Tennessee police look to keep peace at Black Lives Matter protests

One of the striking, but overlooked, common features of the Alton Sterling shooting in Baton Rouge, the Philando Castile shooting in Minnesota, and the Dylan Noble shooting in Fresno is that the police showed a genuine concern for the people they had shot, once the confrontations were over. “And we have to think long term to fix that problem, or history will keep repeating itself”. Institutionalised racism in police forces and other systems and structures such as the judiciary is deepening.

There is only so much people can take without breaking. Chief MIke Cantaloupe with CPD said the event was successful and was glad “people got to say how they felt” and that nobody got hurt. The Washington Post tracked fatal police shootings and since January 1, 2015, 1,502 people have been killed by on-duty police officers - 732 were white, 381 were black. The black sniper, Micah Xavier Johnson, 25 - a former Army soldier who served in Afghanistan - was surrounded before being killed by a C4 explosives deployed by a police robot, the first such use of a robot with deadly force deployed on USA soil. Which it’s not. The whole point is that we white people should be the ones thinking more about black people - their feelings, their experience and their reality, which can be dramatically different than our own.

“If you want to deal with this on the black side, you’ve got to teach your children to be respectful to the police, and you’ve got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police”, he said.

On Friday, at least 36 USA cities are expected to participate in a so-called “Day of Rage”, meant for citizens to stand up to “corrupted authority” and police brutality, according to the global activist hacker group Anonymous Legion.

“I urge all of your viewers to go to their website and look at what they’re really about”, said Swain, who is African American. “I was 24 at the time”, Cotton said. The question is whatever is agreed at those talks how do you ensure that the police, who police themselves, adhere to it? Black Lives Matter’s aggressive and contentious tactics demonstrate as much - the raised black fists and the regurgitated revolutionary chants, the celebration of black racial pride and solidarity, and their increasingly violent demands for varying definitions of “justice”. What are they expected to do?

Racism was one of the top three issues for 34% of young black Americans, compared to 16% of Latinxs, and 14% of Asian Americans. It is clear to me that open carry and having a gun is a right primarily reserved for white people.

“This isn’t about us African Americans; it’s about everyone”, said organizer Samantha Robinson.

The Press Herald reported that 18 people were arrested. On Friday, I had to take time. It was broadcast in the United States of America rather than the UK.

Black Lives Matter isn’t an “anti-white” movement, it’s a pro-black movement. Injustice can not discriminate. BLM doesn’t see that when people counter with All Lives Matter, many just want all lives to be equal but the devastating reality of our world today seems to make them choose a side and people are trying to fight that notion.

“I believe I saved a lot more black lives than Black Lives Matter”.

But on Sunday as I spelled this out and held up my #blacklivesmatter placard at a rally I spoke at in Trafalgar Square I saw white people around nodding in agreement. Rather, these blacktivists consistently seek to provoke, antagonize, frustrate and offend the very people they claim are in need of hearing their message. The rally “had no affiliation with Black Lives Matter”.