Police Brutality

By Mychal Denzel Smith

March 24, 2015--Before he became the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson sat down to compose the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he wrote.

At the time, he was a slave-owner.

Hypocrisy aside, there’s a “duh” factor in saying “all men are created equal,” but Jefferson must have found value in the proclamation of a self-evident truth.

The fact that he needed to spell it out might have reflected the reality that we didn’t then live in a world where all men were treated equally—and we don’t now.

On July 13, George Zimmerman was acquitted on murder charges for killing Trayvon Martin.

Immediately thereafter, Alicia Garza, an organizer and special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, took to Facebook to write her own self-evident truth:

“Black Lives Matter.”

At once powerful and haunting, those three words have been embraced as the banner under which a new generation of activists and organizers is building a movement for racial justice.

Like Jefferson’s “all men,” the statement is undeniable in its truth.

But unlike the celebrated founding father, Garza’s words do not echo a hypocrisy.

Instead, they challenge a nation that has failed to live up to its stated belief that “all men are created equal.”

I sat down with Garza, in the first of a series of interviews with the three creators of Black Lives Matter, on February 21, 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, and we spoke about imagining a world where the fact that “Black Lives Matter” is self-evident.

Where in America Are Black People Safe From Racism?

Nowhere.

My hope is that no Starbucks barista anywhere dares write "Race Together" on anyone's latte and decides to have a “conversation about race” with customers who simply wanted to pay too much for a cup of coffee.

Not only is it extra work for which employees are not being compensated, my gut tells me these conversations will go down with as much awkwardness and anger as the 1975 Saturday Night Live "Word Association" sketch with Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor, “in which tensions rise as racial slurs are exchanged, boiling over when Chase drops the infamous N-word and Pryor responses with a death threat.”

However, if there is a barista out there just dying to take part in their CEO’s new campaign, I hope they choose only white people to “Race Together” with, and I hope they ask only one question: Where in America are black people safe from racism?

At home?

In the street?

In the car?

Public transportation?

At work?

Where in America Are Black People Safe From Racism?

Nowhere.