Tonight, please come with us to the capitol
VERDICT IS IN – NOT GUILTY : The whole world is watching!
#philandocastile #blacklivesmatter
Transcript below:
Officer Jeronimo Yanez murdered Philando Castile. He shot him seven times, only 74 seconds after pulling him over for a routine traffic stop. Castile’s step daughter watched from the back seat of the car.
It’s murder – plain and simple. Regardless of this jury’s decision, Philando and countless others have been taken with no justice.
Philando’s sister and mother said the judicial system “continues to fail black people.” The Movement for Black Lives, like black freedom movements that came before it, is an intervention, seeking to heal and correct the deep inequity and violence at the heart of the very project of the United States of America.
From chattel slavery to white terror undermining reconstruction, from Jim Crow to for profit prisons – racism is the foundation to US capitalism. Sometimes it’s overt, like the “Marches against Sharia” last week. Other times it’s woven deeper into everyday life: “Stop and frisk” style policing happens routinely, criminalizing immigrants and people of color, and feeds Trump’s deportation machine, like we saw on the light rail a few weeks ago, like we saw with Philando.
Tonight we’ll protest with community organizations to demonstrate our disgust with this unjust system. And we must go further.
We need restorative justice, housing and jobs programs by taxing the rich, to address the deeper social issues that feed criminal and antisocial behavior, like the violent robberies on the University of Minnesota campus last week.
We need elected civilian review boards with real teeth: full powers over police department priorities, over the budgets, and with the ability to launch investigations.
Let’s not forget that generations of abolitionists have pushed back slave-owners, hate-mongers, and entire institutions of legalized racial apartheid, “Jim Crow”, and won serious reforms. We can do it again. We can upend this deadly racist system. Black Lives Matter.