It was Maya Angelou, I believe, who was quoted as saying “Every man and his dog thinks they can run a road up a Black woman’s behind.”
The more I think about the death of #SandraBland, the more it saddens and sickens me to think of the many ways her life could have been saved if we did not live in a nation that is so quick to judge and call Black women who are abused and attacked and harassed and oppressed “paranoid,” and even so much quicker to blame them for their own abuse and abandonment.
Never treated the same as an abused and abandoned and psychologically ravaged white female, who can babble on “Doctor So’n’So’s Show” and Oprah Unlimited” about her life issues and traumas and bad decisions, the ‘race piece’ alone is enough to keep the Black woman in a class of her own when it comes to the devaluation of a Black woman’s life.
The part they never get around to addressing with Black women is the filth of the lie of the so-called American dream, i.e., “nightmare”; or the exorbitant racism and even the rape and molestation and abandonment and all of the multitudinous and variegated other traumas and abuse that puts a Black woman in the frame of mind to even have P.T.S.D. or P.T.S.S. (post traumatic slave syndrome) in the first place.
The “every man” issue speaks for itself, but the “his dog” who runs a road up her behind are often white females who are on a racist “sabotage” track nearly every time they see a Black woman who is a better person than they would like to believe; or some other Black women who are jealous of her and acts out in a spiteful manner towards her for no logical reason; “man-diggers” who don’t have much else to do with their time; and very often her own family, the very people she thought were her friends, and sometimes, even her own ingrate-driven children.
Without admission of the factors that contribute to it, and the white privilege that sops it up like a biscuit, there is no place in which healing can ever take place — not for a Black woman in America.
As a woman who has been in #sandrabland’s shoes for no reason except the crime of being a sophisticated lady who could hold my own truths to my heart and not sin against my own beliefs, the scenario of her arrest, the angry racist cop who pulled her over, her disconnect with her family for three whole days in a cold nasty jail cell, stripped of her street clothes after she was dead, photographed to look as if her eyes were open when they were steel cold rigormortised at the time she was forced to wear their slaver’s outfit, and then her stone cold murder (and possible rape) and the post-mortem accusation of having killed herself played over and over in my head.
It was almost me.
In 2010 in Mesa Arizona, a place where I only landed because of the treachery of my own family and ex-friends, I was put into a position in a women’s shelter of sorts that ended up being nothing more than a whorehouse and a drug den for afflicted white females with issues I simply did not have.
True enough, I had spent a long time majorly depressed and deeply saddened, and covered over in self-hatred and self-blame for the sins and crimes of others who had crossed my path in life, but the rejection by my own — people I had taken care of in their darkest hours, bent over backward for to my own personal sacrifice and need, and done nothing but issued some hard love and motherly advice where and when it was needed– was more than any woman of any race should be asked to bear.
And then, the icing, whipped cream, and cherry on the cake: The racist faction of it, too.
It wasn’t that I had not dealt with racism before. I grew up in the United States of Georgia, where racism was accepted, expected, and “par for the course,” but this particular “Aryanzonan” tinge of it was beyond comprehensible.
In the deep South, you learn that racism is part of the baggage of living there. It may not always be personified hatred, but it has arisen to the business and professional level of being highly institutionalized. Racism is part of the region’s constitution, it’s just the way business is done down there, and even Black folks “down souf” live in deep denial of the stench of its overarching impact to this very day.
But when you are in a state on the west coast that never really had a history of the enslavement of Blacks, racism takes on a totally different smell and context that deepens and thickens.
It becomes the stinky onion layer that can’t be peeled; and it actually IS hatred, but more of an emotional hatred than a business-related one like down south.
In states like this, and even in places like southern California, racism is more blindly color-specific and cruel just to be cruel than a matter of “slavery left us privileged this way and we like it and see no reason to change.”
I could see #SandraBland’s dilemma in my mind’s eye–flashbacks of memories about the treachery of those I had loved and cared for, and their complete willingness to stand blindly by and accept whatever these racist drunken drug-addicted whites said about me and my “imagination” and how I was “making everything up,” [paranoid] when they were doing exactly what I said they were doing and had the documentation to back it up.
The willingness of my own relatives and so-called friends to leave me at the mercy of these vicious racist dogs and their female whores and robbers said all it needed to about why in the hell it was that #sandrabland, whose name can only be recognized as the hashtag of another deceased and post-mortem scandalized Black woman instead of the Queen that she strove to be, could be left in a jail for three whole days by her own family until she was situationally murdered and then accused of killing herself … over a damned traffic stop, a turn signal anomaly that a white “button-cute” female could have sucked a dick and gotten away with.
