White America is exhausting. Their racism is maddening. Their reasonings, their faux outrage, their hatred for Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling, their complacency for Derek Chauvin’s knee to the neck of a Black man. And I keep getting caught up in it. We all do.
Before we didn’t have proof. Technology hadn’t caught up with white America’s evil doings, so we only had words. Our words vs. theirs. And then we had evidence, living physical, tangible proof, all caught on video.
Caron Nazario looks like a model victim but he shouldn’t have to be. He is a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, who was stopped by police on Dec. 5. He was in uniform on the night that he saw police lights flashing behind him. Nazario is Black and Latino, and he knows that the way white America plays Spades makes race the big Joker. So he drove to a well-lit area before he pulled over. He told the white police officers that he was scared to get out of the car, one office told him “You should be.”
By now you’ve seen it. We all have. What’s sad is that watching the video isn’t the maddening part. Unfortunately, we have built up a tolerance to unjust policing in the Black community. At this point, we just pray that the victim survives the encounter. What’s maddening is that police have seen the video, seen the way that officers treated a member of the Armed Forces, known full and well that he’d done nothing to warrant being pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground. It’s there on video taken from the DECEMBER encounter.
Nazario, 27, a graduate of Virginia State University, recently filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million in damages. The video has been released and gone viral. Torture porn. White America loves a good beating. And now, after all of the social media comments, after all of the heat coming down on the Windsor, Va., police force–a good ole boy town force with six members: a chief, a first sergeant, a detective and three officers–they finally decided to fire the officer. Not both officers involved in the traffic stop, just the bigger of the two assholes.
“At the conclusion of this investigation, it was determined that Windsor Police Department policy was not followed,” according to a statement. “This resulted in disciplinary action, and department-wide requirements for additional training were implemented beginning in January and continue up to the present.”
Some four months after the shit happened and a really strong push on social media.
There was no internal investigation into the events that happened that December night. There was no reprimand to desk duty while someone looked into what happened. It appears that neither officer was even subjected to a good stern talking to after the victim complained. The officer was only fired after the video went viral, and that’s because this is white America’s design and it’s maddening.
What Black America wants is simple. We want those with the guns to be more cautious and sensible with our lives. We want the rules not to bend to whiteness when they fuck up. We want motherfuckers to stop being so fucking racist. We want our lives to matter.
During the stop a puzzled Nazario asks the officers “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is you’re fixing to ride the lightning, son,” one officer yells back.
You can’t make sense of crazy, it will only make you lose your mind.