Tag: Mothers of the movement

I’m probably gonna ruffle a few feathers with this one but someone has to do it. It has to  be said and overstated that The grieving mothers of Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Jordan Davis,  Dontre Hamilton and Mike Brown are nothing close to being the mothers of any kind of movement and to label them as such for the express purpose of getting Hillary Clinton elected  president is as embarrassing as it is offensive. Offensive and embarrassing to the untold mothers who have had to bury their sons and daughters due to an encounter with an overzealous  non-empathetic cop and  offensive and embarrassing to the millions of people from all walks of life that have taken to the streets with myriad acts of civil defiance  seeking redress for the long standing and ongoing grievance of state, local and federal police officers abusing their authority and murdering innocent unarmed black people with impunity.

When Hillary was not on the chitterling circuit  with these mothers shoring up her southern  firewall (also known as the black vote) she was in the homes of the other half of her southern constituency (Dixicrats) raising funds and talking about “the issues”

The two diametrically opposed dispositions by Hillary Clinton in the last two videos is rivaled in galling political pivots only by the great feat that her husband pulled off in June of 1992 while he himself was on the stump. During Bill Clinton’s  first bid for the white house  he played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show to illustrate how down he was with the blacks and ten days later at a Rainbow Coalition event using Jesse Jackson as a backdrop he conflated an  out of context a musing by Sister Souljah with some of the lyrics in one of her songs to build up a black radical  boogey monster  that he was there to destroy. He actually compared her to David Duke to an audience full of black people. Of course his true audience were not the black folks sitting in attendance.

To be clear the movement that they are referring to as being the progeny of these women is the #blacklivesmatter movement. And to be even more clear it is a movement  that the murders of the children of these women no doubt helped buoy and embolden. For that these women should be recognized for as having paid the ultimate sacrifice. No mother should have to endure what Sybrina Fulton, (mother Trayvon Martin), Lucia McBath,  (mother of Jordan Davis), Geneva Reed-Veal, (mother of Sandra Bland), Gwen Carr, (mother of Eric Garner), Maria Hamilton( mother of Dontre Hamilton) Samaria Rice (mother of Tamir Rice) or Lesley McSpadden (mother of Mike Brown) have had to endure. All of these women are inextricably linked to the movement due to their involuntarily blood sacrifice, but to call these grieving mothers the mothers of the actual movement is to deeply discount the millions of black mothers before them that have lost their children to state sanctioned and/or white vigilante violence. Before these women there was Mammy Till, mother or Emmit Till, Eloise Glover, mother of Clifford Glover, Kaddiatou Diallo, mother of Amadou Diallo, Valarie Bell, mother of Sean Bell and hundreds and even thousands of other mothers in the last decade alone that walked the same precarious walk that these mothers have had to. For these women to sell out their share of the movement for the perks and pittance that only a Super Pack with tons of dark money can afford is unconscionable. And no, I don’t have proof that this group of grieving mothers were paid for their less than logical endorsement but I’m pretty sure that they were.

The true irony in  the Stockholm like love that Hillary is getting from the “Mothers of the Movement” and the millions of other less than enlightened black politicos, pundits and voters that have her well on the way to the democratic presidential nomination is that she has successfully  latched herself on to a movement created to abate a problem that she and her husband greatly exacerbated while Bill Clinton was president and she was the first lady touting his “tough on crime” legislative goals.

Mike Browns mother Lesley McSppaden encapsulates the kind of incongruity inherent in the logic of these mothers “I’m with her” proclamation with this ringing yet confusing endorsement.

Since August 9, 2014, I have wondered where do we go from here? I have made it this far by my faith, but we need more than faith. Our criminal justice system is broken and damaged, and it left broken hearts and damage in our communities. Fixing this will require time and commitment of someone who wants to make things better for us all. I want a leader who is willing to take the steps to reform a justice system that dehumanized my son. I want a leader who will now honor my son’s life and fights for our children’s futures. I want a justice system that is fundamentally based on fairness for everyone…This election season, we are at battle for the soul of our nation…if we want to continue to build on the progress made by our country, we need a president who is ready to lead–and I trust Hillary” ~ Lesley McSppaden

Ms. McSppaden seems to have a solid grasp on the kind of cultural construct in law enforcement that deems it prudent to dehumanize and over criminalize black people to justify their lethal method of policing but she seems totally oblivious to the not so hidden political forces that empower them. For every 100 police officers that have said “I feared for my life” or “he reached for my gun” to explain away them shooting to death an unarmed African-American there’s at least that many politicians on the local, state and national level pushing the kind of hyper-criminalized trope to create the space for these men to continue to get away with murder. It’s no coincidence that the super predator trope was used by Darren Wilson to escape justice after he murdered her son in cold blood. I mean he did not come out and call Mike Brown a Super Predator but you’d be hard pressed to argue that he was not inferring as much after reading the following quotes of his to the grand jury that ultimatley decided that he was justified in killing McSppaden’s son.

