What Happened to Sandra Bland: More Than a Hashtag
As the buzz begins to build surrounding the death of a beautiful and vibrant young 28-year-old black woman from Illinois, Sandra Bland, it is important that blacks take the time to examine their mindset and approach to confronting the suspicious circumstances behind her death. According to an article by ABC Channel 7 Eyewitness News in Chicago, this young lady had just completed an interview with her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, for a job position there in the Student Outreach program — a job she was awarded.
There are some reports that suggest that Sandra Bland was on her way to participate in a “Black Lives Matter” event when she was pulled over. The aforementioned news article lays out the details of what happened from that point. I don’t want to spend too much time describing the details, because honestly, they make me sick to my stomach. It is the same old narrative of a black person dying in the custody of law enforcement officials. What I will say, with confidence, is that I don’t believe for one second that Sandra Bland took her own life. None of her behavior leading up to her death suggests that she was suicidal. In fact securing a long term position in the area of her passion, would suggest that she had a lot to look forward to.
For anyone who is familiar with the narrative, you are already cognizant of the mechanisms at play, and you can probably recite the narrative verbatim. There will be an appearance of an investigation, in which those involved will be relieved of all culpability in Sandra’s death. At the end of the day, no one will be held accountable. The reason that I am reaching out through this article is that we, as a race of people, must be willing to step out of our comfort zones and change the status quo. Our natural proclivity will be to protest and sign petitions; however, without economic power to underwrite those petitions and protests, they will have no power — making them tantamount to a collective temper tantrum.
Click here to learn how to create professional logos in minutes ~ for yourself, or as a business for your clients!
We must become more calculative and proactive in our engagement of the injustices that are perpetrated against us. We must be willing to make our presence felt. To this point, blacks have been primarily consumers in this country, and consumerism has played a significant role in our inability to control our own destiny. We don’t own or control anything of significance. We continue to spend without investing in our future. Each generation has to start over, because the previous generation did not leave them anything to compete with.
The hopelessness that we feel as we hear that we have lost another black person, a woman at that, to a brutal system of injustice, should drive us to press inexorably toward being autonomous, through the building of a vertical economic system. We must make an effort to address the disunity within the black collective, for it has been the division that has made us easy targets throughout the years. Although this step will not necessarily provide the force we need to address the immediate issue of Sandra Bland’s murder, it will mean that her death was not be in vain.
As far as dealing with this situation in a more immediate manner, the first thing we must do is focus the energy of our anger. We must transform our anger into passion. Anger, in and of itself, is an emotion, and emotions don’t have endurance. One of our greatest fallibilities in past situations like this is that when the anger fades, the fight stops. Passion is a different force altogether. Passion is connected to a purpose; it is implacable, it is relentless and it is focused and fixed on a specific goal. We fought for Trayvon, but when the anger faded, the fight was abandoned. We fought for Oscar Grant, but when the anger faded, the fight stopped. We fought for Mike Brown, but when the anger faded, we returned to business as usual. We must be aware of the fierce urgency of now, so business as usual is no longer an option.
As Dr. King stated in his most popular speech, “I Have a Dream,” we cannot be mellowed by the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. We cannot allow ourselves to be appeased by the trinkets and crumbs from the table of oppression. This has to be the moment when blacks determine that enough is enough. This must be the moment when blacks decide that we are ready to make our presence felt.
The best way to make our presence felt immediately is in all non-black economies. We have more than $1.1 in annual aggregate spending power; however, the problem is that we have never consolidated and focused our spending with a specific agenda in mind. Individualism and consumerism as concepts and philosophies shaped the paradigms of the black collective to take on a narcissistic existence that focuses supremely on “self” rather than the black collective. It is this mindset that has left us impotent when it comes to defending ourselves and mastering our fate.
We must develop a mindset that we are going to speak through our spending. We will voice our dissatisfaction through the manner in which we direct our dollars. We will refuse to support anything that supports a system that has systematically wreaked havoc on our people for more than four hundred years. When we don’t control our spending, and we pour our money into a white economy, we are, in essence, financing our own demise. Sandra stood for what she believed in, and she stood boldly. I watched a video in which she called out her white friends for challenging her on her “Black Lives Matter Stance.” If we are to honor her, we must honor her with the same boldness and commitment in which she lived her life.
I will be honest with you; we will have to abandon that innate proclivity to gravitate towards comfort. Advancement and elevation are not achieved within the confines of comfort. Elevation and empowerment are the fruit of audacious faith that has been planted and cultivated in the fertile soil of adversity. It is wrought out through suffering, sacrifice and determination. We cannot seek comfort and freedom simultaneously, because they are diametrically opposed to one another. We must choose freedom or comfort. Be warned, that the comfort you seek is only an illusion, and that it will only be a matter of time before this fight is brought to your front door, whether you are ready to fight or not. The is no as much what happened to Sandra Bland, as much as it is: What are we going to do about it.~ Dr. Rick Wallace, Ph.D.
Click here to support the work of the Black Community Empowerment Initiative and other community programs offered through the Odyssey Project!
