Sandra Bland Would Be Alive Today
If she’d been a White woman
Sandra Bland died almost two years ago. Her death was ruled suicide by hanging since that was the way she was found in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas.
The circumstances that led to her tragic demise is infuriatingly relatable for any person of color that has endured extreme treatment at the hands of over-zealous White cops who can’t control the direction of their guns or lack instinctual empathy for the ones they hunt.
Bland’s unfathomable end is the American story that makes the celebration of Black History Month damagingly uneven — especially when you consider the passage of time and how the present climate refuses to give us permission to acknowledge the progress that has been made.
How can we decently pour over historical antidotes when the relevancy of each bullet point consistently finds a slot next to the carried pain of our ancestral tidings — without washing away the accumulation of the revisited through the documented names of victims that still continue to mount in the shadows of death and injustice?
I am royally pissed that Sandra Bland had to leave this world as a Black woman in chains. Her god-given right to be an American was her undoing. Her defiance in the face of imminent death at the hands of a coward who only saw…
