A Penny for Your Thoughts
BREAKING- This Penny sucks
Remember Black Lives Matter? Remember that subsequent phase of or corporations, agencies, random white people on the street, etc all making big prophetic claims of listening and learning?
I know I am not the only Black person in a white dominated space that fielded calls/texts/emails/carrier pigeons from every white person you work with or in your orbit to say—omg I didn’t know it was that bad or sorry I never knew or (insert some random ridiculous statement here).
For years we had to justify the plea. Many were quick to jump to the ‘All Lives Matter’ bs that was popular with a certain ilk. It was an uphill battle every day to exist while trying to explain that the claim that we mattered was never to say others don’t— it was to say we ALSO matter and should be treated as such.
Then in 2020, people were bored with being at home due to the pandemic, and also the moving protests in the streets calling out the unjust murders of our people, it caused a purported shift to some to say they finally got it and we would be moving forward together. Companies publicly made DEI pledges, organizations created whole departments…all fake caring about Black people and equity. Finally.
Grand Opening
Grand Closing
And that screenshot with the breaking news alert was not an accident. It was the point. Look at it again.
Following 2020, some of you tried to tell me we are moving to a better America this time things would change.
A lot of us said it was a fad and we’d be back here or worse in due course. Well…
Listen to Black people. We know stuff.
Anyway— I thought of this today because—well I do everyday because I exist— but this morning the news came down that Daniel Penny was found not guilty after murdering a Black man on the subway in New York.
Yeah I know I know the wheels of justice and all that. I understand how this stuff works, I quite literally have a Doctor of Jurisprudence. So don’t come at me and say anything about the system working and all of that nonsense. Just to make the point I submit to you exhibits A-C:
The defense rests, your honor.
But why did I think of this today and what does it have to do with the proverbial price of tea in china?
Well, the Penny verdict came in and I immediately had a thought I often have in America.
“Is my life valued at all?”
The thought isn’t as dark as it seems. It is reality. This country has again and again reiterated that my life is less valuable than most. Someone could kill me today and there would be questions immediately of if I deserved it? I’m a Black man in a major city so they will question if drugs were involved? Gangs maybe? Anything to make it okay to not care THAT MUCH if at all that I was killed.
We are conditioned as a society, well white people are conditioned, to not care as much when Black people die. That then makes it easier to devalue us in other aspects of society.
Daniel Penny should be in prison.
I don’t love the concept of jails and prisons. We should do away with them. But while we have them, some people should go there.
There are people in this country who view our lives as disposable. Think about it— the person just elected President openly ran on the concept that we are inferior. We exist to do the Black jobs that are lower paying and if we don’t do them then there is another group inferior to white people who will do them. We are all expendable and disposable.
Ensuring we are always viewed as less than makes it okay to murder us on the subway. It makes it easier for a jury of our ‘peers’ to create excuses and justify our murders.
Until we become a country that punishes people for killing people like me or even pretends to care, I will have to always wonder if my life really matters.