My mother asked me why I was so angry 3 years ago. I didn’t tell her that I have become a rental home for grief. Today, I have realized that sorrow turns into anger if it isn’t given a proper burial. But what’s a proper burial when we are all being forced to live and die so improperly?
I see the name. I read the hashtag. I grieve. I immediately read another hashtag. The impossible-to-ignore old grief welcomes the impossible-to-avoid new grief. They, together, become sorrow. It goes the same way every time. This new grief swells into distraction, while old grief becomes angry and vocal, pushed out by the new.
I have been saying her name and her name. And now I am saying their names. And I say her name and say her name, and now I say the name of the EMT who lived a few blocks from where my mother raised me and where her mother raised her. Now I am saying, “Korryn.” And now I am saying all of their names. Now you have joined me to say their names, too. And now I am saying yours.
Here, in this hell, we are all names said now or soon to be said.
Breonna
Aiyanna
Sandra
While handing out W-2’s, a white manager who prided himself on his god-given individuality asked me in front of a few other natural-born individuals if the reason I go by “Joshua” instead of “Trevaughn” is to not be confused with Trayvon Martin. Their hungry eyes were met with my grief-quickly-turned-rage-quickly-turned-spite.
“You are confused,” I spat out, “I am Trayvon Martin.”
I want to mourn individual niggas. It feels too enormous a task to mourn so many at once. It bears the weight of a thousand tears. A hundred shouts. I am losing my sense of life and the barrier between living and dying seems to be weakening before and behind me. I expect to share my own hashtag soon. Never being able to bury those of us who die the unnatural death it takes to become a hashtag is robbing me of my sense of individuality.
Old grief writes and protests and screams and becomes bitter and becomes a problem. Old grief struggles to get to work on time. Old grief takes a skateboard to a pig’s windshield. Old grief never dies. Old grief becomes less easy to recall but easier to feel. Old grief recesses into my bones.
I am afraid that my children will inherit this old grief. I am afraid of what that will mean for the world. It is already etched into the palms of my hands. I feel it on my skin like a fine grade of dust. I feel it most in my stomach. I feel it most in my aching muscles. I feel it most in my lungs. I feel it most when I am thinking of the future.
I saw old grief happen in grownfolksconversation with grownfolk gestures that were tasked with the triple duty of concealing and informing and protecting. I saw old grief in a parent’s emotional breakdown. I laughed because I had never seen an emotional breakdown before. I laughed because I was scared. I was in 6th grade and because my older cousin saw old grief and laughed, I did too.
I saw old grief in the words that my mother would not let me repeat even though they wasn’t really cuss words. I saw old grief in the friendships my mother wanted me to foster and the white ones she wanted me to avoid. I saw old grief in the long conversations my grandmother would have with her out-of-state brothers when she thought I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t listening, but old grief was.
All of these stories are piling on top of each other. They’re not isolated. There are no individuals. I can’t keep isolating them. They can’t keep isolating me. There is a living memory of a nigga being tricked or killed or robbed or raped in every place I go. There is a living memory of genocide behind every sentence spoken from a non-Black mouth. There is a future memory of me being without a home. There is a future memory of me being fingerprinted and booked. There is a future memory of my vigil.
I can’t mourn any of us peacefully. It feels unethical. I can’t maintain the stillness necessary. I don’t think I have any more peace in me.
White people have created too much collective harm for the harm to be named individually. I haven’t found any one person to blame for Breonna Taylor’s death. I have found every white person responsible. I tried once to blame individual police officers, to blame individual police departments. I blamed individual politicians. I blamed certain schools. Then I blamed entire regions. I said, “that’s just how the south is.” And, of course, it’s not that simple.
I’m very worried that I won’t have enough time on this earth to make it clear that every single white person is culpable. Every white person will be culpable. It is their silent-but-not-so-silent contract. They are all on the same page. Violence is their collective effort.
I am losing the ability to individualize our Black deaths. They, like the police officers that kill us, or the white teachers who fail us, are all becoming a blur. I am becoming a blur. A hashtag. A future memory.
None of us will be allowed our individuality until white people and all of their mechanisms are perceived as, interacted with, and dealt with as a collective.
When I say that I am pro-Black I mean that I am against everything white. I am against borders. I am against civility. I am against the polite, the political and the police. I am against curfews. I am against prisons. I am against individual white people. I am against the banks that cheat us. I am against the politicians that play us. It is entirely personal.
Breonna Taylor. A community member. An individual. I swear it.
Say her name.
Suggested Readings:
Kevin Rigby Jr., “The Whole Thing Has Got to Go“, Medium, 2020
Frank B. Wilderson, III, Afropessimism, 2020
Saidiya Hartman, “The End of White Supremacy, an American Romance“, Bomb Magazine, 2020
