Black Lives Matter - but not in Fairfax
Date: July 08, 2015 02:13PM
Black Lives Matter… at least some of them do.
Rising from the smoke of burning Ferguson, MO in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement quickly evolved from a hashtag on popular social media Twitter to an organization holding demonstrations worldwide. BLM has organized ‘Freedom Rides’ in which hundreds of civil rights advocates have bussed to and from venues including New York City, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Miami, Detroit, Houston, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland, Tucson and Washington, D.C..
The creation of Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, BLM asserts itself as a proponent for justice for self-identifying African Americans who have suffered state violence and oppression. Their tagline is ‘Not a Moment, but a Movement.”
Yet despite a healthy bit of trendy lip-service to embrace children, women and transgender individuals, the reality is that the organization, for the sake of accuracy, should change their name to Black Men Matter. It appears by their actions that black women dying at the hands of police aren’t deserving of justice, in fact according to the BLM wikipedia page listing all of the cases that BLM has protested, some of the most appalling cases don’t even rate mention.
Consider the death of Natasha McKenna at the hands of Virginia’s Fairfax County Sheriff’s Department in February of this year. Haven’t heard of her? Unlike many of the men around whom BLM rallies, Ms. McKenna was an honor student who fought for her grades in spite of a mental health burden that harassed her since childhood. A lovely mom with a radiant smile. Recognizing that she was having an episode, Ms. McKenna called the police for assistance only to find herself transported not to medical care, but to a jail. There she was chained to a chair and masked, then beaten and tasered to death. Her last recorded words were “Please don’t hurt me.”
Recorded is an operative word - the entire incident was captured on videotape but Fairfax Sheriff Stacey Kincaid has thus far refused to release the tape. No charges have been pressed, and aside from a few brave media leaders demanding for a Justice Department investigation, Sheriff Kincaid and most everyone else seems content to sweep McKenna out with the trash.
That a police department would cover up its own vile behavior is to be expected these days. That the mainstream media has shrugged off the story is appalling. But what is truly disturbing is the fact that an organization whose very existence is based on the premise Black Lives Matter seemingly doesn’t give a hoot that a black woman with no criminal history was tortured to death. This isn’t a split-second bad judgement in the midst of a felony arrest, this is murder at its most grotesque. The victim didn’t shoot at a cop, she phoned them for help.
The rationale for BLM’s avoidance of the case is puzzling. A review of the cases protested by BLM reveals that a preponderance of the individuals who died were involved in some sort of criminal event. McKenna on the other hand was an honest citizen who just needed help, a woman who believed, as many of us would hope, that when in crisis she could turn to the police. If not gender, perhaps it is the absence of criminality that separates BLM reaction to Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray and that of Natasha McKenna. If this is the case, perhaps the better name change would be Black Felons Matter.
Your guess is as good as anybody’s as to how and why BLM picks one citizen to champion while ignoring another. We can only observe what we see; when a black man is killed, and statistically those in the process of committing a crime, Black Lives Matter arrives quickly with hundreds of civil rights advocates in tow. When a law-abiding black woman like Natasha McKenna dies a far more horrible death, BLM is nowhere to be seen. Not days later, nor weeks, nor months. No BLM protests, not even a tweet. Absent a steady drumbeat from the Washington Post, the story of Natasha McKenna would likely have already slipped beneath the waves while Sheriff Kincaid carries on like nothing happened. Perhaps BLM might also want to consider adopting ‘Not a Moment, Not a Murmur’ when it comes to defending black women.
Nobody stood up for Natasha, a petite woman who met her death surrounded by a half dozen of the very cops she trusted to help her. I guess some black lives matter more than others.