TNC article, brilliant as usual. This is what Obama said during the 50th anniversary of the “I have a dream” speech:
And then, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us claiming to push for change lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior.
I was like livid. How the fuck can you say that Mr. President, on this occasion, when you know this:
There is the rub: In the 1960s, black men and women who carried the pain of living in a white terrorist state, who carried the pain of redlining, of job discrimination, of being cheated out of land, cut on the television and saw black women and children getting the shit kicked out of them. No one was being punished. Sometimes the police were doing the kicking. They saw this, and they stewed. They’d seen it before. And as they had in the face of racial pogroms, and in the face of slavery itself, they closed their mouths, swallowed the daggers, and got dressed for work.
And they’re still doing so through stop and frisks, tragedies like Katrina or Trayvon to terrible awards. I think African Americans are so used to swallow daggers for breakfast that they’ll eventually become immortal.
Joke aside, I’m deeply disgusted.