To me, a nigger is someone who has been gunned down while being black. Personally, I have recently applied this word to a couple non-black persons who have suffered from what appears to have been a situation where they were gunned down for having a lower social-economic class potential than the shootee. But, if you are black, and Darin Wilson shot you down. You be a nigger boy.
I do not believe that what I am doing is the correct action to take in a civilized world. And I apologize only to Mike Brown and the ones he loved for saying this out loud, and not in the causal way my white privilege has afforded me in the past. Mike Brown no longer has this opportunity, to be upset with me. That is why I use the word only in present tense. Like a coward, behind his eternal back.
My white privilege has afforded me the ability to casually use this word, many times in the past, or more often the hip-modern variation, in jokes or whatever reason, while hiding comfortably in the security of the heard.
Never again. Not even in secure location of my mind will I use this word any other way.
My only hope is that the conversation about needless killing pushes the media to challenge Bill O'Reilly to answer the question of if he is a racist? Would Bill O'Reilly shot a black man if he, Bill O'Reilly, suddenly found himself confronted by an imposing black man in an uncomfortable situation? Yes or No. No equivocating.
I am not going to carry a gun, because I equivocate when I ask myself that question. This does not make me a racist. Mike Brown was an imposing figure, regardless of color. However, if I was a police officer, and I not only had all the armor and hopefully training that a police office should have, I would have understood that I had volunteered to protect and serve the public. I would not have been a coward. Or I hope, that I would never be a coward in such a situation.
It may make me a coward for not being willing to say this out loud to a black man that I have never met. I will probably always be a coward that way. But I am no longer the coward who would not admit that I could not handle the responsibility of owning and carrying a weapon... And I have had a gun put to my head in a road rage situation, so I have some experience with this matter.
Mike Brown would have had to have shot a bullet at me, or more importantly, towards a populated area, before I would have drawn and fired my weapon. Or so I hope. Again, I cannot say that I would not be more concerned with the bullets hitting me than for a child in sleeping in their crib behind me. But I understand the line. Did Darin Wilson? Are we asking people this question enough to be confident that they do understand the line.
It is time to move on beyond this idea of Freedom to Bear Arms when that freedom only extends to the end of the muzzle.
Beyond a right that is “defended” rabidly by people defending it as being imparted on them by the gods of the constitution... and in the same breath would agree to dismantle the United States Post Office. Even though only one of them is actually in the document we refer to as The Constitution, and the other is in an addendum that was affixed to it by the mechanisms designed to modify it for the better of all.
Breathe. because I can.
RIP T. Martin, J. Crawford, J. Boyd, E. Garner, K. Powell, R. McBride, M. Brown, and all those who lost their lives because our nation has lost its mind.
Please take a moment, even if you already have. Mike Brown Memorial Fund
Not to end on a tangent, but I wonder about Autism? the aggressive end of the spectrum? And what, if any, connection there might be to what seems like an increase of gun violence. I offer no stats, not sure where to find them.