Recent reports brought to attention Kellon Nixon (34) who, in an interview with MSNBC, inadvertently provided some powerful and valuable insight into the Dallas shooting on an otherwise bias news station.
Nixon brought his 5-year-old son with him to the initially peaceful rally to be a part of something important; “We wanted to have our voices to support [Philando] Castile and Alton Sterling.” After what Nixon believes was a separate group arrived expressing their anger, he decided it best to take his son and leave, and it was while making his way to his car that the first shots from the sniper rang out.
“I hate that this is what actually will be remembered,” he said in his interview with MSNBC. “That the worst of people will give us a perception of our people.
Nixon recalls his thoughts during the shooting:
“You start to think it’s me against the world. And with that type of mentality, we’ll implode as a people. We’ll implode not as ethnicity as a people, but as a people, period. We’re all one race at the end of the day. If we get a ‘me against the world’ mentality ― last night I was thinking, maybe it’s not black lives matter or all lives matter, maybe it’s just my life matters. Maybe it’s just my family’s life matters. I had to recover from that spiritually.”
In regards to the challenges Nixon has faced himself in the past, he shared a story of how police officers helped him to turn his life around:
“At a point in my life, I sold drugs, and the honest truth is that the mercy that was extended to me wasn’t by other drug dealers, it wasn’t by African-American men, but it was by two Anglo-American officers that found me with drugs and they extended me mercy, and from there I was able to be a husband. I was able to be a father. I’m a pastor and a preacher now. And at the same time, when I’m in a three-piece suit, from the police I’m treated worse than when I was a thug.
“So it proves to me that everybody’s not bad,” he continued. “That everybody wearing a badge is not bad. That every African-American is not bad. But we have to change our concepts. We have to change our ideology in this country. We’re so segregated in everything. We’re segregated in our schools still. We’re segregated in our religion. We’re segregated in churches. And it destroys us.”
Nixon is concerned the shooting will further inflame tensions between police and the community, or allow people to justify prejudiced views:
“But I think that the best thing we can do is to value lives over the economy. I think that’s one of our biggest problems in America is that the economy is stronger than our moral fiber. Our desire for prosperity is so much greater than our desire to be moral, to be humane, to love, to care, that we’ll risk our children, we’ll risk the sanctity of marriage or anything just for money. Just to stay on top as a nation. What we don’t understand, I think, is that when we lose our heart, when we lose our souls, we’re really the bottom, we’re really the worst of people no matter how materially rich we are.”
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