This article by our friend Dominique Christina speaks powerfully to the issues of racism and police violence against black people and other people of color in the United States.
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It is difficult to be radical in Denver. We are so privileged here. There’s a Starbucks and a Whole Foods on every corner; and dog parks and community gardens and it’s all so…seductive. It has an almost soporific effect. One can be lulled right to sleep by the idyllic snow-capped mountains and trendy cafes that suggest there is no crisis here. Our hoods aren’t like hoods in Chicago, Detroit, Jersey, parts of New York, New Orleans, St. Louis…Baltimore. No gritty crime drama about the drug trade and the alarmingly high homicide rates in the inner city could ever be filmed here. We are a little too deft with our trash pickups and our gentrification. Let me start near the beginning.
Mike Brown died. We all got tickets to the show.
What I knew after the spectacle of horror that social media alerted us to on that Saturday afternoon in August in Ferguson Missouri was that I could not protect my children. That is an impossibly soul crushing thing to carry. Especially for somebody like me; somebody whose adolescence was punctuated by the slings and arrows of too many rapacious men and boys and all of the tripwire that accompanies growing up black and female. The one thing I felt certain about when I became a mother was that I would become a fortress. I would keep my children safe at all costs. They came from me; matriculated from my simple womb ands burst through this skin brilliantly. Being a woman in a patriarchal society makes you interrogate whether you can keep the softer parts of who you are and still defy the limitations of misogyny, but being a mother makes you a wolf. The way I love my children told me I was woman enough and wolf enough to keep them safe.
But then Trayvon happened and I felt the ground slipping underneath me. Still, I fought against the despair. I brought my children to rallies that called for Zimmerman’s arrest and I challenged out loud, the notion that Trayvon deserved to be seen as a threat and therefore murdered in the gated community his father lived in. The effort was exhausting and replete with all of the pushback that comes from those whose bodies have never been so undervalued.
Zimmerman was not convicted. I watched the verdict come in with my children and cried and lamented and then almost instantly felt naïve to hold out hope that our judicial system, the same system that criminalizes black and brown bodies to feed the prison industrial complex, would care about one black boy walking down a road at night who never made it home. A boy my community iconicized in hash tags and hoodies. See, we are so accustomed to being slain; so accustomed to the lynching ritual and the picnics afterward, sometimes the only fight we can manage is a blog post about white America and Facebook posts about the legacy of racism.
My grandfather was born in 1911. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He knew all about the spectacle of black bodies dangling from trees, burned alive, castrated and beaten. What I could not personally reconcile was that I was having the same conversations about the same culture of violence that he was having as a boy growing up in the West End of Little Rock, Arkansas. Nothing had changed. Martin Luther King’s magnificent legacy did not result in black people being a protected class. Malcolm X’s unapologetic, larger than life, tell you the truth to your face way of being in the world did not stop the slaughter. Both of those men were cut down by bullets in their prime anyway, which should have been all the evidence the following generations needed that this country is willful about its acts of brutality against black and brown people. If we couldn’t be slaves anymore we could be prisoners. We could be disenfranchised. We could be economically dispossessed. We could be squeezed and starved and relegated to barrios and ghettos that would kill us one way or another anyway. We should have known better. But we couldn’t see it…too much blood in our eyes.
So Ferguson…it awakened in me the unsurvivable reality that my children could be “legitimately killed.” They could be snatched from me by someone who saw them walking down a road at night and concluded that they were the threat. They were the imposition. Their lives were not valuable.
The depression that reached for me was thick. I woke up every morning trying to convince myself that there was still a righteous fight somewhere. That life still held beauty. That I could still love my children seismically and urgently, and protect them from the insistent ugly of the world.
I don’t want to suggest that this feeling distinguished me from so many others in this country and around the world who felt uproarious about Big Mike’s body lying in the street for more than four hours and I don’t want to suggest that my suffering was somehow more pronounced than other people. I saw Leslie McFadden pleading with police officers to get her boy out of the street…her firstborn. And I saw those same officers tell her to get back behind the police tape. I saw and heard the eruption of rage that interrupted the consciousness of brothers on the block who were all too familiar with police brutality but who nevertheless could not forgive the offense of seeing that child’s body face down in the street. I carried the death of Mike Brown hard. I still do. I can’t think about him for too long without gnashing my teeth. I can’t think too long about the fact that my own firstborn son stayed up every single night all summer long watching CNN trying to understand what world this is. And I am his mother so it is incumbent upon me to do something, right? To get in between my child and the horror…but how do I do that? What does my fight look like? How can I arm him? I didn’t know.
Read the rest of the article at Deep Green Resistance Southwest.