A 150 pound African American high school science teacher in Brooklyn suffers a heart attack and requires open heart surgery because of police brutality after (dare I say it?) driving while black:
When the violent encounter was over, Lester Jacob, 50, suffered a heart attack and was left on his own in the street by cops, who accused him of “acting.”
In July he underwent open-heart surgery. […]
Jacob, an earth science teacher at James Madison High School in Midwood, heard a siren, looked in his rear-view mirror and dutifully pulled over for the radio car behind him.
He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Two officers rushed up to Jacob’s vehicle and pointed their guns at his head, according to a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Cursing at him, they ordered Jacobs out of the car and roughly cuffed him.
“One officer crushed his knee into Mr. Jacob’s back,” the complaint states. “They then repeatedly slammed his head onto the car and then pressed his head against the car for some time.”
Additional officers arrived on the scene with a witness to the earlier accident. The witness told them Jacob was the wrong guy.
Jacob told the cops he was experiencing chest pains and began coughing uncontrollably.
A female cop said, “Nice acting,” according to Jacob, and then drove off. Jacob said he struggled to drive home, stopping to vomit on the side of the road.
His wife rushed him to the hospital, where doctors determined he had suffered a heart attack.
This wasn’t Jena, La. people, the new symbol and standard bearer of white racism in our society. This happened in that bastion of do-gooder liberals and political correctness, New York City. The place Red State America loves to disparage for its “multiculturism” and immorality. Except, many parts of America, even the big urban centers where racism is officially supposed to have vanished aren’t that different from small towns in the Deep South, now are they?
Ask yourself this question? Would Mr. Lester been treated this way and left to potentially die in the street if he was a white school teacher driving an Infiniti? Indeed, would he have been treated this way if this had happened in Jena? Would the law enforcement officers of Jena have ignored his statements that he was having chest pains? I wonder.
The Jena incident captured the media’s attention recently because of the perseverance and coordinated efforts of the black blogosphere to bring it to our (i.e., White America’s) attention, and because of the massive protest march and rally that was held there last month to protest the unequal treatment received by the Jena 6 defendants. Yet, this type of everyday, commonplace racism happens all across the country. It’s happening in your city and mine, and in a thousand other towns and cities, big and small, North, South, East and West, even as I type these words. It’s happening to Blacks, Latinos, Gays, Asians, Native Americans, or anyone else who is perceived as different, as “not like us.”
The march in Jena and the media attention it garnered was a nice first step toward making civil rights a major issue again in our society, but that’s all it was. And we will rightly be seen as fools and hypocrites if we ignore the demons in our own communities while decrying the racist attitudes of small town whites in the South. Because racism, bigotry, prejudice, is a problem for all Americans. Liberty and Justice for All, is a nice slogan, but it doesn’t mean much if we don’t match those words with our actions. And the first place we can start is protesting the violations of anyone’s civil rights, especially those that happen in our own backyards.
