Following a common script, I was 1am just now and I couldn't sleep. My mind was racing. Thinking of all the things I'm about ready to explore to engage organizing work in Sacramento. I decided to tune in Netflix. You know, watch something, for a bit, settle down, and eventually go back to sleep. I chose the documentary on the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992 where the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had a standoff and shooting incident with white separatist Randy Weaver and his family. Weaver's wife and son were killed in the standoff while an FBI agent was also killed.
After watching that presentation, I'm so angry that sleep is now completely out of the question so instead, I will express the reasons for my anger - here. Before watching the documentary, I was already well aware and irritated by the fact the Ruby Ridge incident had gotten all of the publicity it has received for the last 25 years. What I just watched intensified the anger I hold for the hypocritical and cowardly nature of the people who govern this society and the multitude of European (White) folks who continue to validate and support this living, breathing, contradiction that passes as a civilized society. I mean the Weaver family and Ruby Ridge, along with the WACO standoff in Texas the next year, serve as two of the lynch pins in the development of the anti-government and widely white supremacist militia movement which has grown a great deal over the last two decades. Hundreds of thousands of white people across this land use the Ruby Ridge incident to justify being anti-government and much of this discontent served as the ground swell that grew into the movement that elected Donald Trump. At the same time, these are the same people who if you dropped an African or Indigenous family into the slot the Weaver family occupied in the Ruby Ridge incident, these same people would be saying what happened was justified because the family disobeyed the law. This is the common narrative used by these people to justify the killing of Mike Brown in Furguson in 2014 by police, despite the fact there is no evidence young Mike violated any laws. He was walking down the middle of the street unarmed when he was shot and killed. Its the same justification those same people use to dismiss all of the state sanctioned violence against African people that occurs every day, all day, all the time. Yet, one White family is wrongly killed by the federal police and those same people still provide them un-compromised support, despite the fact Randy Weaver evidently (and without much doubt) sold sawed off shotguns, a clear violation of federal, not state, law, which is the reason the incident escalated in the first place. My anger stems not only from the contradiction that White people are always given all of the benefits of the doubt - where is the documentary that humanizes Akua Njeri (formally Deborah Johnson, the partner of murdered Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton in 1969) - and they are also given the opportunity to tell their story in a way that elicits empathy for their situation, something we never get. The facts are Weaver allegedly broke federal law and he without question befriended a white supremacist group near his family's compound in Northern Idaho. I can just hear FOX News now if an African family was a face for the Black Lives Matter movement as the Weavers are for the militia movement, and someone from that family had a credible allegation of selling sawed off shotguns and that family had socialized regularly with Bloods or Crips sets. Yet, it has been 25 years of crickets regarding these contradictions about the Weaver family from the "Make America Great" crowd as well as the liberal white left and the so-called revolutionary white left. Yes, we include the radicals. Pardon us if we cannot often tell the difference between you and the rest of your white family. You are so irritating. While we fight white supremacist violence as a way of life, you are so egotistical you have actually convinced yourselves that reacting to white supremacists and going where they assemble to beat them up is more revolutionary than figuring out how to reach and organize them before they are organized by white supremacist organizations. So, you are in some ways more irritating than the white supremacists, but that's a different discussion for a different time.
Please don't be mislead. I would expect nothing less of the majority of white people and FOX news then the contradictions illustrated above. This country was founded on theft and murder and the entire narrative for the last 500+ years has been to deny that and the oppressive system it built and maintained, so I expect no less from this system, but I grieve at this hour for the daily victims of this two-faced backward beast. I feel the pain of those parents of the victims of police terrorism who's children are dehumanized. I feel the pain of those African transgender victims who are dehumanized while white victims of the system of martyred. Don't get me wrong. I find it difficult tonight to have much sympathy for Randy Weaver. At least he got to walk away from the standoff, something the MOVE family didn't get to do in Philadelphia in 1985 when the police there dropped C 4 on their house, killing almost everyone, including children, something the feds made clear they didn't want to do doing the Ruby Ridge incident. Still, he and his deceased wife were just a couple of poor, confused, white people who found it convenient to, at least on some level, point fingers at us for their problems, nothing new to see there. On the other hand, the FBI are known and convicted terrorists who could tell me the sky is blue and I'd have to question it. So, no question in my mind that the Weavers were victims, despite my minor irritation with them. I say minor because my main anger is reserved for the people in power who pull the strings and manipulate the thinking of everyone in this world. Its those people who craft and maintain white supremacy and they build the institutions that ensure that oppression functions in a systemic way.
So, instead of going back to sleep, I'm up thinking of how screwed we are in this society. How Emmet Till was brutally murdered for nothing and the White woman who caused it all has been protected from having to deal with it for decades. I'm up thinking about the Brown, Gurly, Garner, Bland, Martin, and thousands of other families who's executioners are treated like folk heroes while any form we utilize to question that is criticized, which really means don't question it at all. Mostly, I'm thinking how much we have had 500 years of consistently inhumane treatment to demonstrate to us that there is absolutely no way we will ever fit into this system and why we should never want to do that in the first place. But, don't read any of that to mean I'm demoralized. Quite the opposite. I said I couldn't sleep because my mind was swirling, thinking about work I need to do. All this night has done is solidify just how much that work is necessary. And if I need to lose a few hours of sleep to gain that perspective, that's a worthy investment any night of the week.
