This murder broke me from the inside out: a young black woman (a teenager!) with a dead cell phone wrecks her car in an unfamiliar (white) neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, knocks on a random door for assistance and gets shot in the face with a 12 gauge shotgun by none other than a middle aged white man who -- irony of ironies! -- "didn't want to be a victim".
It could have been me.
We've seen this scemario before, haven't we. The media roasts the victim while the "victim" awaits their inevitable "not guilty" plea. And I must say, they've got their routine down pat. As if on cue, Fox News went in on Renisha's character, her background, her past -- whatever they could sensationalize with the usual white (male) conservative malaise. In the meantime, Mr. Wafer told the cops the gun discharged accidentally. During the trial, he said he shot her in self-defense. After about a month of the pomp and formality of a trial, expert testimonies and a river of tears from Mr. Wafer himself, something inside of me began to numb out a little. I remember thinking that if he went free, that would mean that violence against black women would be condoned, sanctioned even. But it already is, in a myriad of ways.
Why should anyone expect justice for Renisha? They had video on Rodney King and none of those cops saw the inside of a jail cell. After his latest misadventure -- brandishing a loaded gun at his pregnant girlfriend -- even Florida cops think George Zimmerman should be in jail before he "accidentally" murders someone else. And then there's Marissa Alexander. She stood her ground -- and now she's facing 60 years for firing a warning shot.
And then, out of nowhere, the unthinkable happened: the jury returns with a guilty verdict on the second day of deliberations for all three counts. Michigan, you have done the nation proud. This is the one place in this country where you can't shoot first and ask questions later. Now let's wrap this up and send him to jail for the rest of his natural life. Selah.
My question is, why didn't he call 911 when he heard a suspicious noise on his porch? If you are safely tucked behind two locked doors, why would you open them to shoot someone? Why did he find his 12 gauge shotgun quicker than he found his cellphone? That he has the brass to breeze past that last one -- and in tears, no less -- was nuts. He just knew he'd walk.
In a world where more white people believe in ghosts than racism, where the military enacts regulations and strict codes against black women's hair in its natural state, where those who are privileged and entitled are convinced they are not, where the past is rewritten or forgotten at random, willful ignorance flourishes and we are rendered invisible by the media, by the entertainment industry, by the government, by gentrification -- in a world where there is no justice and very little peace, the unthinkable has happened. We won. In Detroit!
To see Mr. Wafer's testimony, watch the video below.
Now if they'd just stop chasing Assata Shakur...
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