By Rachael The Lord
I’ve always said that Ferguson and Baltimore woke me from a dormant sleep and thrust me into a world where I can’t un-see what white supremacy has tainted, which extends to our well-meaning gestures or our cries for help.
Things started to get complicated when I noticed the onslaught of new protesters “hitting the streets” after the 2016 presidential election. When white people realized that Trump’s policies affected their world too, white people no longer condemned, but strongly encouraged the protests and marches.
I can’t help but feel a certain way about white folk deciding to fight injustices only when it inconveniences them.
The tragic events that unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February illuminated how grief is segregated in this country. Anti-Black racism informs our emotions and what and whom we choose to give emotional empathy to. It’s not that I didn’t care, but I couldn’t engage for some reason.
Weeks later I learned of the murder of Saheed Vassell and now, no longer numb, mourned his Black life. Saheed Vassell was a Black man who was loved by his Crown Heights community. Police murdered Saheed after gentrifying “neighbors” called the cops on him while he was in the middle of a mental health crisis.
I knew he was loved because I went to his vigil where hundreds of community members gathered to mourn the death of our brother. His mother, with all the strength she could muster, told us how the media was already twisting Vassell’s legacy by reducing him to a homeless criminal. There were so many faces; Black, brown, and unsurprisingly the white gentrifiers who believe their presence absolve them from anti-Black racism.
We marched to the police precinct that dispatched the murderous officers (whose names we do not know). The police, anticipating our arrival, set barricades around the precinct and themselves. A Black woman was screaming at the top of her lungs at a group of police officers. The sun had gone down by that time, and our feet were blistered, swollen and frozen but many of us felt like we had to go on. Some of us now wish we hadn’t.
I stood in the middle of a group of Black men who were arguing with police officers. One of the men exclaimed, “We are so fucking tired. Don’t you see that we are people too? What if this happened to your daughter? Your son?”
I reflect a lot about what Black futures look like. It involves us prioritizing our well-beings and recognizing that we can create societies devoid of the burden of whiteness. Admittedly, my perception on what I believe our futures should look like grows bleak in the wake of countless Black deaths and how our community continues to put our bodies on the line to fight for our lives.
In an interview between Harry Belafonte and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. King states that he believes he has integrated Black people into a burning house. I went home and read this quote over and over again. Mingled with Dr. King’s words were the faces of the Black women who shook the barricade that separated us from the police and screamed for her pain to be acknowledged, and that of the Black man who I witnessed offer failed attempts to reason with police.
Then, I remember the officers with insidious grins painted on their faces as they’re met with Black voices crying out for our humanity to be treated with decency and respect and have to ask: Are we still running into burning houses?
My hands are shaking as I write this because of the depth of their racism. It showed me that their blatant disregard for our lives are rooted so deep that protests, like the one I attended, would not uproot it. Maya Angelou taught us to believe people the first time they show themselves to you. We should extend this thinking to not just individuals, but the oppressive systems and structures that routinely execute Black people.
How many times should we allow our tongues to run dry and our tears to be spent pleading with a system that could give a fuck about us? The question becomes redundant as history echoes itself, but I’m not confident that we understand the totality of this truth, and I am included in that we. This is not to say that our power as a people diminishes when we use protest as a tool or even outlet to express outrage, but I increasingly doubt its effectiveness in our lives.
Media outlets, Facebook statuses and impotent think pieces are used as conduits to the romanticization and mocking of our pain. I saw this at the protest as I watched news cameras shoving their lenses in the mournful face of Saheed’s mother and the stale and suggestive questions reporters bombarded community residents with.
While we are able to express our rage however we choose because we are owed everything, I wonder to what extent the outpouring of our pain in public fits into the tantalizing tactics of institutions that do not function with our humanity in mind.
We give these outlets our pain and always return with empty hands. Is that sacrifice worth it? Has it ever been?
Justice still hasn’t been served for Emmett Till. Emmett’s mother put her baby’s body on display and while we understand why she did it, when the outrage was over, what happens next?
I am reminded of the words of one of Brooklyn’s community activist in which he informed the crowd that the struggle extends far beyond protesting but infects our lives.
When the cameras chase the next story and leave our communities bare, when our voices and feet grow weary or we move on to the next hashtag, I want us to ask ourselves what attending these protests does to us and how we position protesting with our liberation.
Are you returning back to your bed emotionally and mentally spent? Do you feel like you can’t move? Feeling emotionally drained and physically immobile consumed me in the days following the protest. My body felt incredibly strange as I remember feeling stripped as if I was walking around with only one layer of skin. I felt thin and stretched. I wouldn’t be doing myself or my community justice by putting myself in spaces that do me more harm than good.
I want to be realistic in how even fighting for justice can kill us and that is no fault of our own but the fault of systems that work around the clock to exercise oppression against our communities. Remember Erica Garner.
What do we do then? I don’t know. How I envision Black futures is without the burden of having to exchange pieces of ourselves in order to get justice. Freedom looks like having the agency to demand my needs without harming myself in the process. Sometimes that means mourning within the walls of my home and not in the streets.
Suggested Readings
“Empathy is for white kids: Keaton Jones and the Black children we ignore for White Supremacists” – Arielle Iniko Newton, RaceBaitR (December 12, 2017)
“White liberals stay predicting dystopias caused by whiteness—without doing anything about it” – Hari Ziyad, Black Youth Project (April 9, 2018)
“Protests aren’t eulogies: Fighting for more than Stephon Clark and his misogynoir” – Chelsea Neason, RaceBaitR (April 16, 2018)
“How to Participate in the Movement When You’re in a Funk” – Maisha Z. Johnson, Black Girl Dangerous (April 2, 2015)
Rachael the Lord is a writer and performer based in New York. She writes about Blackness, pop-culture, faith, feminism, fanfiction and arts equity. She is the Social Media Coordinator for RaceBaitR. Follow the Lord on twitter @rachaelthelord
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