#BlackLivesMatter Propaganda and Testimony

Speaks for itself



I would only add that I am well aware that I benefit from white privilege every single day, as I have my entire life. I have personally witnessed incidents like those described and I have heard testimony from many people who have never had the benefit of white privilege, and I have been strongly affected by what I've witnessed and heard. There are some things that are just wrong, and one of them is targeting/profiling on the sole basis of skin color -- which is what police departments and private security are trained and expected to do. Do not believe their denials. They lie.

I have also witnessed disparate sentencing for exactly the same crime. Black and brown people are sentenced to jail, white people -- who have committed the same crime get probation or community service in lieu of jail.

This is wrong. This has to stop, but most white people don't even know it goes on. They have no idea because it doesn't affect them. They assume that all the black and brown people in jail and prison are there because of all the criminality among those people -- but that's not the way it is. They are in jail or prison because that's the way plea bargaining and sentencing works in this country of injustice: black and brown people are sentenced to jail regardless of what they've done or not done; white people are not. They may not even be charged with crimes they've committed, thus they may never wind up in court to plead out and be sentenced.

It's a royally fucked up system. It is a systemic problem of disparate injustice. It is fundamentally racist, classist and sexist.

Tré Melvin is telling the truth, and it is a hard truth for many white people to grasp or understand -- unless they've seen it for themselves and have the compassion to recognize that racism and injustice  is inherent in the system itself. So many people are invested in this system that it is almost impossible to change, but that was the case with slavery and Jim Crow too.  Yet they were changed... well, incompletely and insufficiently, but they were changed.

As for the killing, I want it to stop.