#CharlestonShooting: “The Fumes Are Making Folks Sick”

I’m disheartened. For the whole scene of the Charleston church shooting. THIS IS SICK. But what burns me up is watching the police chief statement and press conferences where civilians killing black people, it seems so easy to thuggerize and criminalize blatant racist attacks. But somehow, when it is one of the men in uniform who lets say shoots Walter Scott in a blatantly inhumane way, there is a discourse around how sad it is to see such “wrongdoing by one of our own.” Unequal distribution of rhetoric is as racist as the unrighteous and unequal targeting of black bodies by civilians or officers alike.

Peace is a process not a product. Sometimes peace means chaos, protest, tension, battle, resistance, hearing the voice of the oppressed, the demanding of a seat in decision making, revolt, prayer, uprising, and then MAYBE the common still of peace. These situations are sparking a revolution; for as soon as black and brown blood is spilled at the hand of the white police, the white racist young man, the white penitentiary, done violence by the denial of the nonproductive white legislature, young girls and boys endangered by unwarranted surveillance and abuse, it initiates new angers, new wounds, new fires.

And we didn’t NEED anything, but to wait, to get the page turned on the Rachel Dolezal distraction: white antagonisms always come, they are predictable. What of an America where White verifiable thugs and terrorist who are extremely dangerous often are free or get “caught,” while unarmed black youth called thugs or dangerous–with no verifiable anything–so often get killed. Why wouldn’t Black people be dissatisfied? In uproar, angered, ready do something different.

Trust me, the fumes are making folks sick and the detox does not come in the form of prayer or Sunday school teaching, or quiet peace. America, unless you fix yourself, you will be fixed and it will never feel good, the way you want it to: that sick desire for us to sing you a song in the midst of a recurring storm.‪ #‎charlestonshooting‬ ‪#‎blacklivesmatter‬

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Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr. serves as the  Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University