She muses

It is my distinct pleasure to introduce you to Omar Freilla and the Green Worker’s Cooperative.

Reposted from black and green

In case anyone has been under a rock, the three police officers who murdered Sean Bell in a storm of 50 bullets were acquitted of all charges - all of them.

When I heard the news, about 85% of me shrugged it off as I said to myself “I’m not surprised”. I’ve grown up in the shadow of police brutality. I’ve seen it and felt it at random moments on the street and at protest marches. Every so often a friend (always a shade of brown) will tell me about being stopped and frisked by the police. I’ve been stopped and frisked myself. I’ve followed the names of the young men and women killed by the NYPD ever since I was 14. And like lots of folks I’ve been in the countless marches and vigils that honor their memory. I didn’t think more bullets than the 41 used to kill Amadou Diallo near my home could be fired at a person. This time it was 50. That unsurprised 85% of me has gotten used to the “not guilty” verdicts that always follow. The cops always walk. Sometimes they even get an award or a promotion. Unlike that part of me that expected the worst, about 15% of me expected things to be different this time. Fifty shots was irrational, crazed, sadistic. Detective Michael Oliver, the one who fired 31 of the 50 shots, had just returned from serving in Iraq. Surely the judge would see that Oliver had gone ballistic and thought he was back in Iraq, that Bell was human. This time, they ought to be convicted of something, anything. This time it would be different.

I expect the abuse. I despise it, but I expect it. And then I keep hoping that things will be different. And when they’re not I still don’t call it quits.

I wonder if this is what a battered wife feels like.

When I heard the news that the cops had been acquitted, my mind also heard another story, it said “you don’t matter”. It was like Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” comment in the aftermath of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. But this time the story I was hearing wasn’t coming from George Bush. It was an entire court system saying to me “you don’t matter”. It’s a story I’ve heard repeated over and over. I remember hearing it when I was ten years old, living next to the Cross Bronx Expressway and looking up at the abandoned buildings with painted scenes on the boarded-up windows (drapes, potted plants, and silhouettes painted to trick passing commuters into thinking the buildings were occupied). I thought to myself “why don’t they spend money to fix them instead?”, what I heard back was “you don’t matter”. I remember visiting Baton Rouge, LA twelve years ago and seeing how close poor Black families lived to oil refineries that dominated everything in site and at night looked like their own New York City skyline - families whose members were dying left and right from cancer. The sound I heard from the refineries was “you don’t matter”. When a state environmental regulator considering her support for a permit for a 5,200 ton-per-day waste facility in the South Bronx said “the City is like a body, and every body needs a colon”, I heard a very loud and clear “you don’t matter”.

On a certain level, all of us who hear “you don’t matter” when we listen to the news or go about our daily routine, live with trauma. The fact that some of us actually take steps to change the world around us is a testament to the fact that away from courts; schools; work; welfare offices; other government agencies; and the media, there is another story being told, one that says “you matter”. I hear it in old Civil Rights songs. I hear it today among the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico. I hear it from the members of the ReBuilders Source Cooperative in the South Bronx. I hear it from people chanting “Green Jobs, Not Jails” across the country. I hear it from the grassroots community-based groups everywhere that call for environmental justice.

I often imagine that if “you matter” had always been the dominant story, global warming wouldn’t be an issue. After all, where is all that pollution coming from other than in places where “you don’t matter” is the ever-running story on the news.

I’m tired of hearing that I don’t matter. I’m tired of being abused and accepting it.

There is another story that needs telling. And we who are making another world possible are going to tell it.