How Many Black Lives Will It Take?

Jamycheal Mitchell on Apr. 22 was hungry at a 7-Eleven. The 24 year-old didn’t have the money and decided to steal $5 of groceries. He never could have imagined the punishment he would have to suffer.

Awaiting for a trial that never came, the young black man became a victim of the American justice system. Mitchell waited behind bars for over 4 months for an alleged $5 theft. Mitchell has suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia for 5 years; rather than transferring him to a mental health facility, he was left in a jail where he would spend his last days. In August he was found dead.

Mitchell joins the long list of African-American lives that have been lost in our unjust American justice system. In a year since the death of Michael Brown, which led to a national reckoning about race relations and policing in the US, 1,083 Americans have died at the hands of police. But Brown was not the first to die at the hands of police and neither will he be the last. Less than a month earlier in New York City, Eric Garner died at the hands of police after being subject to a chokehold banned by the NYPD. A few months later, 12 year-old Tamir Rice was playing with a toy pistol when he was shot and killed. On July 13, Sandra Bland was found dead in her jail cell after being arrested for a traffic violation.

Violence from the police force kills more than two Americans a day. If anywhere killed two Americans a day, the United States would be there in a heartbeat, but when it comes to police violence, we just turn a blind eye. It’s too late for justice now. Real justice would be Michael Brown attending college, Eric Garner watching his six children and three grandchildren grow up, Tamir Rice playing in a park, and Sandra working her first job. But no, it’s too late for them. The best we can do for those who have wrongly died is to make sure they have not died in vain.

The Black Lives Matter movement gained national prominence in the subsequent tragedies following Michael Brown’s death. But the movement did not begin with Michael Brown; he only gave them a voice. The death of Emmett Till and beating of Rodney King created the movement. The destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent neglect the African-American community of New Orleans suffered gave the movement a reason.

So when activists interrupted a rally by Bernie Sanders, a democratic presidential nominee, Sanders supporters were outraged. They argued that Sanders was the exact candidate that would help their cause and that the Black Lives Matter Activists had overstepped their boundaries. Unfortunately, this type of response were the ones the activists had hopes would never happened. The activists have no problem with Sanders, but they have an exact problem with Sanders supporters. Black leftism has long been repressed in the Democratic Party. Considering how long the Black Lives Matter movement has been active, it’s clear that the nation hasn’t paid them much attention. Mobilized after Hurricane Katrina, it took 9 years for anyone to talk about the issue, much less do anything about it.

So here’s the problem with the Sander’s supporters and their response: black poverty differs fundamentally from white poverty. Not only are blacks more likely to be impoverished than whites, but the obstacles they must overcome are much greater. Poor white Americans will never know what it’s like to be profiled by police officers, feel the burden of a history of slavery, and receive discrimination by every professional institution in the “Land of the Free.”

Sanders has long been a fire brand of economic equality. His time as a Senator he has been one of the largest proponents for Civil Rights, but his current campaigns show none of this. Until activists interrupted two of his campaign events, his only response to questions about racial inequality is that economic equality can solve this. That is no where near enough for a community that has been the most oppressed and is still the most oppressed community in the United States. Race relations has been absent from national discussion in our current political clownshow. For those asking why these activists would ever think to interrupt the champion of equality, ask yourself this: Would you have listened otherwise?

Over one year has passed since Michael Brown was gunned down in the streets of Ferguson, and nothing has changed. On Aug. 18, 9 year old Jamyla Bolden was doing homework when bullets flew through her window, killing her and wounding her mother. Barely a week after the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, Bolden died just a few streets away from where Brown’s body lay for 4 hours. We promised that Brown would be the last. We promised that we would change. And we promised that we would end the violence. Has anything really changed?