We can, however, demand justice in Tyre’s name.
We Demand an end to a policing system that subjects Black people to traffic and pedestrian stops at five times our population share, where Black people are searched at three times the rate of everyone else, even though we are less likely to be in possession of contraband, and that kills Black people at three times the rate of whites. Justice in the name of #TyreNichols…and #KeenanAnderson, and #DaunteWright, and #SandraBland, and #DevinBrown, and so many others…means that we must pull police out of traffic stops, mental health, housing, schools and all other places they obviously don’t belong.
No amount of diversity training or recruitment could have prevented Tyres death. Despite all five of the murderous police being racially identified as Black, we know that cops, regardless of race, pledge their allegiance to the violent systems of policing that is disproportionately meted out on Black victims. Justice requires that we transform, not simply reform public safety.
Getting justice takes righteous struggle and organizing. It is struggle, and the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings and organizing of the last decade and beyond, that created conditions where there is some degree of accountability for the murderous officers. It is struggle and organizing that will win justice in Tyre’s name. Now is the time to be in the streets, and in the public meetings, and courthouses, at policy tables and schoolhouses to do all that we can to build the kind of world that we want, need, and deserve.
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Statement on Dr. Cornel West Joins the Board of Black Lives Matter Grassroots
In many ways this is a revisitation of the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, in which ruling Justice Roger Taney claimed, “African Americans had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”.
Statement on Jordan Neely
In many ways this is a revisitation of the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, in which ruling Justice Roger Taney claimed, “African Americans had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”.
Statement on the Election of Donald Trump
Our flight has never been dependent on who occupies the White House. It is driven by our secret duty in our deep commitment to justice and the liberation of our people.
