New Yorker: Remembering Sandra Bland's Death in the Place I Call Home

[teach1st]

Remembering Sandra Bland's Death in the Place I Call Home
By Karen Good Marable, 7/13/16

After watching the video of Bland’s arrest, Mama Marable and I were quiet. Before long, I heard my daughter through the monitor calling “Mama-ma-ma-ma-ma.” I turned off the television and went to pick up the baby. While my mother-in-law warmed up leftovers of baked chicken, cabbage, and Rice-A-Roni, I asked her an impossible question: “What do I do?”

She knew without asking what I was talking about: What do I do to keep my black child safe? Mama Marable has three children whom she and her husband, who was a chief master sergeant in the Air Force, brought up all over the world. She didn’t answer immediately, and when she did her tone was resigned. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess … tell her to pick her battles.”

I knew what she meant. She was speaking as a seventy-year-old woman from Quitman, Georgia, who came up picking cotton and tobacco and now owned all the farmland around her. She was advising her granddaughter not to engage. Just get home.

...

The question I am really asking is: What do you do when the battle picks you?

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[tblue37]

1. I wish more people in prominent positions and in the MSM would

say her name and say it over and over again, loudly, clearly forcefully.

Everything that happened to her is like a hologram, in which every part, no matter how small, contains within it every aspect of the whole.

[Rhiannon12866]

2. K&R. Wow. That was very well written and heart wrenching.

I haven't understood why there wasn't more outrage over this inexplicable death. What really happened? Makes no sense. And what happened to her could have happened to any of us, changing lanes to get out of the way of a police cruiser. She deserves justice, they all do.

Thanks so much for posting. We all need to read this...