Guilty! 263 Years

Rarely do I write two posts in one day.

Tonight is an excpetion.

I was going to retire for the night, sad about Joshua Williams getting eight years for the December Quik-Trip fire in Berkely. I was thinking about the injustice of in while the murderer of Michael Brown, Jr. is still free.

The two things are connected.

Daniel Holtzclaw, an Officer in Oklahoma, used his badge and place of privilege to brutally rape and sodomize twelve black women and a black teenager. The black girl, he raped her on her front porch, he also raped a black woman in her hospital bed.

Mainstream media was intentionally quiet about this case.

See, to them, black women don't matter, we are the mules of the world, the ones who deserve whatever disparate treatment they think they can unleash on us.

We were raped by them during the period of enslavement from 1919-1865.  We were raped by them during the period of Jim Crow from 1865-1965. We were raped by them in the Civil Rights Era from 1965-2015. In all those years, a white man was not put on trial and found guilty for raping a black woman. The case of Recy Taylor comes to mind. The cases recounted in The Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance ...by Danielle L. McGuire.

Tonight, I logged back on to just check in and see if a verdict had been rendered. From Facebook to Twitter, the posts were lighting up on my screen. Guilty! Today is that monster's 29th birthday. He will have the rest of his birthdays to spend in prison and think about what he did. He weeped, not for what he did, but because he didn't think they would find him guilty.

Black women, black girls, have never mattered, our womanhood and sexuality never mattered.

Tonight, it did.

These women were counted as the least of these, throwaways, people that wouldn't matter.

They stood up, they showed courage and demanded their day in court.

One bright light of the holiday season came early for them, the all white jury that filled so many of us with worry, did the right thing. They found a police officer in these United States guilty for the most depraved and brutal rape of black woman.

Tonight, this mother, daughter, sister, cousin, niece, and granddaughter of black women will rest.

I am a woman.