Yet another unarmed young man of color hunted and shot down, yet another attempt to cover it up, yet another attempt to silence our voice Ahmaud Arbury was only 24 years old when his life was ended for what appears to be the unspeakable crime of jogging while black.

For four hundred and one years you have been trying to silence our voice. You stripped us of our culture and religion, shackled us in the chains of bondage, rode masked in the night, as the cowards you truly are, burning crosses to intimidate us, chased us down like animals and lynched us before proudly displaying our lifeless bodies as a sort of trophy, denied us access to the right to vote, created laws that allowed you to legally discriminate against us and when we demanded we be treated as equals you turned the dogs loose and the hoses on us, you disproportionately incarcerate us and through a system of inherent racism put in place a series of social and economic barriers designed specifically to hold us down. Today when we dare to call you out on your obvious disregard for the concept this country was supposedly founded on that all men are created equal you call us unpatriotic. Unpatriotic? How could we be unpatriotic when this country’s wealth and very freedom was achieved on the blood, sweat and tears of our ancestors just as much if not more than any other group, for we have fought and gave our lives in every war this country has been a part of only to return home to a country that told us to get in the back of the bus nigger. You have fostered the myth that the color of your skin makes you superior and the color of our skin makes us someone to be feared.

Yet four hundred and one years later you have failed and failed spectacularly because our voice has not been silenced, it has endured and it is getting stronger each day, gaining allies of all races, nationalities and gender. Growing a coalition of the righteous who reject your bigotry and racism Even you cannot deny our enduring contributions to the arts and sciences, our advancements in the business world and the political arena, maybe that is what you really fear. So listen and hear each day our voice as we say louder and louder you did not, you could not, and you never will silence us for we are African American and we are extraordinary.