Dear Gossips,
A GoFundMe page for the family of Daunte Wright has been set up to help his family with funeral arrangements and to help his girlfriend and their baby. If you are able to make a donation, or if you’d like to leave a comment, please see below:
Here is the verified GoFundMe to support the family of Daunte Wright—the 20-year-old father who was shot & killed by police during a traffic stop in Minnesota. https://t.co/pY1Ipt9zBK
— GoFundMe (@gofundme) April 12, 2021
Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a police officer after a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, not far from where the Derek Chauvin trial is taking place. It has been a time of relentless trauma and retraumatisation for the Black community still coping with the deaths of Philando Castile and George Floyd and so many others. The cop who pulled the trigger thought she was using a taser but had fired her gun instead. To characterise this as an “accident” however is to be willfully ignorant of the circumstances – the history – that resulted in Daunte’s death. And if you need a primer on that history, it’s worth watching, again, Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th on Netflix about how policing is an extension and a function of white supremacy.
Daunte Wright was killed in the Twin Cities for the same reason that George Floyd was killed in the Twin Cities: because the first language of police and the organizing principle of policing is violence, and because white supremacy is a structuring element of the whole system.
— Simon Balto (@SimonBalto) April 12, 2021
But over and over again, disappointingly, there are those who will ask the wrong questions, anything to avoid the truth of it. Those questions are a distraction from the real issue: systemic racism. Here’s a question to focus on instead – there are two tweets below:
If your response to the death of a 20 year-old Black man, who was pulled over by police for an air freshener violation, is “he should have complied,†you don’t understand the fear that Daunte was likely feeling in his encounter with police 10 miles from the Derek Chauvin trial.
— Be A King (@BerniceKing) April 12, 2021
Here’s one more:
— Be A King (@BerniceKing) April 12, 2021
These are the questions and ideas, the conversations those of us who aren’t Black and Indigenous can share and have with our own families, our communities, our networks to be part of the change. Netflix made 13th available on YouTube so that those who don’t have a Netflix account can watch. Here is a link to the full documentary. The trailer is below:
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
