Welcome to another episode of Civic Czicker. I'm your host, rams Is joh I go by the name q Ward, but most of the kind of.
I'm working on it, I might stick with that, I might go with something different.
Listen, man, times already change that. My entertainment PERSONA game up.
I don't know I'm coming up, but it's because of y'all.
Y'all can't see me, Lane, Lane, It's because of y'all. Uh yes, And we are back up and you one.
We'll again to talk about some of the goings on in Black America. A lot of important things happening in the news that we need to talk about. And we appreciate your audience. We appreciate your ears, and we appreciate your empathy, sympathy, support, you know, cheerleading, et cetera. So yeah, stick around. We got a lot to share with you today. Of course, we're going to talk about the verdict from
the Kim Potter trial. If you don't know, Kim Potter is the officer that was attempting to grab a taser allegedly, no we saw it, well, I guess you have to say allegedly, but she was attempting to grab a taser and instead pulled out a gun and took the life of John tay Wright, a young black man. Also, we're going to talk about, in the opposite side of things, the verdict from the Ahmad Aubrey trial, where there was perhaps a bit more satisfactory outcome. So we're going to
talk about some good and some bad today. We also got a few other things to discuss our way black history. Fact, we're going to breathe some life into the name Thomas Fuller, who was often called the Virginia Calculator, born in the slave coast of West Africa in seventeen ten. But a story you need to stick around for, trust me. But like we always do at this time, first and foremost, we like to start off with some ebony excellence. How does that resound? Yes we do, Yes, sir, so, yes
we do. Today's story comes from Black Enterprise dot Com and I will share. A black woman is now the majority owner of a new multimillion dollar film and television studio in Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports Tammy Williams has over twenty five years of experience in the film and television industry. She has written and produced a plethora of projects such as films, biographies, documentaries, entertainment, and network news.
According to her biography, Williams owned her first digital production company called Tammy Dell Film in twenty sixteen and is now the first black woman to own a one hundred and thirty five million dollar studio and post production fill that post production facility space in Atlanta, Georgia. Let's give it a one time for some black girl magic. Please for the black girl I will continue. Williams and her business partner Gary Guidry, who's an investor in CEOG Squared
Events and Black Promoters collective funded Cinema South Studios. There's a quote from him. He says, We've been patient. This has not been an overnight thing. This vision for us, and Williams has worked toward making her dream a reality for twelve years. They'll begin to break around in March for Cinema South Studios, located north of Fayette County. The studio will occupy sixty acres and intends to have eleven sound stages of back prop house, wardrobe rental facility, and
a lighting grip rental house. Production facility will include a transportation company and an office building to house theater and prost production facilities. Now, Tyler Perry is not the only game in town. Now we have a black woman and as we stated, we are big fans of black girl magic around here. So one more time, some ebony excellence going out to Tammy Williams in Atlanta, Georgia, occupying a little bit more room in the media space which we desperately, desperately need.
Keep going, miss Tammy.
Yes, indeed, all right, now let's get down to business. We haven't talked about this, so Kim Potter, did you expect?
Well?
First off, let me let me let me share a little bit about if you haven't been keeping up with the Kim Potter story, I got a little blurb from TMZ again. She was the officer convicted of or accused I guess that's the word of killing Dante Wright intending to pull out her taser and using her gun instead. Allegedly, what happened is she is the ex Minnesota cop who was pulled over Dante Wright for an expired tag and
an illegal air freshener. They attempted to arrest him when they learned he had a warrant, and he tried to flee. That's when Potter pulled out a gun and shot him. She's the one who says after she shoots, or as she's shooting, she's yelling taser, Taser, taser, and then moments later she says, holy, yes word, I just shot him. And she broke down crying, and the officer went ticks and sold her. So this is who we're talking about today now. Of course this she gets charged with I
believe manslaughter. Yeah it says manslaughter here and goes to trial. And what did you expect the outcome to be?
