In case you forgot how good it is to be white in America, Oregon has you covered. After a group of armed lunatics in rural Oregon seized a federal wildlife building, the FBI announced Sunday that it's working to bring a "peaceful" end to the "situation."
Lest you forget, this is the same country where largely peaceful protests against police brutality in Ferguson were handled with a highly-militarized police response. In fact, the Missouri governor called a state of emergency before the grand jury decision was even announced in Michael Brown's death. If Darren Wilson was guilty of responding to an unarmed Black man with fear and violence, so was the governor of Missouri. It was "reasonable," they said, because the unarmed Blacks posed a threat.
Clive Bundy's sons and their band of lawless supporters in Oregon must not pose a threat. They carry guns, and they have seized federal lands with the intention to redistribute them (which I'm pretty sure is an act of sedition), but there hasn't been a single tank called out in Oregon. The area has been cleared, but "negotiations" are underway.
We shouldn't be surprised that white men with guns are held to a different standard than unarmed Blacks. While estimates vary, Black men are dramatically more likely to be killed by police than white men –– even when they are unarmed. Even when they are children.
Tamir Rice was only 12 years old when he was gunned down by an officer last year as he played with a toy gun in a Cleveland park.
It took officer Timothy Loehmann only two seconds after arriving at the scene (driving like a bat out of hell) to open fire on the boy. Loehmann claimed that Tamir didn't obey an order to raise his hands and appeared to be reaching for his gun when he shot him (in two seconds, mind you).
Loehmann resigned from his first police job after only five months, following an abysmal performance review that called him "distracted," "weepy," and unable to follow simple instructions. He also failed to pass Cleveland's written police exam. Eight months after Loehmann was hired by Cleveland's police force, Tamir Rice was dead. One year later, another black death was followed by another failure to indict for his murderer.
When Samaria Rice spoke to reporters over the weekend about Cleveland's failure to indict the police officer who shot her son, Tamir, she told them that she was "mad as hell" over the corrupt system that left her child dead. We should all be mad as hell at a system that criminalizes blackness and turns a blind eye to white aggression.
Unless we enjoy our comfortable, protected whiteness. Then it's just another day in America.
