I was 16 years old when Trayvon Martin was killed. I sat browsing the computer with my hoodie pulled up against the chilly library air conditioning, a can of AriZona green tea to my left next to an empty Snickers wrapper. I remember reading the initial news reports of the case: On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, age 17, was caught in the act of walking with a suspicious skin color. George Zimmerman, the local neighborhood watchman took it upon himself to accost the young man. An altercation ensued, and Trayvon Martin was shot dead. I remember the outrage bubbling through a previously unnoticed film of bitterness in me. Immediately, I identified with Trayvon. In fact, if someone had seen me walking to the library that day, they would have identified me nearly exactly the same. A black teenager wearing jeans and a dark hoodie holding AriZona tea and candy.
That night, I walked home steaming with anger, and full of a paranoid suspicion that someone was following me, waiting to report me, call the cops on me, unleash vigilante injustice on me, leave me bleeding on the street because they mistook my phone for a gun. When I got home, my mom told me “I don’t want you wearing that hoodie anymore.” I refused. Why should I alter what I wear because someone else thinks it’s incriminating?
But that night opened my eyes to the clues I hadn’t put together until that point. All my life, I’d lived thinking I was safe. I lived in a good neighborhood, went to a good school, and already had a job. I stayed out of trouble and did what I was supposed to do. I’d always known about racism, but from a more abstract perspective. In school, they teach it as some far-off thing that happened hundreds of years ago and ended with the civil rights movement. Of course I knew it occurred, I’d been a victim of racism myself, but it appeared to be a more tame, quiet version of racism than I’d read in history books. The word “nigger” spat from a school child, a woman clutching her purse as I walk by in the grocery store, the Wal-Mart security guard stopping me in the bathroom, asking what was in my backpack. Unjust yes, but not life-threatening.
Trayvon’s death burst through the facade I’d grown up in, shattered the illusions of safety and impressed a sickening reality: that my life is in danger because I’m black. The former abstraction of racism became a persistent truth that both horrified me, and revealed my eternal involvement. An involvement not accepted, but thrust upon me by the prejudices of others. I began to realize that in the land where all men are created equal, blacks are not considered men. As that horrible truth formed, nebulous in my thoughtspace, previous life experiences flooded from the shadows of my memory to bolster it.
When I was in third grade, there was this kid named Alex who was the closest thing I had to a school bully. He was in a different class than me, but anytime he saw me, he would glare and spit, things like “look at that nigger.” I tried to ignore him, but one day, I was standing on a rock, at recess, and he jumped on my back. After a brief, confused struggle, I lost my balance and fell. He cried as I rolled off of him, clutching his bloody mouth. Terrified, I ran far away. We all went back inside, but I was filled with dread, knowing that they would be coming for me. My mouth dried, and my stomach twisted, and I wished that I hadn’t been wearing yellow pants and a matching windbreaker so they couldn’t identify me so easily. I didn’t realize at the time that he would just point me out as the only black kid in the class. Soon, the vice principal, Ms. Ulrich came for me. I remember overwhelming fear as I walked down the halls. When I came to the office, Alex was sitting in a chair holding bloody tissue over his face. I sat next to him, not wanting to meet his fiery stare. Ms. Ulrich sat at the commanding side of the desk as another teacher laid a plastic bag that held Alex’s two adult front teeth in chocolate milk. He accused me of punching him in the face and knocking his teeth out. Ms. Ulrich turned to me, asking if I punched him. I was in terror and shock, and I didn’t want to get into anymore trouble, so I just said yes.
When I got home, I waited for my mom in dread, wondering how I was going to tell her I’d gotten a referral. How to tell her that I was a bad kid. When she got home, she asked me what had happened. I hung my head in shame, crying as I told her, and she sat down on the bed with me, asking, “Well, did you punch him?”
“No! I was standing on a rock, and he jumped on my back, and I fell on him,” I sputtered through the tears.
“Why were you standing on the rock?”
“I don’t know, I was playing!”
My mom wrote a letter containing the true story and had my statement notarized at the bank. Then, she went into school with me and fought the referral, demanding that they reverse it under threat of legal action.
Traumatizing as the experience was for 8-year-old me, this scenario has played out in countless permutations for hundreds of years. A black person is minding their own business, exercising their supposed liberties, when a white person accuses them of a crime as contrived as existing while black, and, with the justice system on their side, exacts punishment. Instead of a referral, thousands of people who look just like me were mobbed, beaten until their faces were pulverized into ground meat, strung up on trees by their hands and necks, tortured as their skin peeled off over flames, testicles pulled and sliced one after the other as crowds of whites watched and ate, pointed and laughed, posed for pictures with the charred corpses, reveling in how that nigger had gotten what he deserved.
We’ve been beaten down for hundreds of years. We were brought to this country stuffed like canned goods into slave ships, black bodies laying together in putrid feces and urine, blood flowing from the chafing chains that eat skin from bones. We built white empires under the tyranny of the whip that tore the flesh from our backs in grotesque arcs of blood and worked until our hands and feet were mashed and useless. When we became “free” they hunted us down, decapitated us, hung us from trees, burned us alive, and regulated us into ghettos. When we marched for the basic humans rights all Americans are supposed to share, they sicked dogs on us. Back then, a white cop could lynch a black man or beat him to death and get off scot free.
