I am tired of explaining to white people that my life matters. I am tired of reading Op-Eds, news articles, scholarly articles, online sources all outlining the perils of white supremacy, domestic terrorism, anti-blackness and a host of other empty terms used to give credibility to our demise. I am tired of reading about yet another black man, 20-yr old Daunte Wright gunned down as a result of an “accidental discharge”, (a gun fired under the belief that it was a taser). Only blocks away from the place where another black man was murdered here we are again having to mourn yet another Black man’s death. This modern-day genocide of black men, women and children is beyond sickening. It is soul annihilating and it has to stop NOW!
Fact is we have talked and talked and talked about justice for far too long. We have marched, picketed, protested, walked, sat, lobbied, had discussion after discussion and what good has it done? What real change has it produced? We are still dying in droves with our faces plastered all over the news, painted as criminals, predators and vile human beings. In the minds of white Americans, our murders are justified. We have said this time after time and while white Americans have made an intellectual connection with black pain, they have not made an emotional connection with it. Until white people in this country are able to make an emotional connection with black suffering nothing will change. Our bodies will continue to line the streets of this country and we will only be used as food for media outlets and those seeking to advance their careers off black suffering.
For many years I lived in a state of racial unconsciousness. So busy trying to bridge the divides between various cultures, I lost track of the generational trauma that continues to be perpetuated daily as a result of anti-blackness and racial disparities. Many years ago I was a staunch opponent to the Black Lives Matter movement as I felt it to be divisive and counterintuitive. I wrote an online article detailing the reasons why I was not for the movement. I was a fool. A young, naïve, stupid fool! I was so busy living in this idealistic fantasy where we all deserved to have our lives matter. And while on some score this is in fact true, thing is such thinking is a distraction away from the fact that only Black people seem to be dying in droves at the hands of law enforcement. Such all lives matter thinking is a tool used to appease white guilt and coddle white fragility by minimizing the serial murders of Black people.
The truth is this: We as Black people in America are living on a new plantation with police officers as the new slave masters. We are still running for our lives, trying to escape the oppressive hands of white supremacy. White people know our struggle and are intimately acquainted with the ideology of racial inequity however they are unwilling to connect with it fully because it means that they have to give up some of their power, the very power that has made them special, that has afforded them various privileges. They do not want an equal and just world as it means they would then have to actually earn things based on talent, ability and not simply on the merit of blue blood, privilege and family connections. And while some advocates and allies try and say they understand the cause and want to align themselves with it, fact is many don’t fully get it affectively. We as Black people have a history of being bamboozled in this country by those claiming to care about our suffering. We are constantly offered false ladders of assistance in the form of performative activism, false allyship, empty symbolism and counterfeit promises but we are denied true access to generational wealth as well as entry into systems that will align us with our own power irrespective of that granted to us by white hands outs and charitable scraps offered as performative gestures of false generosity.
Enough is enough! It is time. It is time that we offer an opportunity for racist and bigoted white Americans to gain an emotional connection to Black suffering. They need to understand what it means to lose a child, a mother, a father, a cousin, a loved one as a result of racial injustice. They need to understand how everyday Black people in this country have to witness and re-witness, live and re-live, tell and recount the stories of their pain just to have to do it all over again while having to watch it over and over on their television screens as scathing reminders of how much their lives don’t matter. To have that burning in your consciousness over and over again with no relief is a fate worse than death. It is a circuitous living death that keeps on living its grief over and over again. But white Americans have not made an emotional connection with this piece of understanding as we are still seen as just collected specimens, our dead bodies as gathered information that is used to maintain an establishment that needs to be terminated. But we are tired. As the poet Langston Hughes so eloquently stated:
Negroes,
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble and kind:
Beware the day
They change their mind!
It is time we change our minds!
Originally published at http://luisspeaks.wordpress.com on April 12, 2021.
