Image Source: OWN
On August 5th, 2014, 22-year old John Crawford III was shot to death by Beavercreek police officer Sean Williams. His crime was walking around a Walmart store near Dayton, Ohio, with a toy BB gun he had hoped to purchase. In spite of the unprovoked shooting, which was caught on tape, and Ohio being an open-carry state, his killer was not indicted for his death.
On November 22 2014, 12 year-old Tamir Rice, was also shot to death by Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback for “brandishing” a toy gun. His murder, which was also caught on camera, happened within a mere two seconds after the police officers arrived on the scene. Although Rice would not be laid to rest in the six months after his death and his mother had to moved into a homeless shelter because she couldn’t afford both housing and the cost associated with the two criminal and civil investigations into his death, his killers too have yet to be brought to justice.
After a month-long trial, a judge found Cleveland officer Michael Brelo not guilty Saturday of two counts of felony voluntary manslaughter in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. According to published reports, Russell and Williams were killed on Nov. 29, 2012, after leading 62 police vehicles on a chase across the city in a Chevrolet Malibu. When the pair finally surrendered, more than a dozen police officers pumped more than 137 rounds into the vehicle for reasons unknown. This included Officer Brelo, who climbed onto the hood of the Malibu and shot 15 rounds into the windshield. Despite the sheer overkill, Cuyahoga County Commons Pleas Judge John P. O’Donnell said in his ruling, “The state did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant Michael Brelo knowingly caused the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, because the essential element of causation was not proved for both counts.”
And earlier this week, the Justice Department reached a settlement with the city of Cleveland, that would require its police force to “reform their behavior,” including barring them from using retaliatory violence and requiring it to invest in “training in tactics for de-escalation.” According to The Atlantic, the settlement comes six months after an investigation into Cleveland PD, which found that “there is reasonable cause to believe that CDP engages in a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
And yet, Iyanla Vanzant, and all of her healing magical powers and roots, is nowhere to be found.
She will be in Baltimore though.
According to The Root, the mud cloth and knee-high, kitten heel, boot-wearing Yoruba goddess will be one of several “spiritual leaders” heading up a “healing over Baltimore” in response to the recent riots after the police killing of Freddie Gray. The event is in partnership with famed Baltimore Pastor Jamal “There Some Hoes In this House” Bryant, who last year drew the ire of the entire Black Internet for his passionate sermon entitled “These Hoes Ain’t Loyal.” And Jesus wept…
While a representative from the OWN network told The Root that Vanzant’s appearance will not be part of her popular talk series on OWN, where she pretends to fix people’s lives but really she is just meddling for ratings, Bryant tells the Baltimore Sun that she will be taping three sessions at Bryant’s West Baltimore’s Empowerment Temple Church. And that Vanzant volunteered to host the three-day event, which will be divided by gender before a community-wide “healing.” Moreover, he tells the paper that the overall goal of the event “will be a sort of group therapy for people to discuss economic oppression and violence, among other issues.”
I don’t know about healing, but I definitely foresee lots of cutting people off mid-emotional sentence and hugging, a la Oprah Winfrey in The Women of Brewster’s Place, happening during this group therapy session.
I also foresee Vanzant’s planned visit being reminiscent of her previous televised healing she did in Ferguson. There, she sat down with townsfolk and yelled at them about how “we” need to “stand down and hold the peace” for 14 days while the police conduct their investigation into themselves. As reported by the Washington Post, she also told Ferguson: “We need to do better. We need to be better and understand why this keeps happening over and over and over. It’s clear we need another way to express our hurt and suffering.” And in the most egregious moment of the program, she made Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson and Mike Brown’s uncle hold hands across a table to “resolve the larger problems of the town.”
In spite of all of her conjuring in Ferguson, Mike Brown’s killer was found not guilty. So what exactly does she plan to “heal” in Baltimore?
In addition to going in on the community, by gender, about how we need to fix ourselves, will she also use her mystic powers on Baltimore law enforcement agency, which has paid out over $5 million to victims of police brutality in a four-year period? Or will she get on her magical broom and shoot over to Wells Fargo where its redlining and predatory lending of black communities resulted in hundreds of city residents receiving “thousands of dollars each under a landmark $175 million settlement between the U.S. Department of Justice and Wells Fargo over accusations of discriminatory lending practices.” Or will she use her enchanted pot to mix up some jobs for the 37 percent of young Black men who remain unemployed in the city?
Or will she just blame the community, like so many others do when they want to bury their heads in the sand to the brutality, as well as the socioeconomic structural conditions, which ensure the dissolution of the same families that the Black upper privileged class likes to tout as the solution to all of our problems?
Vanzant is not to blame for the riots. But I know victim-blaming and white washing over the poo-poo covered elephant in the room when I smell it. As a former community organizer in Philadelphia, who had her boots on the ground everyday, there was no shortage of preachers, activists and “healers” who liked to come out and give big grandiose speeches and otherwise make spectacles of themselves (and us) when a community issue caught the attention of the media, but were absent from the struggle when the real work of fixing things began. Sorry to say (no I’m not), but Vanzant and all of her remedial mumbo-jumbo is no different.
And it should come as no surprise that she, and all the other spiritual gurus who are coming out of the woodwork now to offer their salvation (just like they did in Ferguson), weren’t too worried about handing out one-sided, half-assed healing over Baltimore until the Black, brown and poor got tired of being disenfranchised, maligned, ignored and murdered and started burning sh!t down. No, this is not about healing anything, but rather gratuitous self-promotion at the expense of the poor and the Black bodies. And I’m sorry if this all seems harsh to some folks, but it is high-time we start calling it what it is. For the sake of the people.
If Vanzant is truly here for the healing, she should start handing out her spells, cowry shells and free hugs to the politicians, the police and the black leaders who have meekly sold out the next generation for a few opportunistic scrapes off the table of oppression. And tell them to do better fixing the institutionalized violence against us. Or better yet, she should go someplace which is in desperate need of love, heal and got-damn attention. Like Ohio…
