Diddy Questions
Why did it take eight years for the Diddy tape (assaulting Cassie) to come to light? Why didn’t the hotel where the assault took place report the incident immediately? If the reason is the hotel was paid off, who was paid off, and why aren’t they being held accountable? How was Puff Daddy able to create an enabling entourage unwilling to stand in the gap for Cassie and any others Mr. Combs may have abused over the years? Why did it take allegations of Sean John sexually abusing brothers before many people even took any of the allegations against him seriously? Why is it society’s first impulse to disregard Black women’s claims of abuse, and the second impulse is to attack them via social media posts, etc.? Why has it been accepted into our psyches that true success and equality for us is emulating and imitating the negative psychoses and actions of those who have brutalized us for centuries? And most importantly, when is Puffy’s new music dropping? ‘Cause you know we’ll be buying it “irregardless.”
Dead or Alive
The history of white people using Black bodies (dead or alive) for experimentation is as long as it is tragic. Their history of using Black bodies (dead or alive) for public display and “entertainment” purposes (at circuses, zoos, museums and modern professional sports arenas) is just as lengthy. Keeping the skulls of dead (murdered or worked to death) Blackfolk to further the BS “science” of phrenology (the pseudoscience that claims skull shape and size reveals intellectual capacities) is just one example of many. Where am I going with all this? To Florida, of course. The Lake County (Ocala, Fla.) Medical Examiner’s Office (MEO) recently called the family of murder victim Cedric Wayne McFadden alerting them that they had his remains. This is a common practice. What’s not so common is the fact that McFadden was murdered 19 years ago, and the MEO gave the McFadden’s some, but not all, of Cedric’s badly decomposed remains. They kept his skull and spine. Now, the Lake County MEO could have been guilty of all or none of those aforementioned inhumane offenses. They may have simply been guilty of so utterly disregarding the life and humanity of McFadden and his family that they just left his remains sitting around in their cellar for roughly two decades. Either way, it speaks to this nation’s ongoing contempt for and/or infatuation with Black bodies, dead or alive.
Aryan Avenger Strikes Again
Texas is so racist even its white-on-white crime screams anti-Blackness. Daniel Perry was tried by a jury of his peers and found guilty of murdering U.S. Air Force veteran Garrett Foster in cold blood. Foster was attending a Black Lives Matter protest. Perry went to the protest intent on inflicting violence upon participants. He manifested his intent, killing Foster, a white man who had the audacity to stand up for Black lives. Perry was later (way later) arrested, tried and convicted of murder in 2020, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Enter aryan avenger Greg Abbott who delivered Perry from accountability via a Governor’s pardon. Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher called Abbott’s pardon “outrageous” and “an affront to our fellow Texans and our system of justice.” “The power to pardon is one that should be used to promote justice, not undermine it,” she added. State Senator Borris Miles called it “a slap in the face to the judicial process” and added that Foster was dead in part because of the open carry law Abbott signed. “Mr. Foster was open carrying a rifle,” said Miles. “He was following the law. He was protecting his disabled wife. For that, he was gunned down in the street, and that very rifle was used as the focal point of the defense… This pardon sends a dangerous precedent.”