After watching that presentation, I'm so angry that sleep is now completely out of the question so instead, I will express the reasons for my anger - here. Before watching the documentary, I was already well aware and irritated by the fact the Ruby Ridge incident had gotten all of the publicity it has received for the last 25 years. What I just watched intensified the anger I hold for the hypocritical and cowardly nature of the people who govern this society and the multitude of European (White) folks who continue to validate and support this living, breathing, contradiction that passes as a civilized society. I mean the Weaver family and Ruby Ridge, along with the WACO standoff in Texas the next year, serve as two of the lynch pins in the development of the anti-government and widely white supremacist militia movement which has grown a great deal over the last two decades. Hundreds of thousands of white people across this land use the Ruby Ridge incident to justify being anti-government and much of this discontent served as the ground swell that grew into the movement that elected Donald Trump. At the same time, these are the same people who if you dropped an African or Indigenous family into the slot the Weaver family occupied in the Ruby Ridge incident, these same people would be saying what happened was justified because the family disobeyed the law. This is the common narrative used by these people to justify the killing of Mike Brown in Furguson in 2014 by police, despite the fact there is no evidence young Mike violated any laws. He was walking down the middle of the street unarmed when he was shot and killed. Its the same justification those same people use to dismiss all of the state sanctioned violence against African people that occurs every day, all day, all the time. Yet, one White family is wrongly killed by the federal police and those same people still provide them un-compromised support, despite the fact Randy Weaver evidently (and without much doubt) sold sawed off shotguns, a clear violation of federal, not state, law, which is the reason the incident escalated in the first place. My anger stems not only from the contradiction that White people are always given all of the benefits of the doubt - where is the documentary that humanizes Akua Njeri (formally Deborah Johnson, the partner of murdered Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton in 1969) - and they are also given the opportunity to tell their story in a way that elicits empathy for their situation, something we never get. The facts are Weaver allegedly broke federal law and he without question befriended a white supremacist group near his family's compound in Northern Idaho. I can just hear FOX News now if an African family was a face for the Black Lives Matter movement as the Weavers are for the militia movement, and someone from that family had a credible allegation of selling sawed off shotguns and that family had socialized regularly with Bloods or Crips sets. Yet, it has been 25 years of crickets regarding these contradictions about the Weaver family from the "Make America Great" crowd as well as the liberal white left and the so-called revolutionary white left. Yes, we include the radicals. Pardon us if we cannot often tell the difference between you and the rest of your white family. You are so irritating. While we fight white supremacist violence as a way of life, you are so egotistical you have actually convinced yourselves that reacting to white supremacists and going where they assemble to beat them up is more revolutionary than figuring out how to reach and organize them before they are organized by white supremacist organizations. So, you are in some ways more irritating than the white supremacists, but that's a different discussion for a different time.
Please don't be mislead. I would expect nothing less of the majority of white people and FOX news then the contradictions illustrated above. This country was founded on theft and murder and the entire narrative for the last 500+ years has been to deny that and the oppressive system it built and maintained, so I expect no less from this system, but I grieve at this hour for the daily victims of this two-faced backward beast. I feel the pain of those parents of the victims of police terrorism who's children are dehumanized. I feel the pain of those African transgender victims who are dehumanized while white victims of the system of martyred. Don't get me wrong. I find it difficult tonight to have much sympathy for Randy Weaver. At least he got to walk away from the standoff, something the MOVE family didn't get to do in Philadelphia in 1985 when the police there dropped C 4 on their house, killing almost everyone, including children, something the feds made clear they didn't want to do doing the Ruby Ridge incident. Still, he and his deceased wife were just a couple of poor, confused, white people who found it convenient to, at least on some level, point fingers at us for their problems, nothing new to see there. On the other hand, the FBI are known and convicted terrorists who could tell me the sky is blue and I'd have to question it. So, no question in my mind that the Weavers were victims, despite my minor irritation with them. I say minor because my main anger is reserved for the people in power who pull the strings and manipulate the thinking of everyone in this world. Its those people who craft and maintain white supremacy and they build the institutions that ensure that oppression functions in a systemic way.
So, instead of going back to sleep, I'm up thinking of how screwed we are in this society. How Emmet Till was brutally murdered for nothing and the White woman who caused it all has been protected from having to deal with it for decades. I'm up thinking about the Brown, Gurly, Garner, Bland, Martin, and thousands of other families who's executioners are treated like folk heroes while any form we utilize to question that is criticized, which really means don't question it at all. Mostly, I'm thinking how much we have had 500 years of consistently inhumane treatment to demonstrate to us that there is absolutely no way we will ever fit into this system and why we should never want to do that in the first place. But, don't read any of that to mean I'm demoralized. Quite the opposite. I said I couldn't sleep because my mind was swirling, thinking about work I need to do. All this night has done is solidify just how much that work is necessary. And if I need to lose a few hours of sleep to gain that perspective, that's a worthy investment any night of the week.
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