Stop, Look, Listen and Learn

Posted by accord1 on January 15, 2021 · Leave a Comment (Edit)

A little over a week ago, I sat on the edge of my chair, shocked and stunned at what I was watching on the television. I hastened to my Twitter account to see if I could find out more information about this apparent insurrection by these people on the U.S. Capitol Building. After seeing a couple of photos, I copied them and hit send. My fingers quickly went to work in a couple of social media communities I am a part of, and stated, “This Is Not America!” 

After a few likes, the comments began to turn to the dark reality of precisely who America is. The comments followed one after another, in essence saying, “this exactly is who America is.” It is the same old stench of the American rot beneath the scab. One may ask, what’s the scab? Maybe it’s the scab of Affirmative action or Fair Housing legislation. Could It have been the scab of demographic change or the first black president and more? Nevertheless, my aspirational emotional response came bounding to a reality that I know all too well. The white supremacists’ led mob motivated by rejecting black and brown votes as fraudulent demonstrated their attempts to disenfranchise millions of voters in a Hypocritical phrase of “Stop the Steal.” 

No different than the Night Riders of the nineteenth century.  

“Blacks out after dark also risked encounters with “patterollers” (mounted surveillance patrols) or, following the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan. Whatever their guise, all of these “night riders” had one purpose: to manipulate blacks through terror and intimidation.” 

Night Riders in Black Folk History By Gladys-Marie Fry

This mentality of evil parallels the Modus Operandi of those terrorists from the past. This same evil visited members of congress on January the 6th. The majority of those on the FBI watchlist present were white supremacists. Regardless of anyone’s political persuasion, this attack on the American sanctuary of government was a horrible reminder of who we are. 

This time it was not Saudi Arabians slamming airliners into buildings, It was not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Isis. It wasn’t even the Russians. These were Americans, and their victims were, for the most part, white. Their beating victims were the same law and order police that they swear by. They were not bloodied black bodies on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Black Wall Street of the Greenwood Massacre, or Greensboro Massacre of 1979, When KKK & Nazis Killed 5 People in Broad Daylight. 

Greensboro’s 5 victims were similar to the number of deaths suffered at the Capital, which could have been many more, including the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Thomas Paine

Black people know this anguish that has been endured for generations. Look again at the lives (Black Lives) that also matter on the other side of the track beyond the ethnic divide. It’s not too late to begin to Build a Bridge.

Kevin Robinson Executive Director of Accord1