THE LONG MARCH CONTINUES
Our walk toward social justice takes detour to Barclays
“I want to be watching James Harden,” a voice shouted from the crowd. “But we have to do this because Black lives still matter.”
It’s 7:11 p.m. outside Barclays Center, 29 minutes ahead of tipoff between the Nets and the Orlando Magic on Friday night, and protestors are gathering outside the arena. Why?
Earlier in the day, a jury cleared Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teen from a neighboring state, of all charges after he used an AR-15 style rifle to kill two white men and wound another at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020.
The jury delivered their message loud and clear. It reached all corners of the country, reverberating throughout all the ghettos, all the hoods, all the predominantly Black neighborhoods, even more so across all the country’s slowly but efficiently gentrifying areas.
The message, 23-year-old Nalekan Masego said outside the Nets’ arena, is as clear as it is racist: “If you stand for Black liberation, if you stand for Black justice, you are a target.”
Meanwhile, a Black man named Julius Jones was set to be executed in the state of Oklahoma on Thursday for a second-degree murder conviction both he and new evidence say he did not commit. Yet instead of being put to death, the governor called off the execution in his final hours. Jones must serve the rest of his life in prison, with no possibility of parole, regardless of what the new evidence says.
“Instead of dying today,” Masego said, “he will die slowly for the rest of his… is that a life? They executed him anyway.”
Masego’s supporters call him Pharoah. He is the first Black, non-binary, LGBTQ+ young adult nominated for Red Hook Tenant President, aka president of the projects. He and a woman who goes by “Spirit” run For Our Liberation, a community of self-proclaimed abolitionists dedicated to “centering Black liberation by uplifting and empowering people through mutual aid and education.”
Masego and Spirit organized Friday’s protest, which was almost a carbon copy of last year’s protest against the killing of George Floyd, which was almost a carbon copy of the protests against the killings of Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Philando Castille, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, et al.
Arbery was hunted and gunned down by three white men who followed him on a jog in a Georgia suburb. His case appears open-and-shut in Black eyes, but this country has a history of looking at situations like this through white-colored lenses.
Masego started planning Friday’s protest in advance. He knew the person he calls “Rottenhouse” was going to get off scot free and has the same feeling about Arbery. Video evidence doesn’t matter, protestors said, only the color of your skin.
“I felt absolutely nothing,” Pharaoh told the Daily News. “Not even disappointment because we knew this was going to happen.”
Yet the clamors outside Barclays Center were those of disbelief. “How could this happen?” “Why doesn’t anything change?”
“We need to protect our children.”
The crowd favorite: “F--k the police.”
It’s the same old song, year after year, a vicious cycle of disappointment, anguish, rage, helplessness, rinse and repeat with every reminder that not just police but your average white person can take a Black life with no consequence.
This time, though, it was different. White-on-white crime is supposed to come with consequences. But this white-on-white crime was stained with brown in the eyes of a color-blind judge and jury.
“Not only are Black people targets from birth, but anyone who is supporting the movement, that is supporting Black people, are also targets,” Pharaoh said. “That’s
something that needs to be globalized. People need to understand that when you are a white person, when you are a brown person, when you are anybody else, it does not matter if you are Black: When you push the message of equity and liberation, you are
automatically a target of this system.
“And they do not care what happens to you.”
Yet inside Barclays Center, one white supporter of Black lives urged those fighting to keep their heads high.
Nets head coach Steve Nash has been an outspoken proponent of freedom and equality for people of all backgrounds and has a photo of George Floyd as his profile picture on Twitter, still today more than a year-and-a-half after his killing.
“Clearly these situations are disappointing and it’s important to not become demoralized and for people to continue to fight for the type of justice and equality that serves all,” Nash said ahead of tipoff against the Magic. “While I think it raises a lot
of eyebrows, questions, a lot of pain, we recognize there has to be a path forward.”
What looks like a path forward, protestors said, is really a hamster wheel. The so-called forward progress always leads back to square one, that’s if it left square one at all.
“It can’t be, ‘well this is just the way it is,’” Nash continued, “and so I think the movement that we’ve experienced, one way or the other, is pushing change. And even if you can’t see that change on a daily basis or even year by year, over the course of time, without that type of attention and willpower to come together and fight for a brighter future, I think there would be no change, and it’s paramount in the seeds of change.”
No more carbon copies. No more of the same old same old. It’s time for change. The question remains: What does that change look like?
“Mutual aid is the real work,” Pharaoh said on a loudspeaker. “That’s how we start uniting our people.”
Ownership, he continued, is where the change lies, too. If the Black community can generate and retain its own source of income, it can power itself regardless of opportunities.
And then the protestors got in formation: White people on bikes on the outside, Black folks and people of color inside the rows of bikes. The bikes were a barricade, Pharaoh said, to protect against police brutality.
Those cops would have to go through white people to get to the Blacks, though this country, through the Rittenhouse verdict, proved that isn’t a problem. It may be the new norm.
On this night, unlike other nights, there was no violence, no policy brutality, no destruction of property, just a message sent. And then it was back to basketball, the flashing lights outside Barclays Center promoting upcoming events inside the arena.
Almost 17,000 people piled inside for a game the Nets played against a bad opponent without two of their superstar players. he real war, Spirit said, is a war of attention. How do you pry Black eyes from the distraction and fix them onto the problem at hand?
“That one percent don’t give a f--k about us,” Spirit said. “Your favorite celebrity don’t give a f--k about us. All we got are the people.”
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