smh...

I still haven't figured out if that means "shaking my head" or "so much hate," but either way...
Fed up by my own continuing anger and frustration that is further exacerbated by all the social media commentary responding to the response to the Zimmerman verdict, I've reinitiated my facebook deactivation and am beginning a 20 day social media vacation.

All I can say is captured by part of my January post, so I'm reposting it here:

 During the eulogy at Medgar Evers' funeral, Roy Wilkins declared:

"The lurking assassin at midnight June 11 and 12 pulled the trigger, but in all wars the men who do the shooting are trained and indoctrinated and keyed to action by men and by forces which which prod them to act. And I say to you that the southern political system put that man behind the rifle. The lily white southern governments, local and state, the senators, the governors, the state legislators, the mayors, the judges, the sheriffs, the chiefs of police, the commissioners and all the rest. And not content with mere disenfranchisement, the office holders have used unbridled political power to fabricate a maze of laws and customs and economic practices which have imprisoned the negro...In far away Washington, the Southern system has its outpost in the congress of the U.S. and by their deals and maneuvers, they helped to put the man behind that deadly rifle this week. The killer must have felt that he had, if not an immunity, than certainly a protection for whatever he chose to do, no matter how dastardly." 

For those of us working towards a vision of racial justice in our communities and nationally, this quote sends shivers down our spines. It's nearly impossible to look at the facts, the interactions of laws, media and racially disparate outcomes, and say that this is no longer a reality. And what is so compelling about Wilkins' eulogy is that is speaks directly to the work that remains to be done, the work that the Rev. Dr. MLK Jr was working towards when he was similarly gunned down by a white man. Like the reality of the men who sat in my training challenging basic facts, our current debate about gun control and gun ownership rights, populated primarily by white men, exists in a vacuum that separates it from these structures and systems, making it nearly impossible to engage in a conversation where the dual realities experienced by whites and blacks are equally represented.

If you look at the song Only a Pawn in their Game, written by Bob Dylan in response to Evers' murder, we see the white shooter as protagonist, similarly to the premise of Wilkins's eulogy. While one might that think that this song is considering Evers' death "from the less obvious point of view," that of the shooter, this is where we must begin in picking up from where MLK (and many others) left off when he was murdered, examining the role of poverty, fear and intentionally divisive promotion of ignorance that put the gun in the shooter's hand in the first place. Dylan's song teaches us who the real enemy is- not the shooter, but the "the politicians, the police and the other branches of government, who's life blood is sustained by the status quo, a status quo that thrives on hatred and violence between the races" (Prial D,  The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music)

Though the national narrative has drastically changed since 1963 when a 22 year old Dylan, wrote the song, perhaps it's possible to transform the current white distrust for large institutions and systems into one in which the less enfranchised and less powerful of all races can critique the ignorance we are spoonfed by moneyed elites 365 days a year and move from a world in which we talk about the shooter himself as the protagonist, and peal back the layers of how this scene is being set in the first place. Because it's a scene that we see set every time there is a shooter, whether that shooter is an isolated young white male in suburban Connecticut,  a traumatized, invisible young black male in urban Connecticut or rural Mississippi. 

In service of racial justice, we must move from picking up the pieces of life and calling it a travesty and a shame when men like Medgar or Treyvon are murdered, and think about in whose name the shooters are acting. If the narrative tells them to act in the name of protecting the safety and rights of whites everywhere, or somewhere, maybe we need to think about the names of those whites. Maybe we need to think about what they have been taught to think when they see a woman like Myrlie Evers-Williams on TV and when they see her next to them on an airplane or in a courthouse.

If there's one message I hope my colleagues received in our training, it's that we are all responsible, regardless of the ways in which we've benefitted or been harmed, because as the Newtown massacre showed us, when we promote a world when shooting anyone is okay, we promote a world in which shooting anyone is okay.