For those of you that follow us, I guess I'm kind of the show pessimist realist.
I call you a realist the right word.
I'm not shocked when there's no charges, and when there are charges, I'm not shocked and there's no conviction, and when there is a conviction, I'm not shocked when the sentencing is extremely weak. So my shocked absolutely not. Does it further my sense of quote unquote realism?
Yeah, like my hope dwindles with every incident with this type of result. Sure that's fair. So yeah, that's that. Well.
I I try to look at things and have a little bit of a positive spin, right, this one is very challenging for me. But what I would in theory say is, well, there is a conviction and there is a sentence, right, and that's not nothing, because there are a lot of people that would for her to have no sentence at all. These people are blindly supportive of police.
These are the people that subscribe to the notion that police have like the most dangerous job of all time, which I'm not saying it's not a dangerous job, but if you look up the numbers, delivering postmates is a more dangerous job than being a police officer. You can look those up yourself, right. So these people that have this idea that police should be revered and held to a standard that the rest of us mere mortals. You know, you know, it's it's unfair to I guess, afford police
almost infinite forgiveness. They don't even they're not even held to the same type of stand They're given the benefit of the doubt to the nth degree in every single circumstance. And then when the victim is black, they often try to criminalize the victim as much as they possibly can to further frame and further justify the black person's death right. So because there are so many people who feel that way.
It's not nothing when there is a conviction, right, this is what I would say in theory, but for this one specifically, we said it on the show. You and iq I said, I really really we took turns, but this video we both had to watch, right.
You remember that I.
Said you provided her a lot more grace, yeah than I then and then I will now, yeah, but that's that.
You know, I'm the optimist, yo, So I says, you know what, I really do think that was an accident that really honestly looks like an accident. And I'm sure now that everything has come out in the wash, a lot of people perhaps have come around to the idea that, yes, that she did not mean to take his life. She meant to taze him and it just didn't work out
that way. But as you pointed out on that episode when we first discussed this, or maybe it's the second time we discussed this, but as you pointed out on that episode, there are consequences even when there are accidents if you're just a regular person and you didn't expect there to be consequences. Because she's not a regular person, she's a police officer and therefore given the benefit of the doubt to the nth degree, and not held to the same standards as the rest of us people in
this society. Somehow they're given more grace or more leniency, as we've seen in her sentencing. Now, the reason we're talking today we haven't touched on it yet is her sentence was two years, and that is insulting by itself, because she ended the life of a young man who he was a father, he was you know, he's on his way.
And she will only serve this part sixteen months of actual incarceration that part. So she was convicted and found guilty of these charges. By the way, first and second degree manslaughter, she will do sixteen months.
So remember when I said it was insulting for two years, that makes it It's like the twisting of the knife. It's like, okay, so what was his life worth? Is that all his life was worth? You know, let's switch it around. What if the officer was black and the victim was a white woman. Oh, we may have seen such an example.
I know we have. I know we have.
But you know, I'm asking for our listeners to ponder this to understand how it feels when things like this come back, and then we have to absorb them and we have to make sense of them, and we have to figure out how to not be so paranoid. We as black men, you and are both black men, we have to figure out how to not be so paranoid in our interactions with the world. You know, I hear a lot of the times, you know, there are white folks and non black people that say, you know, black
people and Hispanic people, and where they always talk about race. Right, But here's another example of how race further defines our reality because race shapes our outcomes and ways that you may have not even conceived of, and it's normal for us. You said yourself to that you were not surprised by the sentence right now.
On the heels of the even the reduction of the sentence, because I think that was a sentence reduction, a light sentence, and then that sentence being reduced for less time. I wasn't shocked by any of it. I think there's another point here. As the judge was reading the sentence, you know, she echoed that, you know, there's a lot of it's called copaganda, right. I think this started like in the seventies where or maybe a little bit earlier no dragnet,
So maybe it was like the sixties or something. I saw this recently where.
