Let me see if I have this straight. Me, a white-skinned woman goes out for a jog. A white man yells, stop I want to talk to you. Me being, white-skinned woman, does not stop. White man and white son grab their guns, hop in their big pick-up truck and follow me down the road, yelling at me to stop. I do not stop. They drive around me, then stop in the middle of the effing road in front of me. The driver jumps out of the truck with a shotgun in his hands and the other man stands on the bed of the big pick-up truck with another gun in his hand. Now what am I supposed to do? Me, being white-skinned woman, thinks uh oh, both these men plan to rape me. I run around the other side of the truck and when I reach the front the driver is already in front of the truck, pointing his shotgun straight at me.
In my mind, this is life and death and I grab the shotgun and start fighting for my life. Yes, I know, the shotgun is pointed at me and the trigger is in the hands of the driver, but its the only chance I have. For all I know these 2 men will rape a dead body as fast as a live one. The truck driver pulls the trigger, I feel the bullet in my stomach — and G-d, I want to live — and keep fighting. He shoots me again. I am going down when I see the man in the bed of the truck is on the street, pointing another gun at me. I hear a third shot, did he shoot me too? The police arrive, but no ambulance, no paramedic. While the police talk things over with the white men with the guns, I lay dying on the street.
The next morning, the police tell my family that my death was all my fault. If I didn’t want to get shot, I should have surrendered to the men who were trying to rape me. My mother screams at the police, she says, “are you telling me, my daughter would be alive if she’d let those men rape her?” The police ask my Mama if she’d rather have a raped daughter or a dead one? After all, I did have a choice. I can hear Mama screaming all the way up in heaven.
If I had let the men rape me, would the police say I’d asked for it, wanted it, even begged for it.
Should we teach little all white girls, all white women and all black and brown girls, boys, men and women to follow white men’s orders?
Ahmaud Abery was murdered in broad daylight and the bigots who murdered him belong on death row.
