There’s something bigger going on here

When I sit down to write my morning column, there’s usually one prevailing story that either dominated the previous day’s events or should dominate the upcoming day’s news cycle. The choice of what to write about often ends up being an easy, and obvious, one. But as I sit down to write this column, I’m having trouble putting my finger on just one topic to write about – because there are simply too many political storylines in motion right now.

There are the obvious stories. The Clarence Thomas corruption scandal is continuing to get uglier, and has not yet reached that threshold where he would even consider resigning, but we all know it’s going to keep getting uglier. Jim Jordan’s big hearing in Manhattan was about as ineffective and irrelevant as every other hearing that House Republicans have held this year. And Donald Trump’s eruptions over on his joke of a social network are growing even more frantic by the hour.

But the stories we should be focusing on right now are the ones that are more about humans than politicians. A grand jury in Ohio failed to take any action against the police for having shot a Black guy dozens of times during a traffic stop. To be clear, in a case like this, a grand jury only decides not to issue an indictment if the prosecutor has made a point of steering the grand jury away from it. So we’re talking about potential prosecutorial misconduct here, and we should be looking closely at it.

Then there’s the stunning, yet not surprising, story of a white man shooting a Black teenager multiple times for the “crime” of ringing his doorbell. In this case the prosecutor has brought charges, but not until after widespread protests and national media attention occurred. And of course this was after the police initially questioned the shooter but then let him go. At least the kid survived.

There’s just something so inherently wrong with these kinds of stories. And the thing is, based on how frequently these stories hit the national media, we know these things have to be going on all the time. Most of these stories don’t get any coverage, because they didn’t happen to get caught on video, or didn’t happen to be so absurdly on the nose that even the average suburban white person can figure out something is wrong with what happened.

There is never a day when Black Americans don’t find themselves targets of violent racism and police oppression. There are only the days that we talk about these things, and the days that we ignore them. But we need to be talking about this every day. This is a crisis, and always has been. Just because some of us know we’re not going to end up on the wrong end of it, that’s not an excuse for us not to be talking about it. Every day. And loudly.