A video of Keiajah “KJ” Brooks, a Kansas-based activist, has gone viral on social media after she was filmed at a monthly meeting on Tuesday chastising the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners for their alleged hypocrisy and failure to address police use of excessive force against Black people.
Brooks, who was in the company of other local activists, stormed the meeting to demand the resignation of Kansas City police Chief Rick Smith, Revolt reports. Though the meeting had to be ended abruptly as a result, Brooks had the chance to take to the podium to address the board members, individually calling some of them out.
The video, which she initially shared on her Instagram page, has garnered almost two million views. It has also been viewed over six million times on Twitter, with many users commending her for her bravery and direct approach.
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“Fair warning, I’m not nice and I don’t seek to be respectable,” she started. “I’m not asking y’all for anything ’cause y’all can’t and won’t be both my savior and my oppressor. I don’t want reform. I want to turn this building into luxury low-cost housing. These would make some really nice apartments.”
She added: “Firstly, stop using Black children as photo opportunities ‘cause they’re cute now, but in 10 years, they’re Black male suspects in red shirts and khaki shorts. Eating cookies and drinking milk with children does not absolve you of your complicity in their oppression and denigration, Rick Smith. Because Kansas City will spend more on police than education, then try to encourage children to feast with their oppressors. Y’all are really weird.”
Brooks also registered her displeasure with people who are against the current protests against police brutality, calling it “asinine.”
“It’s asinine to be called radical or home-grown terrorists for not wanting government employees to kill citizens in any instance. So I’m not here begging anything of soulless white folks and self-preserving Black folks,” she said. “You get one life, and you all in this room have chosen profits over people and that’s pathetic. So I’m going to spend the next two minutes reading y’all for filth, something I’m sure nobody has ever done.”
She then went ahead to openly condemn some of the board members, including a former FBI agent she said “exudes white privilege and is the epitome of mediocrity, and who loves Trump so much that he hired his former attorney general at his firm.”
She also referred to another as a “rich”, “white”, “disconnected” and “out of touch person with nothing but pure apathy seeping through the veins” of his “paper-colored skin.”
Addressing Smith, she said the police chief has “blood on his hands”, adding: “While these idiots hold you on a pedestal, God does not honor injustice and murder.”
Brooks concluded her speech with a bible verse, saying: “Anyways, I’ll leave you soulless, profit-driven, avaricious, greedy, God-forsaken humans including anyone who works in this building with one bible verse. From the bible, detailing the life of Jesus, Jesus Christ – who was another unarmed Black man murdered by authorities in the book you hell-bound people claim to love so much.”
Quoting Mark 8:36, she read: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”
