Another Famous Hat Rant against Racism

I think what I like best about quarantine is that all my important communication is by email, where I can reread it and ponder what I want to say. In person, I am always putting my foot in my mouth, but it has been months since I've said something I regret. However, written communication has its shortcomings too, and there must have been something I didn't understand in Ma Hat's texts, because she let me know yesterday that she most certainly didn't stick the hibiscus outside in the winter to kill it. I'm still unclear on whether she purposely stopped watering it, or if it just... died. I certainly know all about plants just dying despite my best efforts, and I would never hold that against anyone.

Is anyone else feeling like screaming lately? How can it be that if you happen to have more melanin the police can kneel on your neck and kill you for allegedly committing a minor crime, while a white kid who killed two people and kidnapped a third is completely unharmed during arrest? And then I suppose people will start in with the victim blaming, about how maybe the guy killed by police had some minor violations in his past, as if that excuses giving him the death penalty without a trial. Well, guess what? Plenty of the white doctors I used to work with had misdemeanor charges against them for disorderly conduct or whatever, so would it be okay for the cops to kill them if they pulled them over for speeding? What the actual [expletive]? Who among us is perfect? If it's okay for cops to kill black people because once years ago they wrote a bad check, then couldn't we all be executed? And then there was that white woman in Central Park who didn't have her dog on a leash like she was supposed to, and when a black guy asked her to please leash her dog, she called the police and said a black man was threatening her, knowing that encounter could end up killing him. If it weren't for videos, so many of these wrongs would never come to light, so how many times do they happen and we don't know about it? Even the protesters get treated differently: if you are white, you can show up heavily armed at the state capitol or the governor's mansion to protest that you can't get a haircut, and nothing happens to you, but unarmed black people protesting another unjust death get tear-gassed. This is not fair, and it is not just, and it has to stop. NOW.

Famous Hat