By Lucius Gantt
Many people in our communities are expressing similar opinions about what would have happened if thousands of Black Americans stormed the United States Capitol to disrupt the Congress, murder Capitol Police officers and to steal important and or classified public documents right out of government offices.
They are saying stuff like, “Black folk who participated in insurrection activities would have been arrested on the spot or shot dead in the Washington, D.C. streets!”
The truth is if African Americans merely stepped toward any government building after writing internet posts about insurrection and government leaders being targeted, the Black men and women never would have made it up the steps. They would never even have been allowed to assemble with firearms, to set up hangman’s platforms and to destroy government property!
If you don’t know, this is no unsolved mystery. Your heroes have all suggested that there are two types of justice in America, one type for Blacks and one type for whites.
Ha Ha Ha! Excuse me but I’m laughing out loud because American justice is what the people in power want it to be and the types of justice are different, difficult and wide ranging.
For instance, you have justice for people that are innocent until proven guilty and you have different justice for people that are innocent until proven broke.
You have one kind of justice for wealthy families and one type of justice for poor families, and so on.
Stop looking at situations and events as being only Black or white.
Equal protection under the law has always been something to be pursued but it has never ever been attained.
In these times of white supremacy and white nationalism, African Americans will be hit hardest and hurt the most by domestic terrorism. Black Americans have been bought, sold, whipped, beaten, raped, lynched and denied the Constitutional rights that every other American enjoys from the days the first Africans were unloaded off of slave ships onto American shores.
You don’t have to believe me. You tell me, what legal rights and protections do we have to protect us from domestic terrorists that bomb churches, drag Blacks tied to pickup trucks in the streets or shoot unarmed teenagers on their way home from the corner store?
No Constitutional rights exists that permits ANY form of racial discrimination against Black Americans by private individuals.
Do white property owners have the right to exclude Blacks from their property but allow access to all other races and ethnic groups? Do you see where I’m coming from?
Don’t tell me about Fourteenth Amendments and Civil Rights Acts because they are limited to governmental discriminatory activities.
Y’all got it twisted. The judges and the courts that you run to when things go down don’t have a clue or real understanding about racism, or racism’s influence on the thoughts, conduct and decisions made in America’s judicial systems.
Oh well, all of what I’ve written about has been said before by me and others. Book after book has been written about race and justice and those publications are in your library and can be found by search. They are not on Facebook and Twitter posts.
My advice to you is to try and stay out of trouble, “good trouble” or bad trouble. You will not get equal treatment in a court of law. You won’t even get equal treatment by a Democratic or Republican controlled federal government.
Devils and beasts can try insurrections and storm the Congress but you cannot!
Lucius is a contributing columnist to NNPA newspapers around the nation, and the author of “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing,” available on Amazon.com and from bookstores everywhere.