Now they just shoot us.
My mom told me about Mike Brown. Laying on the soft bedroom carpet, I looked up the Ferguson riots, that seething anger bubbling up again. A young, unarmed black man shot to death by a cop in broad daylight. I told my mom, “They’re rioting in the streets and looting buildings.”
“Good,” she said, “It’s about time.”
The firestorm on Twitter seemed to burn straight through my computer screen. Infuriated, black people raged, the bullets in Mike Brown tearing to the same pain and anger in me - that after all these years black people are still subject to random, state sanctioned, modern-day lynchings. Infuriated that there is not justice for us when we are murdered in cold blood by representatives of a system designed to keep us down. Infuriated that time after time when a black person is killed at the hands of a white aggressor, there is no trial. Infuriated that black is synonymous with criminal, dangerous, stupid, ignorant, deviant. Infuriated that the only justice we have for our children is our own voices raised in mourning, hashtags like the sorrowful hymnals of slaves.
Then, there were the racists. The whites. People who didn’t even realize their acceptance of cultural racism when they say that Mike Brown was probably a thug and that he probably attacked that cop and that he should have known better. He should have known his place. They sneered and watched the riots, pointing at the deviants, pointing at the savages, saying look what they do when left to their own devices. They failed to recognize the anger of compounded lifetimes of oppression unleashed with explosive force. They pointed, astonished and said, “Don’t burn the flag. I don’t remember Martin Luther King lighting the American flag on fire.” They watched through the shroud of ignorance, inexperience and lack of empathy unable to place themselves in the shoes of people under a flag serves a symbol of injustice. A flag atop an empire that was built with black hands but denies them its benefits. A flag complicit in holding blacks down and stripping them of their humanity. The flag that waves above the courthouse that defends due process for whites but execution without trial for blacks. They fail to see how they perpetuate racism when they say “Men and women have died protecting your rights, and this is what you do?” This seethes with the same regurgitated racial subtext as the white man’s burden. Yes, men and women have died protecting my rights, but we have died protecting your empire, slaving to put gold in your pockets while cast as the villain, the savage, sacrificed to protect your false sense of superiority.
But people don’t get it. Some see the protests, the riots, the civil rights activists painted as ambulance chasing money-whores, the hastags, the outrage and “think it’s bullshit.” To me it’s a defense of my rights, of my place in this country, of my humanity. Without the outrage, there would be no change. Without the activists, Zimmerman wouldn’t even have gone to trial, and even with them and the public outcry, Darren Wilson didn’t have his day in court. Instead, he forever twisted history with the well-worn trope: “I feared for my life.” Without the hashtags, there would be no brave citizens filming police brutality.
This week, I walked into a fast food restaurant and saw this headline on the news: “WHITE COP CHARGED WITH MURDER IN SHOOTING OF UNARMED BLACK MAN.” I said my first thought aloud: “It’s about time.” But even Walter Scott’s circumstance is traumatizing. The video, taken by an innocent bystander, shows a brazen murder - a police officer, standing several yards away as a black man runs, casually aiming, and executing. The video shows the officer cuffing the dead man, commanding him to somehow put his hands behind his back, then planting a taser near the body. But the police report says that Walter Scott, like Mike Brown, like Trayvon Martin, attacked him, and during the struggle the officer was forced to use his weapon because he feared for his life. Furthermore, the police report states that the officers who arrived on scene immediately thereafter administered first aid, but the video shows the officers standing around the body. Now that people have an example of how the police’s story contradicts reality, will they finally believe what black people have been saying for decades?
A sickening feeling crept over me as I read over the case. Although relieved that some brave soul had the guts to record police brutality on video, I was still horrified. Each new report of an officer shooting down a black man is a reminder of my place as a second class citizen in this society - a reminder that at any time, I could be shot down justifiably. Knowing that thousands of other black people would rally for me is no consolation to my death. Now, instead of looking both ways before I cross the street, I look both ways to make sure I don’t get stopped and killed by a police officer. Now instead of obeying the law fearing fines and jail, I obey the law fearing for my life.
Because, while justice might be a possibility for Walter Scott, it’s still out of reach for thousands like him, including Tamir Rice, who, at just 12 years old, was executed in less than two seconds for playing with a toy gun in public. When I was a kid, my mom refused to buy me a toy gun because she was afraid this very same thing would happen to me. Tamir could have been me laying in the grass. His heartbroken sister could have been mine running toward my dead body, then tackled and cuffed. Trayvon could have been me walking with my AriZona and Snickers and shot dead by the neighborhood watch. Mike Brown could have been me, executed for jaywalking, shot with my hands in the air. Walter Scott could have been me, dead in the dirt for having a broken taillight. And, absent the astronomical chance of a filming bystander, I would be just another black thug who attacked a police officer and made him fear for his life.
I should not have to live in constant fear of a system rigged against me. I should not have to alter my dress or behavior to avoid stereotypes and profiling. I should not have to admit to or be punished, tried, or executed for crimes I didn’t commit. I should not have to fight so hard to assert that my life matters. Black lives matter.
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