Guest commentary: I am thankful my Chicano sons are alive

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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor

I am the father of two young Chicano males. If they approached you, certainly you could mistake them for being Mexican, yet they are as American as any blued-eyed blond hair kid that they went to high school about a decade ago. My two brown Chicano kids survived/lived through their somewhat turbulent and chaotic adolescent and teenage years in white America.  Yet I must confess, even today, that every time my cell rings late at night my heart starts racing and I get an ache in my belly. My immediate reaction and simultaneous prayer is that both my young men are OK. Not shot by the police, that is always my default, I cannot help it.

For far too many parents of color it is the one and only default we have, “I pray my sons does not get shot by the cops tonight”. Today, my sons are college graduates, highly intelligent, highly sensitive, super caring young men; the cops don’t see that, what they do see is two brown men potentially out to do them harm.  More than ever the cops will shoot to kill young men of color and ask questions later. Much like it is done in my country of Mexico, cops and thugs killing young men with impunity.

I can not remember when more Black and Brown young men were killed nationally by the police that in 2014 and the year is not over. America we are at WAR with our young men of color, a never ending war, again!  Why?  Some disingenuous sociologists, law enforcement experts, politicians, fools, racists, will contorted themselves hypocritically to misinform and  bury the truth as they simultaneously  fan the flames of intolerance, fear and hatred to create the necessary evil which is the man made chasm of the “divided electorate”; the divided and hate filled America that they so artfully have crafted and seamlessly perpetuate. Us versus them, it is nothing more than a game to them. It is life and death to our young men of color. That deadly evil that was planted in the American psyche is now being harvested through the land, again!

So we, America, have became, who can question the assertion, a nation driven by fear and hate, so we kill! The Brown Family has asked the nation for 41/2minutes of silence after the grand jury decided not to recommend further action against the cop that killed Michael Brown. We respect the request but what must follow is calamitous screams for justice throughout the land. No justice, No Peace.

This is what James Baldwin said about American racism, stupidity, mendacity, police killing and police brutality in 1960,”The white policeman…finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared for it..naturally, no one is.. and, what is possibly much more to the point is, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him…One day, to everyone’s astonishment, some one drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood conqealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud on the land demanding to know what happened. What happened is the Negroes want to be treated like (humans).

In my town of Oxnard, the city that I love, the cops have killed at least 4 Chicano youth in the past few years  and have militarized the community through the enactment of three civil ”gang” injunctions. We are a community under seize with a police force that is non-responsive and impervious to the demands of the local community to submit to a citizen review and control protocol and system of operation and management. You would think that we were asking them to perform institutional suicide. So as long as cops supervise the internal operations of abuse, misconduct, investigations and discipline of their own officers, this country will never see a cops being charge with negligence, much less murder and the killing of men of color will continue unabated and unpunished through this nation.

So even more so this year than ever before Thanksgiving means absolutely nothing to me… However, I am thankful everyday that my two Chicano sons come home another night safely, not having been shot by a cop for driving while brown. Luck has run out on too many of our young black and brown brothers in this country we call home; they are dead and the only “crime” committed on their deadly night of infamy was being black or brown in America and running into a killer cop.