The Staten Island grand jury looking into the death of Eric Garner decided Wednesday that NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo will not be indicted. The unarmed, asthmatic Garner died earlier this summer after Pantaleo put him in a chokehold. In New York City hundreds of protesters echoed the deceased 43-year-old black man’s cry of “I can’t breathe,” and celebrities across the nation chimed in.
Here are some of the reactions:
RZA took to Twitter to share a string of thoughts:
“Even Shaolin is not safe from injustice #BlackLivesMatter we need to work harder for our country and people to achieve #ABetterTomorrow. Not advertising striving! Until we all respect each others 12 jewels of life we will never achieve A better tomorrow. But repeat bad history. … On our first album the song cream described our condition & we lost friends to police brutality then. Now 20 years later same thing come on. I have a family and friends who work as policemen and women and they don’t condone brutality committed by their peers. They have children… The world get no better if we just let it be… We have to change it you and me. This is not a political issue it’s a social and even more, a spiritual. How can men with PhDs not have a eye for proper judgement of justice. I’m not saying that this generation has not eradicated racism more than the previous but the ones who hold the scepter is from previous. It’s lik sometime it’s hard for me to get out of my daily blunt mentality of my youth but in order to improve my self and my family I did. … We all should respect law and order because that’s keeps us civilized without chaos. The problem is who we are appointing to uphold our laws. … It puzzles me that the brutal behavior inflicted by the men we look to serve and protect us does not affect the hearts of their community.”
Azealia Banks unleashed a long stream of tweets, in which she discussed the problems with America’s education system and called out T.I. and Iggy Azalea. Regarding the Garner decision, she said:
