04/16/18 — Too familiar: Instances of mistreatment raise discomfiting questions

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Too familiar: Instances of mistreatment raise discomfiting questions

Things are out of whack.

A Starbucks manager calls the police on two black men who are sitting in the store waiting for a friend to join them before the order. The police arrest the men for trespassing.

An elderly white woman assaults a pregnant black servicewoman in uniform at a restaurant over a parking space.

A young black teen on his way to school after missing the bus gets lost, knocks on a series of doors until one white woman, hearing the knock, looks out the window. Upon seeing the kid on her doorstep she screams that he is trying to break in and her husband comes down the stairs, gun in hand and opens fire.

So, coffee shop customers can be detained without cause, military members can be assaulted while with child, and teens -- we'll not retrace the Tamir Rice or Trayvon Martin stories -- can be fired at for simply knocking on a stranger's door to ask for directions, to school no less.

There is no argument. There is no defense of this. There is no rebuttal. These things happened. Two of them were caught on cellphone video, and the third, the child being shot at for knocking on the door, was captured by the doorbell camera of the house of the man who tried to shoot him.

When we hear about these things in the media, the conversation is often swiftly guided to black-on-black crime or fatherless homes. But these are white-on-black crimes, happening in public, in broad daylight.

Colin Kaepernick first sat and then kneeled during the national anthem to protest young black males being shot and killed with impunity by police and he can't even get a tryout with another team. He had one scheduled last week with the Seattle Seahawks, canceled at the last minute when he declined to say that he wouldn't kneel again.

And before you get all riled up about the flag, reference the above mentioned assault on a woman in uniform.

We need to look at our society and really ask ourselves if we are going to continue to stand by and allow these things to go on in our midst unchecked. Because, as fear mongers often cite when arguing against perceived threats against the Second Amendment, if they can do it to one group, they can do it to us all.

Published in Editorials on April 16, 2018 11:36 PM