By Goldie Taylor
Alton Sterling was selling CDs when cops shot him dead. Why are people racing to judge him rather than his killers?
“If you fucking move, I swear to God!”
It has been mere hours since Alton Sterling was tackled and shot dead by two police officers. As the East Baton Rouge parish medical examiner’s office completes its work, we as a larger society have already begun to make our own decisions about how he lived and why he died.
We will do that without knowing much of anything about him, other than that he was a 37-year-old father of five, a black man selling bootleg CDs to earn a few dollars. Ultimately, what one believes about what happened last night outside of a convenience mart in a rundown section of Louisiana’s capital city, depends largely on who we are and the America we have encountered. Race and class are unfortunate, yet inextricable factors—for us, for the police and for the dead man.
The incident, captured on cell phone video, comes amid a national conversation about police violence in non-white communities. Each year in the U.S., there are over a thousand deadly shooting by police officers. African Americans make up a disproportionate and overwhelming majority of the dead. We are disproportionately stopped, subjected to search and arrest—disportionately the victims of police violence.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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