Another black man killed? Follow the usual script.

This article is spot on. We’ve seen it time and time again, from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to the next victim. As soon as someone kills a black man, the police and media start the character assassination – he’s violent, on drugs, a thief - to make the death seem not only justified, but desirable. It’s a horrible thing to do to a victim, his family and entire communities, tarnishing a life cut tragically short, but it happens all the time in America.

The niggerization of Michael Brown has begun in earnest. The police and the Right-wing media have decided that like all other black people who have been killed by the police and white (identified) vigilantes, Brown is guilty of causing his own execution-style murder.

Writing about the behavior of the police department in Ferguson, Missouri and their efforts to derail, obfuscate, lie, and dissemble about the murder of Michael Brown is an experience akin to Bill Murray's in the movie Groundhog Day. It is a cultural script that plays out repeatedly in the United States--the events of which are only a surprise to the naive, willfully ignorant, dishonest, and/or stupid.…Black people who have had violence visited upon them by the white racial state and its agents are forced into a type of bizarro world. Like women who are the victims of sexual assault, black victims are forced to defend their right to exist; rapine logic as applied to women is a neat analogy for white racial logic as it applies to black victims of white police (and other) abuse. In this framework, Michael Brown, Renisha McBride, and Trayvon Martin were somehow asking to be killed.

So long as this practice continues in America, we will not have justice. We will not have peace. We will continue to victimize those who are already victims. And to millions of Americans it won’t matter at all, because of the color of the victim’s skin.

This must change.