What's Going On?

 

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying

Tyre Nichols was calling for his mother as Memphis, Tennessee police officers were beating him to death. Typing that sentence makes me want to cry as I did when I first heard about it.

As we were watching the news report on the release of the video of Tyre Nichols murder, my husband commented that at least the killing wasn't racial since no White officers were involved. I said he was wrong, it was racial. Tyre Nichols was stopped because he was a Black man. Tyre Nichols was profiled by Memphis cops who assumed he was linked to something criminal just because he was Black. That is racist. How could those Black cops be racist? Because as cops they were taught to have a Them Against Us mindset. They were taught that Them are the enemy and a danger to the entire police force and society. They were also taught that everyone who isn't a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (WASP) is more likely to be a Them. They were taught that they were righteous men doing the righteous job of keeping society from descending into chaos and, as we all know by now, righteous men are natural predators.

Add into that mixture our country's mass descent into cognitive dissonance. We have members of Congress who have swore to uphold the US Constitution passing laws that curtail some American citizens constitutional right to vote. We have members of the US Supreme Court rejecting the right of women citizens to make their own health choices based on the Justices' own religion beliefs in a rejection of our 1st Amendment protection against the government making any one religion the only governmental approved religion. We have followers of Christ who spout words of hate and threaten do violence against anyone who does not believe what they believe. We have Racists, Bigots, and Sexist men who can only feel better about themselves by thinking that their skin color, religion, or gender makes them better that other human beings when deep down inside they know that none of this is true. And we have Black cops, who have faced racial discrimination as Black men, beating another Black man to death.

When confronted with the mismatch between what a person thinks and how they behave, that person's reaction can be anger or even rage. I'll bet that the cognitive dissonance experienced by those cops caused them to strike and kick Tyre Nichols even harder to release some of the discomfort they felt as Black men preying on another Black man.

The whole thing is disgusting and sickening. It's also an indictment of our society.
#TyreNichols #CopViolence #PoliceBrutality