On Stephon Clark’s anti-blackness

Black Twitter is once again aflutter today. It seems they found some tweets from Stephon Clark that he made before he was murdered by the police last week in his grandmother’s backyard in Cali.

Dude did not like black women. And he was not shy about expressing it publicly.  In fact, Mr. Clark, or @zoewoodz on Twitter, had quite a few “unenlightened” ideas about black women, colorism and race.

The tweets add context to the photo that the Shaun Kings of the media world have been spreading showing him as a handsome smiling man with his what-appears-to-be Latina girlfriend and their two young sons.

So now angry Twitter users are saying don’t support the protests over this black man’s murder at the hands of white police officers. He didn’t love or support black women so why should black women support him?

Many of us have been calling out black men for a while now, asking where they are in defense of black women. Where is the collective black male outrage over the R Kellys and Cosbys of the world? Why are not black men standing up and saying you don’t treat our women like that? The silence is deafening. And when they do talk, we get the anti-black women ho-tep tribe: Tariq Elite, Umar Johnson, Boyce Watkins, Tommy Sotomayor and Jesse Lee Patterson.

So yes, not wanting to support one more anti-black woman black man is understandable.

But this protest is not in support of Stephon Clark. It is bigger than this one individual. The protests are about government sanctioned murders of black men. Is it possible for us to separate the two?

We can agree that Stephon Clark’s anti-black women words are sad. That he is not a hero. Can we put the sting of his words aside and still stand up to the world to say stop killing us? Do all black people that we protest over have to be angels? 

It will be up to each of us as individuals to decide our own responses and actions to this issue. I choose not to protect or defend anyone that will not protect or defend me. But Stephon Clark was not killed because he had questionable viewpoints, that brother was shot 20 times because he was black.