Aiyana Jones Not Even Safe In Her Dreams

By: Saida Grundy

Little Black girls go to sleep to dream, not to die. Radiant flashes of whimsical light should have lit the vivid imagination of a slumbering 7-year-old Detroit girl. Instead, a flash-bang bomb -- the handheld stun grenade most commonly used in active combat by the United States military -- exploded blinding light into her room, and from the accounts of her father and the family's attorney, gravely burned her before she was fatally shot in the neck by the Detroit police officers raiding her home.

This is what it means to go to sleep when you're Aiyana Stanley Jones, and Black, and innocent, and your bedroom is a battleground in the so-called "War-on-Crime" in one of America's poorest cities. After all, the police who raided Aiyana's home were on the hunt for a murder suspect wanted for the shooting of a 17-year-oldDetroit boy.

In this business-as-usual state of extreme police militarism, dangerous Black suspects are somehow more dangerous than other dangerous suspects. And innocent Black citizens are somehow less innocent than other innocent citizens. Never mind the yet-to-be confirmed details of the incident report that the police were at the wrong apartment in a multi-family building. Never mind that no one in Aiyana's household has been conclusively linked with the wanted suspect, because when the War-on-Crime in America becomes a war on the Black and Brown urban poor, it's a war on you. What does it care that you're only seven?


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