Sandra Bland - The Dangers of Normalizing the 'White Narrative'

Everyone’s been bombarded by the case of Sandra Bland.  

With everyone I mean people with any ties to the western (English speaking) world. Which quite interestingly, seems to constitute, ‘everyone’

Just like World War I and World War II, which involved only 32 and 61 of the worlds 196 countries. They are still called ‘World Wars’.

Why? Because the narrator is White, and that is what constitutes the world in their context.

And just like those events have white narrators, so does multicultural America, and multicultural Europe.

I decided to read nothing other than the mainstream headlines and summaries I was seeing on my twitter feed, Facebook homepage and the news sites I had access to. I read only summaries, tributes and shallow news and this was my overall opinion.

This police officer should have known better, but the woman was clearly out of line, rude, offensive and aggressive and he needed to control her. The woman was clearly not killed in jail, she committed suicide because she was mentally unstable and the black community is upset and thinks she was killed because they distrust all police.

Then I read what actually happened. And then after that I watched the video of what happened.

This is a shortened version of the video.

The video is very different from the mainstream version – which always seems to ‘keep under control’ the actions of whites (Dylann Roof) and ‘blow out of proportion’ the actions of non-whites (example above).

When we take the actual rights of Sandra, she has the right to smoke her cigarette, she has the right to not answer polite questions like ‘how is your day’ she has the right to have an attitude – she doesn't have the right to curse, spit or hit an officer and she doesn't have the right to not listen to instructions on being removed from her vehicle.

It is very clear from the original video that Sandra was irritated because 1) she was stopped, and 2) the officer made her wait a long time for her ticket. He was trying to make small talk with her but she had an attitude and instead lit up a cigarette.

When she refused to put the cigarette out he began to abuse his power. He demanded that she leave her car and when she refused (due to thinking he did not have the right to remove her unless she was under arrest) he forced her out of the car shouting ‘I’m gonna light you up!’ while pointing a gun at her (without correcting the misconception she had about it not being his legal right to ask her out of the car)

He twisted her wrist until she was reduced to crying, he banged her head to the ground and had his knee on her back and ignored her crying and screaming about having epilepsy.

Finally when she gave up, his colleagues and him reportedly were happy that ‘all that was on tape’

The level of delusion was incredible for my eyes to witness. He genuinely thought he was in the right here...

It’s very easy to see that if she had been nice to him, this would have been over. He was upset because she had an attitude. An attitude because she didn’t like being stopped and made to wait a long time for a ticket.

An attitude that got to him so much, that he decided she would be punished for it.

What kind of a system employs such emotional officers?  How can a civil servant, a person in a position of authority ever obey the law if they are emotionally insecure? If they are so driven by how citizens respond to them that they will literally use that when deciding the verdict of how they will be punished?

I do not think Sandra was killed by any officer’s hands. She was killed by their actions, collectively. She took her own life because she saw no hope for black people, we will never be treated like people from other races. As a black woman in America, she has witnessed injustice so many times that she lost hope. Saying she killed herself without police involvement is like saying Amanda Todd killed herself and it had nothing to do with the bullies.

The danger’s of portraying black problems from the eyes and mouths of whites who have never even experienced being stopped and searched ‘randomly’, being eyed-up suspiciously or even asked the black community itself trivializes black issues. They say what they ‘expect’ which simply feeds stereotypes and informs nothing. They are also rarely caught out on racial bias reporting because their bosses are almost always white. Whites are good at defending other whites because they understand white problems. They know that Dylann was clearly a racist white supremacist but he will never be called a thug, a terrorist or anything other than a ‘lone wolf’ – a term that frees other whites of the social or moral responsibility of being ‘suspect-able’ or ‘blamed’ because of the actions of those like them in their communities. 

The real issue faced by America and Europe is that they are not giving voices to those from ethnic or religious minority backgrounds. Imagine a court case where the Prosecuting attorney is speaking for both the plaintiff and the defendant. Not only is there no defense attorney present (the defendant has no defense) but the defendant is spoken for by the attorney (the person trying to prove the side of the plaintiff)

We are not spoken for in the mainstream media except by people who do not understand our narrative, and furthermore, make people ‘like us’ explain ourselves. It is ridiculous enough that all Muslims have to ‘explain themselves’ because mainstream media puts them in the same category as extremist anti-western politically charged attackers who happen to be Muslim and use ‘being Muslim’ as a way to get others on board with their ideologies – yet when Dylann Roof kills blacks in the name of white supremacy and maintaining the white population other whites don’t have to explain themselves. 

The importance of allowing people to speak for themselves without having to defend themselves from mainstream ideologies is a fundamental right that doesn't exist in the so called progressive western societies we live in today.

Instead blacks must always defend themselves and Muslims must always explain themselves.

We need more ethnic representation in the media, and we need it now.