The New Apartheid

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  When I watched the first scraps of news litter my twitter feed on the ninth of August 2014
I asked myself only one question:
Again?
Michael Brown was an 18 year old African American man from Ferguson MO
Which resides in the same county as St Louis MO
A city, where fifty years ago,
People were fighting to prevent the events that follow
Michael Brown was fresh out of high school and well on his way to college when an officer decided to get too trigger happy and toss six bullets into the man's back
And set off the bomb that's been aching to burst for fifty years
But Michael Brown wasn't the only one to fall like this
On July 17 2014, a 43 year old father by the name of Eric Garner was choked to death by police for selling untaxed cigarettes
The man resisted being cuffed and instead of maybe...
Tasing him?
The officers decided to smother this man into the ground
The cigarettes he possessed could have caused the same choking death to buyers
But the discrepancy here is, he didn't choose this consequence.
On August 5 2014, a 22 year old man by the name of John Crawford was shot for holding a BB gun
It's been almost two months and though the public and the family are screaming "Why"
The murderers are withholding the tapes to avoid looking as stupid as they are
The BB gun couldn't cause harm to a fly but Crawford was a fly on the wall to these police officers
Just another pest to swat out of existence
On August 11 2014, 25 year old Ezell Ford was stopped on an L.A. sidewalk and a spokesperson cries foul play on the part of the victim
But the victim's mother insisted that he was shot mercilessly in the back
LAPD is still looking into the story but I guarantee you that they will never look into the eyes of the mother that lost her son at their filthy, piggish hands
And just over a month ago, on August 20, 2014, a few miles from where Michael Brown was shot into the asphalt
Kajieme Powell, 25 years old, was shot by a police officer and the encounter was caught on tape
He insisted for the police to shoot him right there and though he had a knife, the final stab went through the body of the victim and not the officer who squeezed the trigger
The video does not show this over hand grip on the knife that St. Louis Police Department is desperately trying to fabricate

Rather

 it shows the evidence of history repeating itself like the six second vines that America feasts on to distract itself from reality
The killings of these African American men are right under our noses and yet, we'd rather check our Facebook feeds to read the news of the people who will never know this fear
Because when you're a middle class white american it's easier to sit back and call African Americans who die hundreds of miles away every single day "thugs"
Because when you're a middle class white american it's easier to think that you can determine who deserves the right to live and who deserves brutal treatment
Because when you're a middle class white american you have all the rights in the world because you were born a different color than your dying brothers and sisters
Because when you're a middle class white American you're on the pretty side of the fight, all pipecleaner daisies and paper suns
The side protected by a wall of social media and brainless celebrities,
A façade carefully executed to desensitize you and turn your mind to putty
But there are two sides to every story, things on the other side of the wall
Things that most people are too weak to see.
Now you may be asking yourselves, why is this seventeen year old white girl trying to speak for these dead men?
These dead men that share nothing in common with her.
You wanna know why?
I hopped the wall because the artificial side I was programmed to love
Holds no actual value
And I wanted to see the carnage
I wanted to hear the chaos
I wanted to feel the war cry resounding from the chests of my brothers and sisters in turmoil
Because I'll never experience what they have
But I think that we can agree on four things;
This isn't a war on drugs
This isn't a war on murderers
This is a war on an ethnicity.
This is the American apartheid. 

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