What happens is the police sort of got in cahoots with the film industry because the film industry wanted some realism, right, so they leaned on the police to help us make these stories feel real. Give us some stories that we can tell, you know, that sort of thing, give us intimate details that will captivate and grip our viewers, right. And in exchange, the police wanted to be able to approve scripts and approve you know, visuals and that sort of thing before they made it their way to air.
And so what you have is this relationship early on that morphed into what ultimately has come to influence the way many people view the police, certainly people that don't have to interact with the police. I read a statistic the other day that seventy five percent of people have zero police interaction on it in a given year. Right now, Of that twenty five percent, how many do you think of those folks are black? Of that seventy five percent, how many do you think are non black?
Do you see that? Math is easy?
By the way, right, and so I'll continue. So when you have a lot of people whose only interaction with police is what they see on TV, and a smaller amount of people whose interactions with police is largely in real time, and the people in their environment, you know that they're oh, such and such got beat up by the cops or such and such, you know, dirty cops, or you know cops shooting at people, cops you know, abusing and bullying and victimizing or whatever it is the
police do. You have two different views of police, and so you end up with a divided America where a lot of people are really pro police.
Right.
I was talking about the judge as she read the sentence for Kim Potter, she broke down. You could hear it in her voice. That was bizarre, Yeah, And she was trying to echo that sentiment that that copaganda. The police have such a tough time and they have to make split second decisions. But listen, if I'm driving a car, right, and I have to make a split second decision and I make the wrong one and I end up crack wishing and someone loses a life, you know, they might
say reckless endangerment. They might say man, slider and man for someone to give me, you know, a sentence like this, for ending a life of a human being. He didn't get to live his full life. It was taken. He has no more days. His story ended. He's forever going to be a I believe he was twenty four years old, something like that.
That's it.
He doesn't get to see his grandchildren, doesn't have more children, he doesn't get to see his dreams come true. He doesn't have the chance over taser, taser, taser, bam, bam.
Dead, death permanent. There wouldn't have been multiple trigger pulls for a taser, folks. Just by the way, in case anybody was wondering.
But watch this.
Oh and did you know she was the person responsible for training the other police officers. Yes, I think we talked about it with the taser and a gun sit on opposite. But it's okay. It was a mistake. She didn't mean to kill the guy. You know, there's a lot of people that say all lives matter, right, and
of course they're not wrong. I think the intent behind that message, I just wish they meant it, sure, sure, and I wish the intent behind that message was you know, a little bit less adversarial, and you know whatever, I don't mind.
That you're saying it. I just wish you meant it instead of never mind.
But if you're one of those people or you know those people, those people often say all lives matter in response to people like us saying black lives matter. Right, they feel like we don't need to say that because naturally all lives matter. This is an argument that they make right. But the reason that we say black lives matter, a new reason is this story we're talking about now.
How can you tell me that in a society where manslaughter is a punishable offense right and a judge has to consider the circumstances and so forth, that the judge would cry while sentencing this woman and then take her two year sentence and reduce it further insulting while the mother stood there. Mother's white too, but the.
Son was black.
Let me cry for them, or the person who not for the mother, for the officer, but for the officer that killed the mother's son. Let me cry for her right, because man, she must be going through so much, you see.
And this is why we say black lives matter. And the size of the smile on officer Potter's face. If you guys see her in her in her prison orange with this big, lovely smile on her face. If you were if you saw that picture and you were wondering why she appeared to be so happy, she just learned she's not even doing a year and a half for killing someone. Now, far be it from us to intentionally make something sound more sinister or more intentional that it is.
We are stating facts, and of course we have the filter of feelings and emotions, you know, so we have to absorb this. But that's not something that we can really ignore. That smile is like the last you know, I get it in her world, and from her perspective, she really feels it was an accident. She really feels like, you know, she resigned from being a cop. She's like, I'm not going to do that, you know, whatever. She says,
she was really sorry. I'd imagine that's true. You know, I'm trying to be a human and see the human right. But that smile is hurtful, That judge crying is hurtful, that sentence is hurtful. And then how in the world do we grow up ourselves and raise our children in the world where black lives matter if everything tells us that they don't.