And her family didn’t even care enough to raise hell until AFTER she was dead.
For me, it was much more serious than a turn signal.
It was the subjugation of myself, in search of shelter after being left in the streets during an economic downtown (thank you George Bush) by those whom I had clothed, fed, given money to, held hands and cried and prayed with, and even housed at some point in their own lives; and left to a den full of criminal white women at that.
The things that they screamed at me because the unemployment office was taking too long to send the rent money, though I had borrowed from a client back in Atlanta to “get by” and to pay them something until the unemployment started coming in, was in itself a nightmare.
Black bitch. You better bring me my money!
You nappy headed nigger!
Nigger Bitch Fraud!
It was only later that I discovered that the head of that household, an unscrupulous type named “Sammi Jo,” who was 10 years younger than I, was addicted to heroin as well as prescription drugs. It was perfectly clear once I discovered that, how the need for the money and property theft of her clients, became one of outrageous sacrilegious desperation for her. She and her “housing buddies” had become comfortably accustomed to pretending to have a “christian household,” which turned out to be nothing more than a legal scam to get money out of government-issue females who found themselves in horrible situations due to their own addictions, something I had never had, unless “people addiction” counts.
They would take their money in cash only, would not give them receipts, then would pretend that they were never paid in the first place, and these women, so strung out themselves, could not remember whether they paid or not and would keep owing “back money” that really was not behind.
I wasn’t one of those, and demanded handwritten receipts for my cash, but nothing that I said about what was happening at the unemployment office was satisfactory. And to top it all off, her husband Rob, an enabler of hers, even forced me to make a call to Chase to demand where the money was, because they just “knew I was lying about it.”
I had never lied. To anyone. Ever. Except to spare someone from complete embarrassment when it became necessary.
The entire episode swirled completely out of control, I landed back in the same hospital I had just checked out of less than two months earlier, and court battles ensued that circumstantially gave these racist bitches all the leverage and right of way they needed — even to the point where I was robbed of personal possessions and phone calls were made to my family and former friends that painted me out as everything but the woman I was.
I said “was,” because I am not now the woman I used to be. That experience, and so many others before it, completely changed me and my attitude. Maybe I wasn’t a bitch then, but I am now; and am damned proud of it. I am the bitch the world has turned me into, and so it shall remain — another “death of a good Black woman” that will never be that way again.
I already knew the friends who had betrayed me, but the fact that my own family allowed these drug-ridden whores to use the words “paranoid” and “liar” against me, and they actually fell for it and ignored the entire trauma I went through was completely devastating.
It was also draining to discover that the folks who should have known me the best and should have known I would never have acted in that manner after everything I had done for them, who had turned their backs on me when I needed them the most … would have known better than to believe such things. Yet and again, maybe it was their opportunity to let the ill-will that they harbored against me explode into a phantasmagorical lie, for reasons they cannot explain to this day. I ask them, and they still can’t tell me why they would allow such a horrible thing to happen to me and sit on their royal asses and do nothing to stop it.
I envisioned #sandrabland’s life, as it slowly and unabatedly slip out from her grip.
Had her own family members, who should have shown up within moments after that insidious overblown arrest to DEMAND her release, NOT waited until after she was cold dead to scream #thismeanswar, #sandrabland would still be with us.
Watching her videos over and over again, and knowing that if I was as beautiful a woman as she, I would make some videos, too … about the exact same issues … I sensed in my heart that she had so much more to contribute to the love of the Black woman and the Black families on Earth, so much more by way of solutions for healing. I sensed in my heart that she would likely have become famous, like my other sweet lady of whom I am a lifelong fan, Bree Newsome, and she would have become famous for reasons other than being murdered for no reason whatsoever.
And just as was done to #sandrabland, had those bastards in Mesa, Arizona killed me cold dead and then swore I “committed suicide,” too; my own family -and those low-down former friends of mine- would have actually believed it. Even worse? If John Quinones from ‘What Would You Do?’ had been there filming the entire thing with a show topic called “Racism in the American Courtroom,” even the Judges and cops would have been cold busted.
As another woman whom I have known for more than 30 years said to me later on “They put you through shit that they could not have gone through themselves. They would not have lived to talk about it.”
SAY HER NAME. She is not the first, and as long as we ignore it, she will not be the last.
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