Are Kamala Harris and Barack Obama Worth Celebrating In a Country where Its Black Citizens Are Routinely Slaughtered?

Adebayo Adeniran
3 min readSep 25, 2024

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Sonya Massey.

Marcellus Williams.

Sandra Bland.

George Floyd.

George Stinney.

Emmett Till.

Philando Castille.

Fred Hampton.

Martin Luther King.

Medgar Evers.

The four little girls from Alabama: Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Rosamond Robertson.

And you can fill several books over, if you published the names of every Black man, woman, boy and girl, who have been slaughtered by individuals acting in the interests of the state in the last few centuries.

For vast numbers of non-Black and some Black folks too, there is the tendency to want to dismiss these state sanctioned murders as outliers; as not representative of the reality of African-Americans in America.

They will point to numbers of Black faces in congress and senate as progress; they will say that Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are proof of a country, which isn’t irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

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Adebayo Adeniran

A lifelong bibliophile, who seeks to unleash his energy on as many subjects as possible