Member-only story
My Fellow White Brothers And Sisters, Can We At Last Do The Work To End This Nightmare?
My experience of the two-tiered justice system in the 1990s convinces me it’s time we white, privileged folks abolish this “justice” system
I finally had a good, remorseful cry.
Often, in a large news story, we can understandably numb ourselves to their implications, even for several days, until something which hits home in that place of “That’s me” at last triggers a cascade of tears.
In this case, I was suffering insomnia in the wee hours on a hot, sticky night in central Japan, so I was reading my hometown newspaper about another man who said “can’t breathe” as his final words, dying in police custody on March 3rd due to hypoxia due to physical restraint.
No, it wasn’t the hometown angle. It was that, like me, Manuel Ellis was a father who had struggled with drug addiction. Like me, he was by no means perfect and was still working on this issue which impacts so many…
