The difference between being a patriot and being dead.

White guy in public with a real gun? Open-carry patriot. Black guy in public with a toy gun? A dead man. https://t.co/mc8kJHVciM
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) August 7, 2014

For those of you who aren’t local to me, yes, that happened in the same Beavercreek, Ohio, which got featured with this lead paragraph last year:

A lily-white Ohio suburb is doing everything it can, including risking millions in federal highway funding, to keep mostly minority bus-riders from a nearby city from entering their community.

I still sometimes hear “those people” used to refer to minorities poor you know, THOSE people in this area.

I was recently told it wasn’t polite or right to call out people being racist like that in public. That it wasn’t needed any more.

I wish it wasn’t needed any more.

‘Post-racial’ will be when we hear ‘Cops shot an unarmed kid today,’ and we aren’t instantly, unerringly certain that the victim was Black.
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) August 10, 2014