It's Deja Vu All Over Again

 The title is this blogpost is a well known quote from Yogi Berra. And considering that we just had another police shooting of an unarmed Black man during a traffic stop followed by protests and the postponement of a professional sports event, that saying might be an appropriate description for this latest shooting.

Last year, the unwarranted shooting of a Black man led to professional athletes entering the conversation. That started with the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin and finished with some sports teams owners getting involved in the conversation as well by lending their facilities to eager voters.

Of course their participation in the discussion was a violation of the federal celebrity law authored by Laura Ingraham, 'Shut Up and Sing.' Apparently, Ingraham wants celebrities to only perform, she doesn't want them to use their platform to speak out against social injustices. Apparently, she either doesn't want to hear their voices at all or believes that they have nothing to contribute to conversations about social justice.

And Ingraham isn't the only one who found fault with professional athletes speaking out against social injustice. Viewership of pro sports was changed by athletes entering the public forum on social justice. The biggest change was seen in some Republican men who, by their decision to reduce or stop watching certain televised sports, decided that they didn't want to hear any messages about social  injustice.

And so as the Red Sox-Twins game was postponed in the light of the most recent police shooting of an unarmed Black man, we might be tempted to quote Yogi Berra and one of his most famous lines. However, apart from the participation by professional athletes in the discussion. the unwarranted violence against Blacks by police itself was Deja Vu all over again not just this year, but last year and for many consecutive years before.  And that is a story conservatives don't want to hear. It was because of the publicity of last year's killings, that made many white people, including myself, became more aware of our nation's  perennial problem with systemic racism.

Conservatives will cherry pick statistics in vain attempts to show that there is no systemic racism in this nation against Blacks. For to admit to our nation's system racism would not only be an attack on their self-serving pride in our nation, it would be an attack on many of their heroes.

But the point is that regardless of whether the latest shooting was an accident or not, the reaction to the shooting by some sectors of the public shows the serious problem at hand. That problem is that because of nation's past atrocities against Blacks,  we might have lost the ability to discern whether each new shooting of a Black man by the police was justifiable, an accident, or criminal.