The influential online collective known as Black Twitter has found a new cause célèbre to rally around.
Every other week the hashtag activists sounds the call to battle for what they believe is an injustice perpetrated against people of color by cops or the system. Usually the victims are minorities who wind up dead while in police custody.
In a few cases the protests are justified, such as in the case of Walter Scott who was shot in the back while fleeing from a North Charleston police officer.
In most cases, Black Twitter acts out of emotion rather than facts or reason.
As a result, some cities never recover from the economical impact of civil unrest and violence spurred on by their hashtag activism.
Take Black Twitter’s latest cause célèbre. Her name is Sandra Bland, and she committed suicide in a Texas jail cell after speaking with a bondsman hoping to post bail on Monday.
Bondsman Joe Booker told the Daily Beast blog he spoke with Bland on Thursday. He even offered to call her mother for her.
It would cost Bland’s family $500 to bail her out of jail, Captain Brian Cantrell of the Waller County Sheriff’s Office told the Daily Beast blog.
According to the Beast, Bland was pulled over by highway patrol for changing lanes without signaling on Thursday. for whatever reason, she began struggling with the officers and resisting arrest.
A bystander recorded video of her saying, “I can’t even fucking feel my arms,” and calling the officers “motherf*uckers” several times.
“You just slammed my head into the ground, do you not even care about that? I can’t even hear!” she said. One of the 2 officers told the witness, “You need to leave.”
Bland addressed the witness who was recording, “Thank you for recording! Thank you! For a traffic signal, slammed me into the ground and everything!”
Now celebrities have taken up the cause, retweeting the #SandraBland hashtags to their millions of followers.
In none of their tweets do they mention that Bland suffered from depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I gotta be honest with you guys,” Bland told her friends in a Facebook video in March, “I’ve been dealing with something that some of you all may be dealing with now. It’s a little bit of depression as well as PTSD.”
Bland said she asked God to block “that depressing moment in my mind.”
And she shared these facts: “Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are things that affect everyone—black, white, it does not matter.”
At 7 a.m. Monday, Bland asked to make a phone call from her jail cell. Two hours later, a jail worker discovered her dead in her cell.
The coroner ruled her cause of death as suicide by asphyxiation.
Her family insists she would never kill herself.
But suicide is a symptom of depression. 400,000 people attempt suicide in the U.S. annually. Suicide is more prevalent than HIV, diabetes, and cancer combined.
But why bother with facts when they are inconvenient to Black Tiwtter’s causes?
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