http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/lastwords-tribute-victims-police-brutality-jvinc/

NOVEMBER 25, 2014 BY THE EDITORS 14 COMMENTS

Shirin-Banou Barghi created this series of graphics dedicated to those killed by police officers.

She pushed out a back door and ran into the darkness beneath overarching oaks. He lay on the floor near his kitchen, two bullet holes in his chest, blood pooling thick, dying. -mobile.nytimes.com
sean_bell_shirin_barghi_last_words

At one point, Guzman says, he spoke to Sean Bell and said, “S, I love you, son.” He says Bell said, “I love you too.” Then Guzman says Bell “stopped moving.” –abclocal.go.com oscar_grant_shirin_barghi_last_words

Mehserle testified that he meant to zap Grant with his Taser in an Oakland station – but instead pulled his .40 caliber handgun and blasted the man. -newyorkdailynews.com trayvon_martin_shirin_barghi_last_words

“A man was watching him,” said Rachel Jeantel, 19, who was on the phone with Martin just before he was fatally shot. “He said the man kept watching him. He kept complaining that a man was just watching him.” -cnn.com michael_brown_2-shirin-barghi

The officer demanded that the two “get the f—k on the sidewalk, Johnson says. “His exact words were get the f—k on the sidewalk.” -gawker.com kimani_gray_shirin_barghi_last_words

New York City police officers shot and killed 16-year-old Kimani Gray in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. -afreesociety.org kendrec_mcdade_shirin_barghi_last_words

They said they thought McDade was armed because … he clutched his waste band as they chased him onto a dimly lit neighborhood street. -pasadenastarnews.com

jonathan_ferrell_shirin_barghi_last_words

Jonathan never had an opportunity to reply. He had bullets in him before he could ever hit the ground. So there was not sufficient warning. No one ever told him to stop. He didn’t have time to react. -huffingtonpost.com john-crawford-2-shirin-barghi

He was at the video games playing videos and he went over there by the toy section where the toy guns were. And the next thing I know, he said ‘It’s not real,’ and the police start shooting and they said ‘Get on the ground,’ but he was already on the ground because they had shot him. And I could hear him just crying and screaming. I feel like they shot him down like he was not even human. -msnbc.com eric-garner-2-shirin-barghi

The medical examiner’s office later ruled Garner’s death a homicide, caused by the officer’s chokehold as well chest and neck compressions and prone positioning “during physical restraint by police.” -newyork.nbclocal.com amadou_diallo_shirin_barghi_last_words

Diallo was shot outside his Bronx apartment. The police officers had mistaken him for a serial rapist, who was later apprehended. -pri.org last-words

“The newly released cell phone footage undermines the statement, showing Powell approaching the cops, but not coming as close as was reported, with his hands at his side. The officers began shooting within 15 seconds of their arrival, hitting Powell with a barrage of bullets.” –http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5694224 All images used with permission. Journalist. Photographer. Filmmaker. Shirin-Banou Barghi created this project after recent events reminded her of the 2009 uprising in Iran and the violent police crackdown against opposition supporters. See the full project at Shirin-Banou Barghi’s Facebook or Shirin-Banou-Barghi’s Imgur.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/opinion/of-lions-and-men-mourning-samuel-dubose-and-cecil-the-lion.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Of Lions and Men: Mourning Samuel DuBose and Cecil the Lion

JULY 31, 2015

Roxane Gay

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LIKE many others, I was stunned by the story of the Minnesota dentist who hunted and killed a 13-year-old lion, Cecil, in Zimbabwe. It was a brutal, senseless thing.

The story has gone viral because it offers a strange alchemy of arrogant privilege, an animal’s being lured out of safety and slaughtered, and something onto which we can project outrage without having to contend with the messiness of humanity. Animals are not stained by original sin.

On Twitter, I joked, “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.”

The columnist Erma Bombeck once said, “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”

When people die in police custody or are killed by the police, there are always those who wonder what the fallen did to deserve what befell them.

He shouldn’t have been walking down that street.

She should have been more polite to that police officer.