Darren Wilson on the initial confrontation at his car:

DW: I see them walking down the middle of the street. And first thing that struck me was they’re walking in the middle of the street. I had already seen a couple cars trying to pass, but they couldn’t have traffic normal because they were in the middle, so one had to stop to let the car go around and then another car would come. And the next thing I noticed was the size of the individuals because either the first one was really small or the second one was really big...

He then grabs my door again and shuts my door. At that time is when I saw him coming into my vehicle. His head was higher than the top of my car. And I see him ducking and as he is ducking, his hands are up and he is coming in my vehicle.

I had shielded myself in this type of manner and kind of locked away, so I don’t remember seeing him come at me, but I was hit right in the side of the face with a fist. I don’t think it was a full-on swing, I think it was a full-on swing, but not a full shot. I think my arm deflected some of it, but there was still a significant amount of contact that was made to my face.

And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.

prosecutor/defense attorney*: Holding onto a what?

DW:Hulk Hogan, that’s just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.

Prosecutor/defense attorney*: And it was your opinion that you needed to pull out your weapon because why did you feel that way, I don’t want to put words in your mouth?

I felt that another one of those punches in my face could knock me out or worse. I mean it was, he’s obviously bigger than I was and stronger and the, I’ve already taken two to the face I didn’t think I would, the third one could be fatal if he hit me right.

He grabs my gun, says, “You are too much of a pussy to shoot me.” The gun goes down into my hip and at that point I thought I was getting shot. I can feel his fingers try to get inside the trigger guard with my finger and I distinctly remember envisioning a bullet going into my leg. I thought that was the next step.

Like I said, I was just so focused on getting the gun out of me. When I did get it up to this point, he is still holding onto it and I pulled the trigger and nothing happens, it just clicked. I pull it again, it just clicked again.

At this point I’m like why isn’t this working, this guy is going to kill me if he gets a hold of this gun. I pulled it a third time, it goes off. When it went off, it shot through my door panel and my window was down and glass flew out of my door panel. I think that kind of startled him and me at the same time.

Darren Wilson on what happened once he exited his vehicle:

DW: The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.

When I look up after that, I see him start to run and I see a cloud of dust behind him. I then get out of my car. As I’m getting out of the car I tell dispatch, “shots fired, send me more cars.”

We start running, kind of the same direction that Johnson had pointed. Across the street like a diagonal towards this, kind of like where the parking lot came in for Copper Creek Court and Canfield, right at that intersection. And there is a light pole right there, I remember him running towards the light pole.

So when he stopped, I stopped. And then he starts to turn around, I tell him to get on the ground, get on the ground.

He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running. When he does that, his left hand goes in a fist and goes to his side, his right one goes under his shirt in his waistband and he starts running at me.

At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.

And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.

And when he gets about that 8 to 10 feet away, I look down, I remember looking at my sites and firing, all I see is his head and that’s what I shot.

I don’t know how many, I know at least once because I saw the last one go into him. And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.

Again he did not call Mike Brown a super predator but he sure did describe him as such. He actually got away with telling a jury of HIS peers that Mike Brown who was unarmed and already wounded by at least one round from his .40 caliber pistol grunted at him and charged him head on before having to be put down for good with what was left in his clip. If only Mike Brown’s mother and the mothers of the other well chronicled victims of police abuse were enlightened enough to connect the dots they would know that Hillary is neither a leader or a visionary when in comes to truly understanding and rectifying the problem of our broken criminal justice system.

Hillary did not invent the Super Predator bathos and neither did Bill Clinton. They both however used it in the most insidious and political expedient ways to justify their means to an end. These mothers have every right to endorse who they wish but I don’t think that it’s too much to ask them to leave the movement out of such a dubious decision.  They certainly cannot lay claim to the “Mothers of the Movement” moniker while bestowing undue praise on the very same  people who helped necessitate the movement in the first place.