Charlotte's Mayor Wants You To Be Uncomfortable About Race - Mayor We are Uncomfortable

Charlotte's Mayor goes all in on race further adding to the division, adding more fuel to the fire and the building on to the entitlement culture of Black America that always blames the color of their skin for their failures and demands more from White America. 

But first Mayor Lyles:

It's Time for Charlotte to be uncomfortable about race

Growing up in South Carolina during the Civil Rights Movement, I am no stranger to racial injustice. I attended segregated schools. I was a toddler when Emmett Till was lynched. As a teen I witnessed the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Though I knew I couldn’t completely escape racism and discrimination at the time, I hoped things would be better in a more progressive city, so I set my sights on Charlotte for college. I quickly learned the battle Black America fights daily wasn’t limited to just one place. As protests against racial injustice and police brutality engulf our country, I’m reminded this ongoing fight isn’t limited to a moment in time.

The eight minutes and 46 seconds that George Floyd was pinned down by the police was not much different than the events I lived through in the 1960s. It’s why the same anger that exists in Minneapolis exists in other large cities and rural towns. Downtown and suburbia. It exists in Charlotte.

We share in the outrage and anger, because in mourning the death of George Floyd, we mourn the deaths of Keith Lamont Scott, Johnathan Ferrell, and Danquirs Franklin. We say their names. We march. We seek answers to why Black men and women continue to die at the hands of police.

In response, we call for reforms and create task forces. We do workshops and implement de-escalation tactics. Yet, we fall back into the comfortable places we’ve grown to know. We fall back into a place where black parents continue to have the ‘talk’ with their children – as I have done – on how to get out of traffic stops alive. We stop questioning why many in the Black community continue to live in segregated neighborhoods and accept low-wage jobs without healthcare or childcare. Professionally, members of the Black community become comfortable taking jobs at publicly-traded companies that lack diversity in the boardroom and in the c-suite.

We can no longer allow ourselves to fall back into those comfortable spaces. We aren’t just at a breaking point for systemic racism, but also a breaking point for the systemic comfort that we’ve grown to know.

It’s time to remain uncomfortable. We need to have the uncomfortable discussions, be uncomfortable in our approaches, and embrace the uncomfortable because that is where growth and change live.

We need more than policy and training changes and youth programs. The issue with systemic racism isn’t just a policing issue. It is education, jobs, development, planning. A systemic issue needs a systemic response.

For the corporations who call Charlotte home, we don’t just need their funding and messages of support but need the diversity in their offices and on their leadership teams. The actions of leadership must reflect those statements of solidarity, particularly in their hiring, promotion and customer service practices. We need these organizations to change the systemic practice of only recruiting in the top 10 percent of colleges and universities, which eliminates talented Black students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, state schools and community colleges.

And for our faith community, we need your support more than ever. we need to discuss your ideas and have your congregations join us in this call to action.

As mayor, I will continue to listen. I want to have the uncomfortable conversations that matter so we have a united community vision for systemic change.

We can model the change we want. We can work to eliminate systemic racism and define our future. It’s my commitment to help do that work and I ask you to join me in being uncomfortable. 

Vi Lyles is Mayor of Charlotte


Cedar's Take:

Vi Lyles is 67 and desperately trying to connect herself to the "events she lived through in 1960s". Keep in mind that she was only 12 in 1965.  

Next she'll tell you how confederate statues made her feel anxious while walking with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery Alabama.

She continues and fortifies the myth of "systemic racism" never mind that our own city council maintains a solid people of color majority, and that every top level position within our city county government is occupied by an African American.

Mayor Lyles adds her voice to the claims of systemic racism in an effort to expand the territory of entitlement. Like Al Sharpton and so many others who continue to preach the victimhood of African Americans and the shame of White Guilt. 

Yet, Vi Lyles ignores the effect of crime on our community. Explaining "the talk" as if only black parents need to tell their children to be respectful of law enforcement officers. No, she preferrs blaming the police for doing their job and supporting the call to de-fund the police. Never mind that violent crime in Charlotte is solidly an African American issue. 

In our city of 32 homicides this year 28 are Young Black Men,  of the 18 known killers 100% are Young Black Men. Last year saw a 89% increase in homicides solely due to black on black violence.

The African American community has become a culture of violence embracing gun play and criminality as a way of life, and this has nothing to do with systemic racism. 

Mayor Lyles wants us to be uncomfortable about race, well mayor we are uncomfortable about race. We are uncomfortable with the surge in homicides, the increase in property crimes, drug dealing, armed robberies and domestic violence that is a solid a problem laid squarely at the feet of Charlotte's African American Community. 

Like all liberals Vi Lyles wants to blame White America for the pain of African Americans that can only be corrected by American Liberalism. Only the democrats can save Black Lives. Never mind they elect the same democrats year in and year out with absolutely zero reforms or progress. 

To Vi Lyles you aren't Black unless you're a democrat and if you are White and have not owned up to your slave owning history then you aren't legitimate. 

Painting Black Lives Matter on Tryon Street was just a easy way to for Mayor Lyles to remind African Americans how oppressed they are how bad they have it and that the only way for things to get better is to elect liberals because only the liberals will fight the oppression and systematic racism.

Never mind that she attended Queens College (Current Tuition $35,000 Annually) which has become fully divesityifed and lives in a 1/2 millon dollar home in South Charlotte far removed from the gun fire along Beatties Ford Road.