Clutch magazine's Stacia L. Brown says that the 13-year-old's shooting death by an elderly neighbor is difficult to understand, but that shouldn't stop us from talking about this most recent racially charged tragedy.
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If not enough has been said about slain Milwaukee 13-year-old Darius Simmons, it's because so few know what to say anymore.
Cases like these make us feel helpless. Because even if the law prevails, the world seems dimmer.
But we need to speak Darius Simmons' name. We need to follow his case. And we need to discuss it with others. As we've seen with the Trayvon Martin case, too much of society is desperate to explain away senseless racial killing by finding fault with the victim. Too many are so hard-pressed to understand what motivated the aggressor, they're willing to excuse his actions as somehow justifiable. (In the case of John Henry Spooner, the front-running "justification" is that his home had been a repeated target of theft, that he'd complained to his Alderman and nothing had been done about it.)
Read Stacia L. Brown's entire piece at Clutch magazine.
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