Impact Statement…

Our past is our present.. We wouldn’t even be alive to engage constructively in our current predicament if not for surviving forced migration, genocide, degradation, and oppression through forced servitude (formally known as slavery) of black Africans first in America’s British colonies then once independent, in the United States of America. Policing black peoples started with the slave patrol then the white national militia/KKK then the modern day police municipalities, who have been policing us every since.. We have to help ourselves too, we need to rise up and out of an existence fraught with self destruction, our descent arising out of self hate due to hopelessly resigning ourselves to a permanent substandard existence that is race and class related, perpetuating the slave mentality, which originated historically as an instinctive behavioral mechanism of self preservation (now in desperate need of extinguishment), conditioning many of us to believe we were second class citizens (internalized oppression) and would never succeed as a people economically in the “white man’s world” so took the alternative path of crime (access to wealth by illegal means) and numbing the depraved psyche by self medication (illicit drugs) throwing a disproportionate number relative to population into a downwards spiral… then the policing on top of this, we have become lost in the system, with institutionalized racism firmly implanted into the foundation, the fabric of all major institutions of America, the judicial system namely but also the financial and educational systems, we’ve been beat down (denigrated), held down (oppressed), and excluded (through segregation) from the promise of this nation… Culturally marginalized and isolated, denying self to be accepted by the majority who have all of the socioeconomic power. I hear “Black people are too sensitive!” Role play… And if you still think I am too sensitive about the black experience you’re right, I am emotional about this, but I have earned the right to be… we have earned that right!