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by Joseph R. Gibson (Author)
It is literally scary to be Black in America, always has been. People of all races and ethnicities die every day, but in America there's something terrifyingly normalized (i.e., made normal, natural, orderly, routine, typical, predictable, unexceptional, allowable, tolerable) about the killing of Black people. Perhaps the greatest catalyst for our horror, to quote Omali Yeshitela, is that if they "think they can kill Black people with impunity they will continue to kill us." And they are the multitude of individual and institutional murderers who have killed Black people throughout American history, including throughout the process and perpetuation of our ancestor's enslavement during the Transatlantic Slave Trade; the epidemic levels of lynching and race rioting during the blood-soaked Jim Crow era; the government-facilitated assassinations of numerous Black leaders and nameless proponents of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements; police who correctly expect their fear and bias-fueled homicides to somehow be deemed justified; White civilians who shoot us dead while supposedly standing their ground; and other inexcusably violent Black people (e.g., competitive drug dealers, rival gang members, enraged community members with an underdeveloped capacity to regulate negative emotions and impulsivity, etc.).Only an inconsequential fraction of four centuries worth of murderers of Black people in America have received any type of consequence dreaded enough to deter our future murderers. There's been a persistent inequity with regard to the protection of Black versus White life implied by the inequality of negative consequence and public outcry for taking it. Accordingly, there's never been an adequate level of dread associated with the intention of killing Black people, which if adequate may have prevented this intention from being actualized far too often. The consequence for killing Black people in America has not been consistently unpleasant enough to create a sustainable deterrence (to killing Black people). That's terribly problematic, yet mainstream America has never allowed it to be deemed as such-conceivably for no other reason than the murdered being Black and our skin color somehow being perceived as a threat. Perhaps the goal here has never actually been to discourage future perpetrators or diminish mass tolerance with regard to the killing of Black people, especially not at the risk of foregoing successful boundary maintenance, which I believe is the specific reason why America only kills Black people.
