Callin Out Names – “Vote Or Watch Us Die” Real Justice For Oscar Grant
Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Bernard Monroe, Timothy Stansbury, Jr.
All black men. All unarmed. All killed by police. None received justice.
On Friday, we sadly added Oscar Grant’s name to the long list of black men shot and killed by officers of the law. After taking a certain number of L’s in the justice system, it’s easy to want to give up, throw a middle finger to the sky and remain angry and reactive.
By now, the circumstances surrounding Grant’s death and the aftermath are well known but worth recounting. Grant was shot and killed early New Year’s Day in 2009. He was defenseless, handcuffed and lying face down after being pulled off a Bay Area Rapid Transit car. His killer, Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to two years in prison.
Two years in prison for killing an unarmed man.
Michael Vick was sentenced to 23 months for killing dogs. TI got one year for being a felon and simply having a firearm an entire arsenal. Former NFL player Plaxico Burress got two years for shooting himself carrying a gun into a nightclub.
Common sense dictates that the life of an innocent man is worth more than all those sentences—combined. What makes the Grant case so particularly egregious is that not only were there witnesses, but that the shooting was captured on tape for the world to see.
What we know for sure: Incidents like this will happen again. The future victim is unknown and the details will be revealed in due time. The outcome—that the offending officer or officers will walk away acquitted or with a slap on the wrist—is nearly a given.
After everything blacks as a community have gone through, it’d be easy for me to give up on the justice system.
I haven’t.
If you want justice for Oscar Grant, you want to do something that will keep his memory alive? You want to make sure tragedies like these are dealt with and the impacted communities and families walk away with a sense of justice? You need to do one thing—and one thing only.
Vote.
With youth and people of color voter participation dropped well below 2008 levels, it is nothing short of appalling to me that so few people have connected justice for Grant and others like him to active participation at the ballot box. This isn’t a “vote or die” message, but if you vote, rest assured that fewer of us might die at the hands of the police. Don’t believe me? Consider the following:
EVERY person responsible for Grant’s killer walking—from the federal to the local level—can be terminated fired. You want to talk presidential politics? The president appoints the Attorney General aka. The Top Cop. An AG sympathetic to issues effecting black and brown people make the difference between a focus on civil rights versus a focus about things we don’t really care about.
At the state level, we elect our Attorney General—the first person likely to step in after a questionable decision.
We elect our District Attorney—the person who can elect to file charges when an officer shoots an unarmed citizen in the back. This same person can also elect to sit on his or her hands.
We can elect to vote them out.
We elect our sheriffs—who can set a tone that police brutality and racial profiling aren’t acceptable. That officers should actually protect and serve, be a part of the communities they police, not apart from it.
More often than not, we elect the judges who hand down these less than stellar, questionable decisions that leave our communities searching for answers and asking why.
One more reason to vote: Jury pools are often—but not always—pulled from registered voter databases.
Months before Grant was senselessly murdered at the hands of Johannes Mehserle, I ran into Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee in Houston. I asked the Congresswoman why our votes mattered. Her response rings louder today than it did that hot summer day.
Jackson-Lee looked directly at me as she spoke, delivering her response as though she’d been asked this question by cynical young voters a thousand times: “The votes make a difference in people’s lives,” she told me. “Voters [who stayed home] in 2000 and 2004 might have put a different US Attorney in Gena, Louisiana that might have prevented Mychal Bell from going to jail. The vote might not be seen today, but it will be seen when you need it with civil rights laws, better judges and people who have an understanding of the judiciary system.”
You want to do something for Oscar Grant? Get educated about the local officials in your area and take your ass to the polls on Election Day.
way too true and way too poignant. with this historic failure of midterm elections, i can only hope that people will be spurred to not only vote in 2012, when the presidential elections roll back around, but also in 2014, when the fervor has died down yet again, and it’s only the knowledge that our votes decide our rights and opportunities that keeps people making a conscious effort to be citizens of this country.
