Hate Crime

How to cope?

Liza Donnelly
2 min readAug 29, 2023

I was talking to a friend today about politics, and I realized that I had not processed the three hate-crime murders in Jacksonville, FL. Of course I had read about it, but it just went into my consciousness, and my brain said, “oh how horrible,” and I moved on.

That’s not right.

Not that I personally can do anything about it, except mention it here and post a drawing. I don’t know what good that does. It is a blessing that the shooter was not let into Edward Waters University, a historically Black institution, where he went right before going to the Dollar Store and killing three Black people. One can only image how many more he would have killed has he gotten into the college. Authorities say it was clear the gunman was targeting Black people.

“We have three people who are dead because they are Black,” State Senator Tracie Davis, a Jacksonville Democrat, said at a vigil on Sunday morning. “Shopping. In our community. Gunned down. Because they were Black.”

Jacksonville has a long history of racsim, which you can read about here. At a vigil for the vicitms, Govenor DeSantis was repeatedly, and loudly, booed. His administration has enacted laws that roll back diversity and inclusion policies, and “ his administration [has come] under withering criticism for rejecting the curriculum of an Advanced…

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