Lethal Choreography: A Byproduct of Woke Part 1

By Patrick Hall

Do we remember the tragic death of Michael Brown? He was a young Black man caught up in a frenetic confrontation with police in Ferguson Missouri. At the time, Mr. Brown had just come from roughing up a grocery store owner, stealing some merchandise. He was confronted later by a local police officer. Foolishly, Mr. Brown parried with the officer for his service revolver and was fatally shot.  It was the sickening and lethal choreography played out far too many times when a justified stop of a black suspect by a law enforcement officer quickly goes south.

 As usual, the second step in this dance was accompanied by obligatory shouts of police brutality followed by the tertiary connection of how innocent black men are being indiscriminately hunted down by racist police.  It gave birth to the “hands-up-don’t shoot” myth widely disseminated by the Defund the Police movement.  Combine this with the media-driven Kabuki Theatre in Minneapolis surrounding the death of Daunte Wright (a black man), when Kim Potter one of the arresting officers accidentally confused her gun with her taser killing Mr. Wright. Officer Potter received a lesser sentence because the court ruled that Potter was “in the line of duty and doing her job in attempting to lawfully arrest Daunte Wright.”

As a side note, Mr. Wright was being retained for various outstanding arrest warrants, and not because of some minor traffic violation that the corporate media and race pimps like NAACP and the Black Democratic political class try to depict.

Potter was attempting to protect another officer, who could have been dragged and seriously injured when Mr.  Wright tried to drive away. However, the same dissensions (of police indiscriminately killing blacks) were acrimoniously resurrected as a referendum on all law enforcement. Unfortunately, if not by design, the demonization of the police is a tragic byproduct of “woke” socio-cultural thinking and behavior.

Sidebar:   Since the term woke is becoming ubiquitous in the national dialogue, a serviceable definition is in order. The term “woke” is a social-cultural mindset of being alert to racial and social injustices in Western societies and the United States in particular.  Before 2010, the cultural left’s term “political correctness” was and still is employed as the precursor to woke hermeneutics or principles. “Wokeism” later came to encompass a broader awareness of perceived social inequalities such as sexism, transphobia, ableism, mansplaining, toxic masculinity, environmental racism, etc. Woke proponents teach or promote the destructive idea, that America is bad or an incurably flawed nation. Woke or political correctness has been employed as a kind of shorthand for American Left ideas or DEI trainers involving identity politics and social justice notions of white privilege, cultural appropriation, ethnic chauvinism, and slavery reparation for African Americans. Once more, the woke template is riddled with the “America is bad” catechesis so dear to the cultural left and too often constituencies within the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, the culpability of the officers involved in both cases served and propagated the well-established secular hagiography surrounding the deaths of George Floyd, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin.

About the latter, one is reminded of the comments made by our former President, that if he had a son, he would’ve looked like Trayvon. But I doubt very much, that he would’ve acted like him.  And quite frankly, so does Barrack Obama.

The so-called profiling and open killing of black men have more to do with a host of life decisions, proper mentoring, the devolution of family in the black underclass, and the fracturing of basic civic behavior, that has been lost or not even taught in Post-Civil Rights America.   I say this without apology! Too many blacks are engaged in illegal activities, that often bring them into contact with law enforcement, where the potential of something going sideways has been ginned up by the blatantly false narrative of police brutality, orchestrated by the cultural left. The “rate of criminal offending and/or behavior” by blacks never enters the equation or mind-set of those wishing to label the police as racist. This pernicious way of thinking and “behaving” towards the police has been injected into a large segment of the black community. Subsequently, many blacks exhibit a response to law enforcement, that borders on Pavlovian.