Congressman John Lewis Can Tell You

And he did tell us all in David Halberstam's book, The Children.
He was referring to police presence and posturing.
In Chapter 53, Congressman Lewis states, about a January, a half century ago, in which an Alabama
sheriff manufactured a detailed, overdone, uniformed look for himself  "to show you that if you were
black, you were subhuman, and therefore, you ought to fear him, and that there were no restraints on him because he was the law.  Therefore what he did was legal no matter what it was, and what you did was illegal no matter what it was. It was as if he was his own portable constitution."
We could use that statement to describe any of the murdering policemen in the news for killing young
unarmed men.
We have been very consistently muddling the murder conversation with the pre-killing conditions
of our victims, not the pre-kill mentality of the killers.
In this way, the state hopes to convince people that state-sanctioned murder should be accepted as the
part of the cost of living in American cities.
I don't see that working.
These men have families who love them.
These men were loved and adored even when they were slaves, who could control and care for almost nothing. Now they have the legacy of their forefathers as well as their own willingness to
reboot in a racist society. In no circumstance will they ever doubt they are treasured in their own communities. We loved them centuries ago. We love them now. That alone makes them superhuman.
When you hunt and kill them, that makes you what?