books like bury my heart at wounded knee

“They killin us for no reason,” read a protest sign in Kansas City. Our children should feel safe, not as though they are being hunted.” The ubiquitous fomenter of racial resentment, attorney Benjamin Crump, demanded that “gun violence against unarmed Black individuals must stop. The incident shows why “Black people and Black parents” are concerned that merely “existing while black” can get you shot by a white person, Lucas said. Yarl was shot because he was black by someone who “clearly, clearly fears Black people,” Lucas said. Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas made no effort to defuse the race angle that the press, the president, and his fellow Democrats had instantaneously imposed on the incident. Biden invited Yarl to visit the White House when he had recovered. “No parent should have to worry that their kid will be shot after ringing the wrong doorbell.” For once Biden left out “black,” but his formula by now is so routine (“Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter came home from walking down the street, playing in the park or just driving a car,” as “Brown and Black parents” have to do, Biden asked in his 2023 State of the Union address) that he doesn’t need the descriptor to get his racial message across. “Last night, I had a chance to call Ralph Yarl and his family,” Biden tweeted. President Biden weighed in with his usual trope about black parents living in daily fear for their children’s lives in racist America. (The DA has charged Lester with assault in the first degree because the potential maximum sentence-life in prison-is higher than that for attempted murder.) The shooting had a “racial component,” the prosecutor said, without offering evidence. The Kansas City district attorney validated the race narrative.

Yarl was inevitably identified as a “Black” teenager and Lester as a “white” homeowner. Thankfully, Yarl will likely survive the horrifying attack.Įvery news outlet that covered the shooting led with the race of Yarl and of Lester. (Yarl denies trying to open the door.) Lester shot Yarl, once in the head and once in the arm, through the storm door.

He became “scared to death,” he told the police, when he saw the larger Yarl pulling at the exterior storm door handle. Lester, who lived alone and who appears from photographs to be in the early stages of dementia, grabbed his handgun and went to the door. Yarl rang the doorbell, summoning the 84-year-old homeowner, Andrew Lester, from his bed. On April 13, 2023, at around 10 p.m., 16-year-old Ralph Yarl went to the wrong address in a Kansas City residential neighborhood to pick up his younger brothers. Meantime, the actual configuration of interracial violence is assiduously ignored. The shooting of a teenager in Kansas City, Missouri, has added “knocking on the door while black” and “existing while black” to the list of activities that allegedly put blacks at daily risk of their lives in white supremacist America.

Books like bury my heart at wounded knee