MANSFIELD: The Ray Tensing Defense Fund

Tensing

While no defense fund has yet been set up to make the $1 million bail and pay attorney fees for 25-year-old Ray Tensing, the recently fired University of Cincinnati cop who stands accused of killing 43-year-old Samuel DuBose during a routine traffic stop, it probably won’t be long before one is. [Update: Tensing paid — or someone paid for him — the $1 million bail the day after he was arraigned with apparent ease.]

In spite of the fact that Tensing’s body camera clearly shows that he (and two other police officers who claimed to have witnessed the incident) lied when making a claim that the cop was being dragged by DuBose’s vehicle and therefore had to shoot to protect himself, cop supporters will no doubt rally to his side.

Their first line of defense will be that DuBose shouldn’t have been on the road since he didn’t have a front license plate on his vehicle, which obviously is a capital offense punishable by death here in Ohio. Supporters’ next line of defense will be that DuBose caused his own death by not obeying Tensing when he was ordered out of the vehicle, and instead attempted to close the door, again, a capital offense in the minds of many. And lastly, although it will go unsaid, many supporters of how policing is currently carried out in America feel that a black man simply must always immediately submit to the orders of a white man, especially if the white man is armed.

The killing of Samuel Dubose serves as an illustration — a metaphor, a cipher — of the power and dominance one race is seeking to maintain over another. Weighed down by and fraught with our ugly, racist history of blacks having to be subservient to whites, the protectors of the police status quo are not simply going to roll over and play dead now that the media is focusing attention on police brutality.

The ever-formulating plan on the part of supporters of white dominance in this country is to simply batten the hatches, circle the wagons and ride out the current storm of criticism. And like all good soldiers, they are going to rally to support their comrade in arms by not allowing Ray Tensing to remain in jail one moment longer than he has to, and to assist him in mounting a vigorous defense against any and all charges. And their reasoning and logic is straightforward and simple: “We have to protect our men in blue, because they protect us.”

This recent spate of police killings of unarmed black men by white cops is merely the point of the spear of a much larger cultural/racial conflict that’s seething just under the surface in America.

2040, the year in which “others” will outnumber whites in America, looms large in the minds of those who have had their way in this country since the founding of the Republic. These shifting demographics, coupled with world events such as the economic rise of China, India and Brazil, are what caused 59-year-old John Houser to recently shoot 11 people (killing two women) in Lafayette, LA movie theater before turing the gun on himself.

For those of us who avoid right-wing Internet sites, we need to comprehend there is another America out there: a seething, violent underworld full of swastikas, Confederate Flags and hatred. And to them Ray Tensing is not a disgraced cop, but a true blue hero.

Look for the fundraising to begin any day now.

mansfield250 From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

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One Response to “MANSFIELD: The Ray Tensing Defense Fund”

  1. Michael

    After reading this I am very sad. I’m a republican born and raised from Miami, Florida because of my family’s history. I don’t always agree with some of the stuff that democrats do, but I don’t go around calling them racist bigots like you just said in the last paragraph. After watching the video of Ray Tensing, it is completely obvious that he murdered him and deserves at the very least life in prison, and he will probably get it. So contrary to popular opinion, he is a sung hero of the republicans, he is a murderer alike in all our eyes. Next time, speak for yourself and not for others.

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