That kid in the black jacket is not Antonio Martin

This clip posted on ImGur.com is going around on Twitter, and a lot of people think the kid in the black jacket with the cell phone is Antonio Martin. I thought so, too, at first. But then I noticed the third figure in the clip.

Yes, the kid in the black jacket is holding a cellphone and not a gun, but that kid in the black jacket is also not Antonio Martin.

Unfortunately, Antonio is the kid with the backpack at the edge of the frame, lower left corner. As you may be able to see, he lifts up his arms, and the officer backs up. The friend then jumps back.

Whether the gun was loaded or not, whether Martin fired or not, we know that if you point a gun at an officer right in front of him, he's most likely going to draw his weapon and shoot, especially if you're a black person. I could write more about the evils of guns here, but been there, done that.

As most sane people are, I am anti-police-brutality and overreach. Furthermore, I firmly believe that people of color are often mistreated and prejudged by police officers in general. I'm not one of the people who automatically believes the official versions of events when I hear them, including Officer Wilson's story for the Mike Brown shooting, which is why I marched in protest here in New Orleans.

But I believe as well that when you fight the good fight, you must be fair and have your facts straight. In the Antonio Martin case, some of us are so anxious to find police at fault that we are buying any story that contradicts the police narrative and then not bothering to check facts. That's a good way to sound unreasonable.

Yes, police officers kill black men at a disproportionate rate compared to white men, and that crisis is worthy of our righteous anger, but is it wise to blow up even when police officers do their jobs and face situations in which they must defend themselves from people with guns?

We can't expect police officers to not draw and shoot when a gun is pointed at them, and the person pointing the gun is that close. They're human, so I'm sure they're not fear-free when someone waves a gun in their faces. So, while I can't say for a fact Antonio Martin had a gun, based on what I see when I look at the Antonio Martin surveillance footage the teen assumed a stance and moved as though he had a gun. So, I think this is not a case for second-guessing the officer.

My heart goes out to Toni Martin-Green, Antonio Martin's mother. Everything she's said about her son is probably true as far as she knows or wants to know. So, I'm low on patience with people making fun of her for saying that her son was trying to turn his life around. Wouldn't we all hope that was the case if we had a child in trouble? So, I hope his mother gets the help she needs to get through this.

As for Antonio actions, he may have been trying to get his life on a better track, but late Tuesday night, December 23, his life skipped that track. He made a bad decision, and it cost him his life.

I know some of us are so infuriated by the way police treat members of the black community that we will still doubt the Berkeley police department's version of events even in the face of evidence that support it, and that skepticism is understandable. Police departments around the country have been caught in lies before. The Ferguson police were not honest, efficient, or respectful after the Mike Brown's shooting, and more recently in the Tamir Rice homicide, the Cleveland police had already released a false report and stood firmly behind it until video showed the report was a lie. But in the tragic case of Antonio Martin, the police officer appears to be telling the factual truth about what happened that night.

Does that mean we should only stand up when the dead child is a "perfect victim"? No, it does not. Does that mean we should no longer demand investigations when police shoot black people with "criminal" histories? No, it does not. Does that mean Antonio Martin's life and death can be deemed less significant than the deaths of others? No, it does not.

Does that mean that our community, education system, and American society failed Antonio Martin? Probably. He was only 18 years old, and according to cognitive scientists, the teen brain is not mature. Human brain development goes on longer than we've been led to believe.

Sadly for us all, there probably were adults in Antonio's neighborhood and leaders in the Berkeley community who saw the Martin household was in peril, in particular the oldest boy, Antonio, but no one wanted to get involved or no one felt inadequate for the task.

More than likely there was some program proposed that would have helped families like Antonio Martin's family, but the bill and funding for that program never passed in Congress or Missouri's state legislature because it was labeled "more welfare." Most likely there's some program that's been proven successful that could have assigned someone to intervene on Antonio's behalf when he first showed signs of frustration with his life circumstance or got into trouble, but in the name of individual accountability and fiscal responsibility, for the love of tall tales about bootstraps, that program was cut.

Does the American population as a whole really want to help people like Antonio, or does it just want to sit on its ass and demonize people who have the deck stacked against them? It's a difficult question and the answer, I'm sure, is complex. And maybe taking time to throw tantrums about the killing of Antonio Martin is part of our journey toward finding an answer. I don't know. But I do know that we should be fair in our allegations when the police kill a member of the black community. I know we have to weigh evidence and choose our battles.

When we don't get our facts straight, it gives our opponents an opening to overwhelm and distract us with minutia. It gives them a way to do what they would prefer to do, ignore the real problems, dismiss the truth. Knowing this is how the world works, can we pause, reflect, and focus again on the central points of our protest? Can we shake off distractions and move on?

Unity of purpose is a beautiful thing, but a mob mentality smothers wisdom.

Blacksplain vs. Mansplain vs. Whitesplain vs. Poem

I wrote the poem "Song of the Fatigued Blacksplaining Folk" during National Poetry Month of this year, and recently turned it into a digital poster that's embedded farther down in this blog post. As the title indicates, and to borrow the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, "I am tired of being sick and tired" of explaining racism in America and how racist policies hurt not only people of color but the entire country.

