That's How the Game Goes (Systemic racism in North Carolina)
Chess masters
Raleigh, North Carolina is one of the most, if not the most wonderful places you ever could have run across and made home, or to have been born and raised in! Most of the people here are nice, they are neighborly, and usually pretty helpful. The weather is nice pretty much all year round, it's just an awesome place to live! But then there are those who cling on to the racist ideals of the past and those who judge their wealth and sense of self-worth based on the wealth or value placed on others, their statuses, or possessions. I have to say that in spite of the constant abuses that I’ve witnessed and endured for me and others at the hands of the “so-called” North Carolina justice system, I love my home city! I have had judges turn a blind eye while I get bullied, and railroaded by District attorneys and the Wake County prosecutor's office, bargaining with the seemingly incompetent Wake County Public Defenders office; I mean, I kind of get it the court-appointed attorneys only get compensated for their time if their client is found guilty, at which they ordered to pay sixty dollars per hour for the attorney's retainer. The system works in a way to protect its many moving parts as a way to forfeit or deny me of my constitutional rights and covertly push a racist agenda to oppress blacks. It begins by patrolling our neighborhood streets; the poor 'hoods' because we were profiled first by the Reagans and their war on drugs.
If the average John Q. Citizen could have walked a mile in my shoes or spent one day in the life of these poor children living mostly on the streets or without a steady, safe home, or food. We instead were labeled 'superpredators' by the POTUS and FLOTUS (of the time) and were warned against helping or associating with them, since young black men are very dangerous! They threaten to give us jail time which is so effective because whether you're found guilty or not, the extreme conditions make anything, better than being in the Wake county jail, there’s no telling how long it would be until you get back in front of a judge, and God knows you don’t want to piss him off by declining his ever-so generous plea bargain, and get buried beneath an unjust prison sentence. Sometimes; more often than not, the only way to get out of jail is to plead guilty whether you are or not at the time. I clearly see that this is a carefully laid plan to keep one up on old ‘darkie’ like my Grandma ‘Blue’ used to say (although she was a lighter complexion); since slavery ended, and America was reconstructed. There is a bit of irony here because as I sit here and try to come up with these very words, a man is being killed less than five miles away from my house in police custody.
This young man-Darrell Williams- may he get the justice he deserves, and rest in peace! His life was extinguished way too soon, by what they are calling Jim Crow-style policing. That’s it! It hit me like a ton of bricks. We have been so traumatized, and desensitized from enduring so many years of violence, fear, and death that we feel it is our own fault, that we don't deserve anything, we don't work hard enough that's we are behind as an entire race of people. There are no homes, wealth, or businesses for us to pass on in order to sustain our future generation’s successes. I think of the ingenuity, and by whom, it took to plan for so far into the future back then, that it affects me to this day. They would have had to be the epitome of the title ‘chess master’!
Comments / 0