If all the evidence is to the contrary.
Right, So that's why we have to say we seem like liars listening talking to our sons.
There's a I have.
One of those huge vinyl banners in my garage and it says black Lives Matter on it, and whenever I come home into my garage, it says it right there, black like huge, right, And I see it every day, and my.
Son see it every day. Right.
And if they never hear it, and they never you know, nothing ever comes their way where they know, in fact, if the whole world tells them otherwise, when they come here to Daddy's home. I also have another sign. This says Daddy's home in the garage, but when they come here, it'll say black lives matter. And for those of you who you know, support, you know, the efforts in the plight of black and brown people and who understand that
black lives matter. Is not meant to be antagonistic. It's not meant to suggest a black lives matter more or less than anyone else. It's just meant to say, hey, you know we our lives have value, and we're entitled to some dignity, and we should not be allowed to be slaughtered in the street for no reason, or certainly before we had our day in court with impunity.
There you go.
For those of you who understand that and have not hidden behind, you know, a false into patriotism in a thin veneer of you know, humanitarianism or whatever it is. We salute you and we thank you because we recognize that a lot of those other people really just we see it. We know it's racism, and they just have a way to be racist and have it not appeared outwardly racist by saying things like, well, you know, all lives matter, we know what it really is.
Come on now, stop.
And it's not to say black people can't do that too, because there are black people that don't like black people, and there are black people that try their best to separate themselves and create some distance from their actual blackness socially, and so they will say things that are very much anti black because they feel like it gets them closer to being non black. A lot of times you'll find a lot of self hatred in those people, and that's
also sad. Sometimes they know, sometimes they don't know. But we've talked about a lot of those folks on the show too, So let me continue here. Yeah, so she's going to spend sixteen months behind bars. The remaining time will be on supervised release. I forgot about this. And on top of that, she's going to have to pay a one thousand dollars fine.
I'd rather there be no fine at all.
That hurts, right, it's insult or rather it be no fine at all, one thousand dollars.
And then again, according to the article here, the sentence is significantly less than the seven years prosecutors had suggested. Now we talked about Derek, we talked about the killer of George Floyd and his sentence. I don't want to give these killers too much in the way of recognition on this show because we try to uplift black name. We like to say their names, and we like to
get it right and that sort of thing. So the man who kneeled on the neck of George Floyd, I believe his sentence was like twenty two and a half years, right, which again a lot of people wanted more, right, because he killed that man slowly, intentionally, it was deliberate, and it was at no point did he looked like he was taking pleasure in it. You know, it's hard to do something for eight minutes that's physical unless you enjoy it to some degree, especially when we don't have to
do it. I don't exercise because it's whack. But there were a lot of people that wanted him to have a much longer sentence. And I remember saying on that day, Yes, that's what a lot of people wanted. But let's be honest. Let's be fair. Twenty two and a half years is not zero. It might not be the win that we wanted, but it's certainly not a loss because we knew how
this could have gone. He could have just walked out of there, right, And so I will say again this one, admittedly is a lot more difficult to say, but there was a conviction, and for better or worse, it is forever documented in the annals of history in this country that for this woman taking the life of this black man, the courts agreed that it was wrong for her to do that, because she could have walked away. They said
it was wrong, and they did punish her. And listen, man, I have a son who will be twenty four soon. Doesn't look too dissimilar from Dante. You know that that's something that I can feel. I was twenty four not too long ago myself. So they said it was wrong, and they did punish her. So, but that sentence for that crime is almost not punishment. Well that's a fair
statement to make. But here we are and we have to deal with it, and we I appreciate you for listening, So I guess we'll just leave it right there.
Stick around your radios.
We're coming back with more cific cipher right after this