I’m Numb to it. (The Public Execution of Black Men)
(WARNING: This is a heavy post and a lament.)
Today I realized I’ve seen black men being killed my whole life.
Left: Rodney (Snoop Dogg), Right: Jody(Tyrese Gibson) Directed by: John Singleton (2001)
We saw “Baby Boy” in theaters when I was a 4-year-old. My parents didn’t think I’d pick up on it or even pay attention.
But I did, and my memories were vivid.
I had a bag of Burger King crown-shaped nuggets and ranch dressing my mother had snuck in. They sat in my lap while Tyrese shot Snoop Dogg in the legs before Omar Gooding killed him. I don’t actually remember the nightmares my parents said I had, but I remember my mother apologizing to me.
That was the first time I saw men with skin like mine dying.
The only difference is that as I got older, Hollywood became reality, and there was no director yelling cut. No PA helping to clean up the squibs of fake blood. No wrap-up; no end; no rest.
Just always another scene.
I won’t pretend that my childhood was marred with violence.
After Baby Boy, The next time I was faced with my own mortality was Trayvon Martin.
He was 17, and I was 15.
Arizona Tea was my favorite after-school drink.
Skittles were my favorite candy.
A curious kid with an internet connection, I saw his unedited crime scene photos online. It was my first time seeing a dead body outside of a casket. He looked vacant, with his eyes rolled into his head. It’s a face I’ve never forgotten.
My eyes were opened, and for the first time in my life, I recognized that someone might kill me for no reason. Not because I was a bad person, started a fight, or because I was on active duty in some foreign war zone. Just because.
Trayvon Martin was MY Emmett Till.
From that moment on, a cascade of dying black men began to fill my consciousness.
Now the same age as Trayvon Martin, I kept my hood down even when it was cold.
Next was Michael Brown. I attended my first protest. My sign was made from a ripped white cardboard box, tied to me with a green shoelace, and read:
“STOP SHOOTING PEOPLE”
For the first time, I raised my voice not for laughter or song but in defiance. We shouted, “Hands Up Don’t Shoot!” In unison for hours.
Without missing a beat, police nationwide quickly developed their response to our chant.
“______ was shot and killed by police with their hands up.”
Quickly became as mundane a headline as
“Rain expected this weekend.”
Just like I knew it would rain again, I knew another one of us would die. I knew it could be me.
I could try to recount more moments, but the list of murdered unarmed African Americans by police is so long you would fall asleep reading it.
My breaking point was a dark day.
Above is a Police “challenge coin”.
It is a token of “honor“ traded by New York Police Department officers for hunting (and many times killing) blacks in the predominantly Jamaican 67th precinct.
My father is Jamaican.
Somehow, at 23, I could conceptualize that my life was potentially forfeit, but my father’s? Impossible.
“They’re HUNTING US!” I wailed.
I wept for nearly an hour in his arms. I cried for my dad and Trayvon and Michael and Walter Scott and Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland and so many many others. I begged God for justice. For an end to it all. I cried and cried until I could do nothing but limply whimper in my father’s arms.
That was my line. That was my endpoint. I fell off of it and into a void without sound or gravity. After that day, nothing has phased me or shocked me. I finally, truly understood the country I lived in.
When these things happen, I now feel nothing but dull anger at most. Many times I feel almost nothing.
Every news story and body cam video is like watching a rerun of a boring sitcom. I know how it starts and how it ends.
I barely have a week to process the trauma and the loss of life before the next tragedy.
How can I cry for anyone anymore? I need to save my tears for the next one.
There’s always a next one. Like a skipping record, it loops on and on.
America is in an unending cycle of violence both globally and within our borders.
It’s like oxygen. Tasteless and odorless. It’s the “New Normal”.
How do you articulate the scale of an intermittent genocide?
There are no gas chambers or death camps.
No mountains of cut hair or children’s shoes.
No long lines of train cars with people screaming for help.
American innovation has done what Nazi Germany could not.
We are being quietly erased.
And it is being done slowly and from so many angles, there is no stitch tight enough. No policy is quick enough. No protest bold enough to stem the bleeding of these wounds.
We are brought to the country as chattel, and our pasts are washed from our minds.
We are first inhuman, then subhuman, then the wrong flavor of human.
We make progress and change.
They quietly change laws, move neighborhoods, and gerrymander.
With every step we take, they plant 5 seeds to undo the work.
They are killing us with impunity. They are declaring our history “unimportant” and our inventions their own.
Socially, mentally, and physically we bear more of this country’s crosses than even we ourselves are aware.
Even as I acknowledge these things, somehow, I still find hope in Christ. Hope for a future Im confident I will not live to see.
Though I can’t shed tears, I will bleed into my writing. I will scream the truth from every corner and high place I find.
I’ll do what I can, for as long as I can.
