t let nobody around me, friends of mine, kinfolk, talk about no other race and think it’s a joke. It’s not no joke.

There’s a lot of guilt in America too. Somebody recently gave the NAACP $500,000. Money is good to help fund a program, but it’s just an act of kindness unless when somebody else says something about another race of people you step up and say hey, that’s not funny.

A lot of people think racism is just like white people don’t like black people. I’ve straightened so many of my friends out over the years saying stupid stuff about Caucasian people.

America is a festering sore. You know you have a sore, and you may think it’s drying up, well it ain’t drying up! America is a big sore. It’s not drying up. The puss is running out of it. And the pus that is running out of America from our leadership, with Donald Trump — the pus is running down on some of the citizens and causing them to act the same way he acts.

You research a house and it’s $200,000 and when you as a person of color go back and they tell you the house is $350,000 or somebody else had bought it, when nobody else bought it, they just don’t want you in that neighborhood. That’s happening all over the country.

But you have a president that promotes this stuff. He called on the military. They hadn’t done that since 1982 when they had the riots in Chicago!

This should have stopped 50 years ago. When they say something about somebody, get together. Get friends of different colors. They think people are just coming together to start trouble. No. We’re coming as a people. It’s gotta stop. I’m always about nonviolence. It’s hard to fight fire with fire. Breaking out windows and all that, what’s that going to solve? It’s making the unrest even worse and it doesn’t solve a thing.

We got to work together as a people to stop this. We gotta break this blue code that these cops got. I can imagine how the Afro-American cops feel in this country knowing that they killing Afro-American men and there’s nothing they really can do about it and they’re working with them every day. I would do some kind of protest. And say I’m not coming to work until somebody addresses this problem. And they say, well you’re fired. Fire me then. If you don’t stand for nothing you’ll fall for anything.

We gotta do better. We’re not doing enough. We gotta start electing leaders that are more spiritual and the ones that don’t just care about themselves.