a sad example of the injustice we (i say ‘we’ because it is our majority that serves as our voice) help keep alive in the system, by not making our lives matter to those who only care about power, is the conviction of mumai abu mentioned today on thewellversed. besides the depressing comparison between the ridiculously unjust consequences received by this civil rights activist, and maybe martyr, and Mehserle’s ridiculously unjust conviction, which basically pardons him for stealing another man’s life without reason, I feel wounded by the fact that i have not heard either of these stories mentioned on the news sites i read (thedailybeast & current). Although I would sadly expect ignorantly conservative news site to ignore stories that exemplify the raging discrimination that pervades our system (& is only going stronger through the ever-widening income gap yet is ignored b/c the superficialities of oppression have diminished), i was deeply disturbed that the sites i presumed to have all encompassing perspectives did not even give a sidebar to these heart wrenching injustices. Maybe I need to search for more non-mainstream sites in order to find one where i can get a complete dose of media justice, and I realize that there are myriad examples of degradation and immorality that occur so much everyday it would be almost impossible to give the proper respect in relaying information on each these instances, but you would think that if you had the time and space to write a full article about another celebrity and/or politician (is there a difference nowadays) twitter posting, you would have time and space to recognize the system’s virtual dehumanization of the death of a unarmed, handcuffed, & obliviously defenseless young man. you would think that if you had the time and space to write a full article about Bush’s pseudo-attempt to verbally expunge his record of some of the crimes against humanity he committed while in office (yet he focuses most on ridding himself of a label), you would have the time and space to highlight the blatant oppression and suppression of a man who has been confined to jail for defending the rights of humans (regardless of one’s opinion of the validity of his actions) since decades before Bush, as president-elect in 2008,uttered the words “it’d b much easier if this were a dictatorship & i was the dictator.” I have extreme empathy for the recent suicide victims who believed themselves at their limit of degradation and low self-esteem, but you would think, if so many people have the time and space to recognize those who took their own lives because of hate, and even have the extra energy to fight for awareness so that this does not occur anymore, then all of these same people would have the time, space, and energy to fight so that not one more person has to suffer a unjust and unmerited death or conviction while their murderer, or those who seek their murder, are left to reap the hate-produced and complacency-perpetuated fruits of their labor.
i am not saying that the members of the oppressed are not just as much at fault for succumbing to the numbing effects of the ignorance that is daily and systematically coaxed into our existence, but if the civil rights movement was for anything, it was to not only give a platform to the suffering, but to shine light on our progress as the product of one unit–humanity. As such, regardless of social constructs, no war has been won by a divided army; Latino, woman, paraplegic, long haired, dark skin, gay, librarian, fat, old, transsexual, blonde, polygamous, illiterate, man, Sioux, smart, tall, farmer, OG, roman catholic, billionaire, Kenyan, blind, Muslim, we are all fighting towards the same goal–a better life. Though accumulating all humans under the same belief is an ideal and futile mission, we have done ourselves a favor by splitting into smaller, more manageable, societies and cultures whose directives are influenced by the force of its inhabitants. As such, just as with voting, it takes each individual’s contribution of support or dissent to create the pressure needed to change the system. As we have come to a place in history where, I believe, enough precedence has been set, recorded, and distributed to show the impact of each individual on society and society’s subsequent impact on each individual, the equality of humans, and the consequence of inaction, why are we here? do people not care? have we so numbed ourselves to oppression and violence and injustice that, when it occurs for the 500 gazillionth to the same group of people, it no longer has the effect to even deserve our attention? even our sympathy? even a picture, or a note? i know this comment was a too big and too long, grammatically incorrect, and, probably, convoluted rant heard only by the ears of the omnipresent internet, but if there is just one person who took the time to read this, i just need to know how what unified front i am to join if even the gruesome, unmerited deaths of children (not in reference to grant though his was surely unmerited) at the hands of those enabled as protectors, go not only unpunished, but unrecognized and uncared for? if these perpetual cries for help fall on deaf ears, what else would be effective? as a Christian I believe that God orchestrates life, but also that He entrusts us with the fight for good that it is realized here and now. So, because I am burdened too much by the world’s pain to not care, what strategy, with protests and civil injustices being ignored as commonplace, am i to support if i want to help other people to care enough to vote, to help, and/or to change?
*mumia abu jamal (sorry, typin too much & too fast lol)