In a heartfelt message posted to Facebook on Tuesday [September 27], Serena Williams decried the grim reality confronted by Black Americans while dealing with law enforcement. Williams was reflective in detailing the thoughts that ran through her mind, as she observed a police cruiser trailing behind her nephew on the road. She would go on to express having felt the need to share her tension as a means of speaking out on behalf of the voiceless, closing the message in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., when he famously said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
"In the distance, I saw a cop on the side of the road. I quickly checked to see if he was obliging by the speed limit. Than I remembered that horrible video of the woman in the car when a cop shot her boyfriend," Williams wrote, mentioning that the shooting death of Philando Castile by an officer in Minnesota flashed to memory as the 18-year-old drove her to a meeting. "All of this went through my mind in a matter of seconds. I even regretted not driving myself. I would never forgive myself if something happened to my nephew. He's so innocent. So were all 'the others.'"
Williams' response to the social climate that has developed as a result of police violence, comes in the weeks following the heinous killings of Terence Crutcher and Keith Lamont Scott in Tulsa and Charlotte, respectively Within hours of her sharing the post, another controversial shooting involving police began to circulate the web out of El Cajon, California. Williams has been an outspoken critic of injustice in the past, as was the case in 2015, when as a guest editor for WIRED magazine, she wrote: "To those of you involved in equality movements like Black Lives Matter, I say this: Keep it up. Don’t let those trolls stop you... To other people, I say: When someone’s harassing someone else, speak up!”
Source: facebook.com