He shouldn’t have been playing with a toy gun in a park.

We don’t consider asking such questions of a lion. We don’t speculate as to why Cecil was roaming the savanna.

In Cincinnati, there was a news conference on Wednesday to announce grand jury findings in the case of Samuel DuBose. He was an unarmed man, shot in the head on July 19 by a University of Cincinnati police officer, Ray Tensing. Before the news conference, the school shut down for the day, anticipating riots, anticipating human messiness.

The prosecutor, Joseph T. Deters, was visibly angry during the news conference. “It was a senseless, asinine shooting,” he said.

And then there was the video. Less than two minutes into speaking to him at a routine traffic stop, Officer Tensing pulls his gun on Mr. DuBose and shoots him in the head. Mr. DuBose is fatally wounded, and the car begins rolling because the man behind the steering wheel is no longer able to control it. Officer Tensing falls, gets up, and absurdly gives chase, shouting unintelligibly.

It’s a bewildering scene. When Officer Tensing catches up to the car, which has crashed, another officer has arrived. Officer Tensing says he shot afterMr. DuBose began rolling away despite the incontrovertible video evidence. This other officer writes in a report that he, too, saw this thing that did not occur.

Greetings from an alternate reality.

I did not want to watch this video but I did. I felt a compulsion. I needed to see what led to such a senseless murder. I hoped this was all a misunderstanding, an accident. I have no idea where such foolish hope comes from.

Often, when I write about race or gender, people offer apologies.

They say, I apologize for my fellow white people.

They say, I apologize for my fellow men.

I understand this desire to say, “We are not all like that,” or, “I wish the world were a better place.”

Sometimes, saying sorry is, at least, saying something. It is acknowledging wrongs that need to be addressed.

These apologies, however, also place an emotional burden on the recipient. You ask the marginalized to participate in the caretaking of your emotions. You ask them to do the emotional labor of helping you face the world as it truly is.

When we talk about injustice, the conversation always comes back to: What do we do? How do we move forward? How do we create change?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I don’t think anyone does, but there are actions that would accomplish more than offering an apology to those who cannot provide you with the absolution you seek.

When you hear, “black lives matter,” don’t instinctively respond that all lives matter, as if one statement negates the other. Instead, try to understand why people of color might be compelled to remind the world that their lives have value.

When others share their reality, don’t immediately dismiss them because their reality is dissimilar to yours, or because their reality makes you uncomfortable and forces you to see things you prefer to ignore.

Avoid creating a hierarchy of human suffering as if compassion were a finite resource. Don’t assume that if one person says, “These are the ways I am marginalized,” they are suggesting you know nothing of pain and want.

Understand that the seemingly endless list of black people who have died at the hands of law enforcement or racist zealots or other bringers of violence is not just a news peg or a matter of “identity politics.” This is the world we live in. The traumatic blur of videos, this stark imagery of how little black life matters, takes its toll. It creates a weariness I worry will never go away.

It feels impossible to talk about race or other kinds of difference. But if we don’t have difficult conversations, we will be able to reconcile neither this country’s racist past nor its racist present.

I am thinking about how and when people choose to show empathy publicly. Cecil the lion was a majestic creature and a great many people mourn his death, the brutality of it, the senselessness of it. Some people also mourn the deaths, most recently, of Sandra Bland and Samuel DuBose, but this mourning doesn’t seem to carry the same emotional tenor. A late-night television host did not cry on camera this week for human lives that have been lost. He certainly doesn’t have to. He did, however, cry for a lion and that’s worth thinking about. Human beings are majestic creatures, too. May we learn to see this majesty in all of us.

Gestures of Defiance

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

"#LastWords: A Tribute to Men Killed by Police": A project by Shirin-Banou Barghi

http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/lastwords-tribute-victims-police-brutality-jvinc/

Shirin-Banou Barghi created this series of graphics dedicated to those killed by police officers.

Saturday, August 1, 2015

"Of Lions and Men: Mourning Samuel DuBose and Cecil the Lion"

Of Lions and Men: Mourning Samuel DuBose and Cecil the Lion