Alliance News: Mourning the Loss of Philando Castile

Together with so many across the Twin Cities, the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability’s Board and staff mourn the loss of Philando Castile, a black man who was recently shot and killed by police in Falcon Heights, MN. We offer our sincerest condolences to his family and friends, and grieve with an entire community who is struggling with his untimely death. He will continue to be deeply missed.

Unfortunately, this tragedy again underscores the reality that black men, women, and children – regardless of education, occupation, sexual orientation, age, ability, or religion – are profiled and killed by police or self-appointed keepers of the law at a disproportionate and deeply disturbing rate. We are grateful for the BlackLivesMatter movement which has shined so much light on police brutality in recent years. We see this brutality as endemic of a system which has dehumanized and exploited black people for hundreds of years. At the Alliance, we know that we cannot separate police brutality from the rest of our country’s policies and practices, including slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, the destruction of black wealth through racist housing policies,d the construction of freeways through urban areas, and the War on Drugs.

We must also be cognizant of the ways that this same system of white supremacy continually marginalizes American Indians and immigrants of color, whose communities also suffer from police brutality in addition to other dehumanizing policies. The denial, enacted in policies and practices, of our full humanity drives horrific violence and ugly racial disparities both in our region and nationwide. In that vein, we must continue to organize, agitate, create art and demand policy change so that justice may be fully realized. At the Alliance, we stand in solidarity with all of those who are doing this hard work at this time.

Here are a few stories highlighting some of the ways people have been doing and thinking about that work in the wake of this shooting:

See this compilation of art and activism featured in Pollen ‘In Memorium of Philando Castile’ >

See photos and the mural from the National Day of Art at J.J. Hill Elementary School >

Watch ‘Three Protestors Tell Their Own Story of the I-94 Shutdown’ >

See photos from some of the local protests documented by Patience Zalanga >

Read ‘Police Accountability Petition Advances’ >

Read about the Children’s Peace March >

Read ‘Am I Going to Write About Murdered Black People Forever’ by Kara Brown>

Read ‘Alton Sterling and When Black Lives Stop Mattering’ by Roxane Gay>

Read ‘Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the Fourth of July Week Massacre’ by Mel Reeves >

Read ‘We’ll Need an Economic Program to Make #BlackLivesMatter” >