View Points
The Streets to the Sanctuary: Michael Brown to Rev. Pinckney
Clementa Carlos Pinckney was an American State Senator and Democratic member of the South Carolina Senate. On the evening of June 17th Senator Pinckney, search who was also an AME minister, viagra dosage was gunned down along with 8 other parishioners during a Wednesday evening bible study at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, view South Carolina. On August 9th 2014, 18 year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot in broad daylight on a neighborhood street where he lived in Ferguson, Missouri.
In the case of Michael Brown, the shooter was a white police officer; and in the case of Rev. Pinckney, the shooter was a white male armed with the dogma of white supremacy. Both shootings captured national attention and drew the white hot light of media scrutiny, while being contextualized through a dichotomous lens of one community’s response to the violence being touted as “good” and amazingly gracious, contrasted by the other community’s response being described in much less compassionate terms. The latter response to the Ferguson community’s outrage facilitated the deployment of the National Guard and the imposition of a curfew which made the streets of Ferguson feel like its citizens were under a state of martial law.
A year has passed since the shooting death of Michael Brown, for which no charges were brought. A St. Louis County Grand Jury ruled that unarmed Michael Brown was shot to death by the white police officer in self-defense. It seems, they determined that, as a large Black male, Mike Brown’s body was, itself, a dangerous and threatening weapon. This assertion cast the well-armed police officer as the victim of the crime and, therefore, shooting Michael Brown dead in the street was a completely justified act of self-defense. The disputed circumstances of the shooting and the determination via the judicial process resulted in mass protests and civil unrest for several weeks bringing the lack of fairness, equity, and equal justice under the law once again to the forefront of American critical discourse, igniting calls for both mass criminal justice reform and investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Fast forward to the current discourse around the #Charleston9 shooting and we, once again, unpack the politics of race, equality and justice in America. This time, the shooting(s) was in the sanctuary and not in the street. The victims were in a bible study meeting engaged in prayer. They were in a posture of humility and not confrontation, surrender and not rebelliousness and yet, they too were gunned down and left for dead. Rev. Pinckney, Depayne Middleton Doctor, Cynthia Hurd, Ethel Lance, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Dr. Daniel Simmons, Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Suzie Jackson and Myra Thompson, not unlike Michael Brown, were gunned down because their Blackness was perceived as threatening.
The goal of white supremacist ideology is to eliminate and/or dominate all other non-white races because it sees the white race as superior. There is little value placed, in the “eyes” of white supremacy, on the lives of Black people in particular, whether those people are walking in the streets or kneeling in the sanctuary.
Although the circumstances of time and place for the killing of Michael Brown and the massacre of the #Charleston9 are extremely distinctive, one cannot help but make certain comparisons. The structure of white supremacy supports systemic racism and institutional bias. It continues to allow for structural inequities in the practice, policy and systems of public institutions and throughout the criminal justice complex. If the truth be told, until #BlackLivesMatter, #AllLives do Not Matter. The lives of Black people, whether in the street or the sanctuary, must have value to all people, Black and non-Black alike.
Up Next Week: County Clerks & the LAW
