They don’t lynch black folks with ropes from trees amid huge outpourings of partying white men, women and children choked into frenzies anymore. No, “the white supremacy system/culture” just lets white people, mostly law enforcement officers, shoot black people down, strangle us or otherwise send us into the hereafter with impunity.

Just a few days ago, 31 year-old Corey Jones was gunned down by an off-duty Palm Beach Gardens police officer after 3 a.m. as Jones awaited a tow truck on I-95 for his stalled vehicle. The white officer, Nouman Raja, rolled up on Jones in an unmarked police department vehicle that displayed no blue and/or red flashing lights, dressed in a T-shirt and not displaying a badge or any other identification.

Raja could have been anybody, especially someone meaning harm, in the dark, on a lonely side road at three in the morning. Jones was a musician, a drummer coming home from a gig; he also played for his church. He also had a housing inspector day job. Jones had no arrest record and had a gun permit and a weapon he had recently purchased. That early morning, Jones died from three of six bullets fired at him from Nouman Raja’s service weapon. He died almost 100 feet from his car. Why?

We know why the killings don’t stop. Every generation of white people since the formation of the thirteen colonies have been taught to despise people of color, especially earth’s darkest humans from the continent called Africa. It is that indoctrination that justifies manifold murder of minds, bodies and spirits.

Never forget that 13 of the first 15 United States presidents were staunch advocates of, and/or direct participants in, the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade. Only John Adams and John Quincy Adams were not participants in the slave trade plantocracy. They placed no black people in bondage and railed against the practice.

Politics had to support the economic structure that brought theretofore unheard of riches to the new so-called democracy later named America, a nation forever burdened with the unrighteousness of its past; indeed, its very formation. The greater sin is lived in the lives of those who want America to forget slavery and its aftermath yet blame those African Americans for their plight while spewing hatred for generational descendents of slavery’s survival.

To my mind, it is also ungodly for the oppressed to not have faith and the use of will to emerge as a frail flower does through a rock. Nature teaches us that will is the strongest element of survival and growth. Will is unfettered determination.

It is most unfortunate that subjugated people listen to those who propagate dependence on the Lord – GOD – wherefrom independence through free will is given with each proceeding breath taken as we grow from birth. We have this great gift until death and have the audacity to squander it with ineptitude and sloth?

So as lost souls we try to blot out our misery with drugs, liquor and licentious behavior while our youth roam the streets as feral, saturated with deadly self-hate, seeing other blacks as mirror images. Seething with self-destruction, they kill, kill anyone near – get a gun and just shoot and shoot anybody in the mirror. Some of slavery’s great impacts are black nihilism and self-destruction: killing of the will.

Yes, we know better than others do, why the killings don’t stop, because we are the ones being killed! When black people kill us we have no name for it. When white people kill us we habitually call it racism which is merely a notion,  not a reality. White nationalism is the reality, the motivation for bringing all manner of harm upon black people, ostensibly for the survival of white people.

But be very careful black America, white folks are armed to the teeth. They are expecting to annihilate black people in what they call “a race war.” White people, including their children, spend time on weekends at shooting ranges and develop competence with handguns, rifles and machine guns. Corey Jones had a gun permit and a new weapon, but, obviously, did not take time to develop competency in its use before carrying it. So he ran, and he died.

Yeah, we know all the reasons why the killings don’t stop. Yep.         

Al Calloway is a longtime journalist who began his career with the Atlanta Inquirer during the early 1960s civil rights struggle. He may be reached at Al_Calloway@verizon.net.