Two Black, Two Blue

I just read Brian Crooks facebook post, "What it's like to be black in Naperville, IL". https://www.facebook.com/brian.crooks/posts/10103901923530909. It's long, but to the point. I recommend that you read this man's story. I don't know Brian, but I know his story (though not nearly to the degree that he spells it out- #ihavebeenblessednottoknow). The point is not his alone, though. In case one doesn't have time to read all of Crook's story, one can capture the strong sentiment in the words of fallen officer Montrell Jackson's facebook post [see the following link for his whole message--https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/18/baton-rouge-shooting-dead-policeman-wrote-emotional-facebook-post-about-trying-times]. Jackson was one of three officers who was killed in Baton Rouge. In a post prior to his untimely, unjust death at the hands of an evildoer-his death, the death of his comrades, and those of the officers in Dallas, were no more just than unlawful officers and citizens who reach well beyond the authority of the law and harm black persons). Jackson sums up the tension that both Crooks shared in his present day post, and what W. E. B. DuBois penned for Americans over one hundred years ago when he said, "One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (William Edward Burghart DuBois, 1903). Hear the tension that this fallen, black police officer spells out for us. It is simply a shorter expression of the sentiment that Crooks expressed a few days ago, and DuBois expressed in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk. Jackson says, "In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat." It is just the fact of Blackness in America for so many. Living in two worlds at the same time. I suppose if one is a police officer like Jackson who is genuinely conscious of the "black space" they occupy in America (socially speaking), then one may feel a "threeness" (American, Black, and Blue). At any rate, the more things change, the more they stay the same. It makes me wonder if we really should ever expect things to change. #istillhopepsalm4211