By Thesna Aston
In living colour.
The list of black people being murdered and brutalised grows by the minute. It’s not just by police officers and military but people behind the uniform they are wearing and the system, aka systemic racism, that backs up police and military action. Basically, systemic racism is anti-black practices, the unjustly gained political and economic power of white people, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines, and the white racist ideologies and attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power.
Read more: The South African system enables the killing of Black body.Placing a black President in a country such as South Africa means very little when the economy is not in black hands. We need only look at those that have the wealth to understand that the power is in control of the people who have wealth and not those living in townships.
Because when you have wealth, you have control and those who do not fall into that bracket, are used to create more wealth and increase poverty.In living colour, black and brown people globally have very little power based on the colour of their skins, and it is this that allows for the murder and brutality to continue. There has not been an overhaul of the police system since 1994, in their training. Regardless of the colour of the police or military, the “system” teaches them that it is acceptable to gun down black and brown people. In their training to learn shooting, it does not involve a white man, looking as innocent as the next-door neighbour’s son, armed with a firearm shooting black people.
The images in living colour are black and send clear messages that black and brown people are the problem. They fire at “targets” coming for them, and those targets are often not blonde and blue-eyed. Instead, by the time the police and army personnel have completed their training, all they know is that criminals and gangsters are black and brown people, primarily men, and terrorists are Muslim; so definitely not white.
Trying to live in the colour of skins in a society that’s brainwashed to view black and brown people with suspicion is attempting to dodge proverbial bullets. Because if they lived today, they’re lucky because maybe tomorrow they may not be.
The black people that have been murdered and brutalized at the hands of police officers and military personnel in South Africa and the States are defeating the ends of justice; because justice has not been served, and due process has not happened.Instead, they are gunned down like wild animals while holding a packet of skittles, drinking a beer, using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, and or fast asleep in their beds like Breonna Taylor.
What will it take for black and brown people to live in peace in a society that does not allow them to live in the colour of the skins they were born into?
Or perhaps that is the point of it all; maybe black and brown people aren’t meant to live period! How else does one explain what is happening right now or the fact that white people can go about their business never once thinking that they may not make it home alive because they could be gunned down by people in uniform tasked with protecting and serving them?