Very Smart Brothas' Damon Young says that some are just supporting the black former LAPD cop because he's black and getting back at something "white" — and that's messed up.
… This (the "Nigga Neurosis") is one of the more unfortunate byproducts of a lifetime of dealing with America's neurotic relationship with race. It's something so ingrained in many of us that we often don't realize when we're doing it, and the perpetual mental gymnastics involved in distinguishing between real race-related behavior and perceived can f*ck with a person's sense of reality.
I was reminded of this yesterday while following the Chris Dorner news and some of our (Black people's) reactions to it. Not so much the advanced form of Nigga Neurosis displayed by those actually rooting for him, but how messed up things have to be for this to even be possible.
This and other situations like it manages to be both an indictment on America and us at the same time, proving that our experience with race and (real or perceived) racial injustice in this country has left some of us so cynical, so antagonistic, so angry at anything having to to with the "establishment" — police, the government, politics, rich people, etc. — that we'll support any type of comeuppance, regardless of how much evil had to happen for it to occur. This is f*cking scary.
And yes, if the things he's been accused of are true — and I have no reason to believe that they're not — Chris Dorner is an evil man. He's not a hero and he won't be a martyr. He's not even a Django. He's a murderer who killed people in cold blood, a man who might have had a real opportunity to expose the LAPD's corruption, but instead chose to act on his own selfish need for some type of retribution. At best he's a movie-of-the-week, a Dateline special, a new Wiki page, a line in a Jadakiss verse …
Read Damon Young's entire piece at Very Smart Brothas.
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Damon Young is the editor-in-chief of VerySmartBrothas.com. He is also a contributing editor at Ebony.com. He lives in Pittsburgh and he really likes pancakes. You can reach him at damon@verysmartbrothas.com.