Of course, living under Jim Crow laws, Ms. Hamer had a much tougher life than I did. Still, I get frustrated sometimes because some of the words that come out of the mouths of some white people sound like they'd be fine with returning to Jim Crow. Yes, there are many "white allies," who want America to live up to its credo, but there area also many who refuse to even attempt to understand systemic racism and how it contributes to many of the problems found in black communities, especially poor black communities.

Also, the last two years have been more difficult than usual because of the increase in the number of unarmed black people killed by either police officers or by white citizens. Both the officers and the vigilantes tend to claim they felt threatened even when the black person, often a young black male, is unarmed. Essentially they assert black people's bodies are weapons.

I had the pleasure of reading my poem at the Poetry Buffet at Latter Library on St. Charles Avenue earlier this fall. The multi-ethnic audience appeared to enjoy it.

© 2014 Nordette N. Adams

Click picture to enlarge.

You may have heard the invented words mansplain, which is a combination of man and explain, and whitesplain, as in white people explaining. The word blacksplain is a combination of black, meaning black people, and explain. However, unlike mansplain, which is the word given to a condescending explanation a male gives to a female, the word blacksplain is usually not associated with condescension, unless, of course, a white person is defining it who's shown him or herself to be a racist jackass. If that's you, then a black person may have blacksplained something to you in a condescending manner before.

Usually to blacksplain is to explain some aspect of black culture, history, heritage, or experience to a person who is not black. That person may be a sincere person who is asking a potentially offensive question but does not mean to offend. Or that person may be a racist jackass who still doesn't understand that America works this way: A black person has to be able to shift between white culture and black culture/white world and black world easily in order to be successful. But often white people don't have to know anything significant and factual about black people in order to be successful.

Frequently black people end up blacksplaining on some racism-related topic. For example, at UrbanDictionary.com, the first definition of blacksplain is actually an example of racist hate speech that's allowed to remain there probably because their editors are hipsters (see hipster racism) who think it's okay to have the offensive defintion since a more accurate definition follows it. In reality, the definition of blacksplain on that website is very similar to how n*gg*r used to be defined in the Webster's dictionary as "a Negro person." Only the worst stereotypes are included in the definition, but they let it ride because I guess they consider themselves "urban."

The word urban is often used as a euphemism for people of color, primarily black people, Latinos, and Mexicans, but as is the often the case, on one hand its used to marginalize people of color and on the other a white person uses it to make money. An even better example of that phenomena would be the success of Thug Kitchen. At CNN, healthy food activists Bryant Terry does an excellent job of blacksplaining why Thug Kitchen is problematic.

Now for the term whitesplain, it usually means that a white person is speaking condescendingly to a black person or other person of color when giving a white person's definition of racism (often wholly inadequate and stuck on overt racism) or is explaining why everything in America is fair and just: black people just need to work harder, and what about that "black on black crime" and those fatherless households. Another example of whitesplaining involves a white person telling a black person that in their eyes skin color is irrelevant. "I see everyone as the same. I'm color blind," they say, even as they speak to the black person in ways that make skin color very relevant.

It's possible also for a black person to whitesplain the world because frequently you may come across black people who have internalized the white supremacist propaganda against black people and don't think much of their own black skin and culture. For instance, it's possible that a black person wrote the first blacksplain definition at UrbanDictionary.com. Ironically that definition reads like whitesplaining.

But I'm not going to write here again all the reasons I am tried and worn out from blacksplaining. If you're interested in why that may be, though, please read my post on Toni Morrison's 1975 lecture. I'll just say here that I was a lot less tired before Trayvon Martin's death and the violent deaths of black people who have followed him since then and who were pre-judged and killed because they are black. And I'm really disappointed in myself that I've written this blog post that has some blacksplaining in it again.

#Ferguson to #ICantBreathe

I really should take up fine art again because I need a more physical art for the sake of mental therapy. But I haven't seriously drawn or attempted to paint in decades. I'm a writer. Still, lately I have found myself making little digital graphic cards to capture moments during this stressful period of seeing justice fail. We have received less than two weeks apart the decisions of two Grand Juries not to indict white police officers who have killed unarmed black men, namely Mike Brown and Eric Garner.

While making these documentation cards and digital protest signs have given me a measure of relief, they're not the what a trained graphic designer would produce. And that's okay with me because sometimes the most effective signs at protests are amateurish, ones written crookedly on piece of a box cardboard.

All of these have been posted on Twitter or Facebook or both, but I thought it made sense to put them in one post on my blog. They have been presented it here in order of most recent to earliest.

The list includes the side eye for Pat Lynch's insensitive statement, "If you're speaking, then you can breathe!"; a picture of Missouri's attorney general's statement that the law that allowed Darren Wilson to escape indictment needs to be eliminated and that it's unconstitutional; a recap of part of a CNN discussion with Sunny Hostin and men who support the Staten Island Grand Jury's decision; a Van Jones quote; a snarky commentary on McCulloch's failure to prosecute Wilson; a poem, and a video. For a look at the cards in their actual size, click here.

© 2014, Nordette N. Adams