MY TURN

Greenfield Recorder, May 25, 2022

By SUSAN TRIOLO

The bloody line of police brutality and murder of Black men, women and children is long. The death of George Floyd sparked an uprising of conscience in 2020. As a country we can no longer turn away from our responsibility to end racial profiling by police against people of color. We need police reform as shown in the current charges of racism against the Greenfield Police Department.

We demand judicial accountability to protect innocent defendants and our voting rights. We will raise up the memories of the many who have died — from long before Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice to Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

We will work to end police violence. We will work to end white supremacy. We will educate our children with the true history of our country.

We will not forget.

We will raise up the history of today’s police departments that have their roots as slave catchers.

Mercenary men captured freedom seeking enslaved people who fled their misery; kidnapped them and returned them to “their masters,” for bounty. We will raise up the history that over hundreds of years in our country, Black women were raped by white men, resulting in generations of children with many skin tones, from very dark to very light. Of 1,055 people shot and killed by police in 2021, 285 or 27% were Black, while Black people represent only 13% of the U.S. population.

Since January 2022, there have been 200 mass shootings in the U.S., meaning incidents where at least four or more victims were shot. The most recent being the horrific slaughter of 10 Black men and women and three more injured in Buffalo, New York. The 18-year-old white male terrorist was radicalized in the dark web of hate and white nationalism, and who was known by school personnel to be deeply troubled; yet, they did nothing. He chose to drive two hours to Buffalo into the heart of the Black community, purposefully, to kill Black people he didn’t even know, while they did their food shopping. This is the depth of willful depravity today, a legacy of centuries of Black hatred and white supremacy.

This is why we remember George Floyd.

Susan Triolo lives in Sunderland.