Letter from a Reader:

Looking for Help While Black: Renisha McBride Murdered in Detroit Suburb

November 11, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

At about 2:30 in the morning of November 2, Renisha McBride was in a car accident in the mainly white suburb of Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Her cell phone had died and she went to look for help. She should have been able to find it. But when she went up to a house and knocked on the door seeking help, the owner of the house opened the door and shot her in the head with a shotgun. Renisha McBride died, at 19 years old.

The killer has not been charged with a crime. According to journalist Rania Khalek, at first Dearborn Heights police told Renisha McBride's family that her body had been dumped somewhere else. Then they said the killer thought Renisha was breaking into his house and shot her in self-defense. Then they said the killer was claiming his gun went off accidentally. And all too predictably, they started floating out "blame the victim" stories, questioning what Renisha McBride was doing between the car accident and her death, as if there might have been something she was doing that would justify her cold-blooded murder.

This isn't the only recent case of someone getting killed while seeking help, just because of the color of their skin. On September 14, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old Black man, was murdered by police when he sought help after a car accident in an upscale white community.

Bernita Spinks, Renisha McBride's aunt, told the Detroit News that the shooting was unjustified regardless of whether or not the shooter believed she was an intruder: "He shot her in the head... for what? For knocking on his door," said Spinks. She added, "You see a young black lady on your porch and you shoot? ... She went looking for help and now she's dead."

At a protest in front of the Dearborn Heights police station, organized by writer dream hampton and hip-hop artist Invincible, hampton said, "This is what happens, again and again. It's kind of textbook. We're able to break it down in the public media, when it came to Trayvon, the criminalization of the victim, of the corpse. Look, he got a C, look, he was a teenager who smoked pot, he had a sugar problem, he liked Skittles... It becomes the criminalization of the corpse."

Michigan has a "stand your ground" law that excuses and encourages deadly force against "perceived" threats—like the "stand your ground" law in Florida that became notorious around George Zimmerman's murder of Trayvon Martin. While these types of "self-defense" laws don't overtly justify racist violence, in a society like this that is so deeply stamped with the history and present reality of white supremacy, that is the unmistakable message.

What kind of society is this where a young Black woman gets in a car accident and goes looking for help, but instead of finding assistance, she is treated like a suspect, shot in the head and killed?

We must join in the fight for "Justice for Renisha McBride" and see it through until justice is won—as part of the movement for revolution.

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