I’m a member of a peculiar group. I’ve seen both my parents–whom I love dearly–in the immediate aftermath of their deaths, before the niceties of preparing their bodies for burial. And for my father, I was there when he took his last breath in this life and transitioned into the great hereafter. I will never forget what I saw, what I heard, and what I believe he experienced. Both my father and my mother died peacefully and in relative comfort, to the extent that they could have been comfortable when dying of illness.
So, when I am accosted by the images of black people dying, being killed violently by the police, I am overwhelmed at being a witness to their murders, to their lives being crushed out of them by a police officer’s chokehold or knee or their breath snatched by multiple bullets piercing their flesh and destroying their vital organs. I feel a visceral pain for the victims of these heinous acts of violence, pain for their loved ones who witnessed it in real-time, sometimes with their own clutched cellphone bearing witness to the final moments of their beloved’s life on earth, helpless to do any more. And then that same murder runs on the television as a commercial preview to the news or as a visual introduction to a news story on social media, or even as a meme or the latest #challenge trending on Instagram or Tiktok.
The act of consuming black suffering and death as bloodsport is not new. The people of this country have long participated in the deaths of black people, whether as executioner or witness. The history of lynching is one that has been well documented by the photographer’s lens, capturing the intergenerational crowds of white people who came to picnic at the lynching site. They didn’t have supercomputers in their back pockets as we do now. So they went to see it in person. And not just see it but hear the moans and words of terror that would issue forth from the brutalized victim’s mouth and add their own taunts as a part of the last words that person would hear this side of eternity. To smell the smells that would emanate from a person whose fear at their imminent fate might make body systems malfunction and whose burning body–set ablaze either before or after death–would coat the air with the stench of burning flesh.
I was there, holding my father’s hand and singing him a church hymn when he let go of this life and entered the next. I will never forget the sight and the sounds and the smells. I remember how his countenance changed at the very moment he crossed over. My father died a good death, surrounded by prayers from afar as well as two of the people who loved him the most in the world. I don’t know everything he saw or experienced in that room; I won’t know that until I am at my own moment of transition. But I know that he heard and felt love.
For those who are murdered, this is not so. And for those whose execution is a community event enjoyed at their expense, those final moments must feel especially cruel. What moral depravity lives in the mind and heart of a person who will taunt and jeer and celebrate someone’s murder? But let me come a little closer. How can anyone bear witness to the violent death of a person who is running away from his pursuers or who has already been subdued by her pursuers, or who is outnumbered and outgunned by those who were called ostensibly to protect them from the bad guys without their own naked outrage at the cruel injustice of it? Just offer a #SMH and move on. Or worse yet, conjecture that the execution, which we all just witnessed, must have been warranted for reasons that some unscrupulous person will unearth well after the fact. People will go into overdrive compiling a dossier of the deceased’s most unflattering selfies or questionable posts on social media; will look for any possible “evidence” of previous drug use, alcohol use, an expired license, or a car with some amount of disrepair (missing tail-light, anyone?); or any history of previous brushes with the law, however slight. And then this compilation of so-called offenses will be used as justification for the person’s violent death at the hands of the police or a self-described civilian militia or vigilante self-appointed to investigate and “stand their ground” in the face of anyone they deem to be a threat.
In this, the land of the free and home of the brave, the insistence by a white person or a police officer of feeling threatened has always been enough of a defense to justify the killing of black and brown bodies. The mere existence of a black or brown body taking up space in any activity can be called a threat: driving, sitting in a parked car, talking on a cell phone in a grandparent’s backyard, taking a wrong turn and getting lost, going to the convenience store, napping in a university dorm’s common room, jogging, playing, having a mental health emergency, bird watching, waiting for the bus, selling lemonade, barbecuing with family, sleeping. Any activity that a black person might be engaged in can be labeled a threat by a white person. And even when that “threat” is met with deadly force, a judge and jury can be convinced it was warranted. Why? The common denominator is that it was a black person doing it.
How do we know this? Well, we all know this. This is why a ramshackle assemblage of armed white men can take over government buildings without fear of physical reprisals. It’s why a group of white football fans can throw trashcans, flip cars, vandalize property, physically and verbally assault each other, and break every noise and public nuisance ordinance in Philadelphia in celebration of the Philadelphia Eagles SuperBowl victory and still make it out alive and home to their families that very night. It’s why a white man can attend a bible study at a black church and then laughingly admit to shooting dead nine of the people he just prayed with and the police who arrested him not only manage not to kill the armed and dangerous man when they arrested him but the officers stopped at a fast-food restaurant to buy the murderer a meal since he was hungry.
There is no end to the list of examples of how black people who are just living their lives are called a threat, abused by those who have sworn an oath to protect and serve, and then maimed and killed with impunity. (Even those who live through the ordeal of being body-slammed to the ground for “fitting the description” have physical and emotional scars that can’t heal because they are wounded repeatedly.) Think about all who are forced to witness this brutality and all whose lives have been shattered by those depraved actions.
By contrast, the myriad examples of white people flouting the law and living to tell their stories aren’t even on any list. There’s no list because there have traditionally been few, if any, consequences. This country’s lakes and rivers still are full of the bones of black and brown people whose lives were snatched as bloodsport. The stench of burning flesh still wafts from government-sanctioned execution rooms where black people are killed not because they are guilty but because they are too black and too poor to afford legal counsel that would assure due process under the law. The blood of black women and men still runs in the streets and in police holding cells. The bodies of children are still warehoused in cages with only a concrete floor, a foil blanket, and other crying children surrounding them, but no parents. And too many, too many, watch our black and brown fellow human beings have their lives wrung out of them, their humanity stripped from them with little more than some hand wringing and a sad-faced emoji before they scroll on. The tolerance for black and brown suffering and death continues to be high.
The perverse irony is that this pandemic–itself a disproportionate burden on the black, brown, immigrant, and poor people who are overwhelmingly the essential workers providing the necessities that allow others the privilege of sheltering in place–is the reason why the world couldn’t look away and unsee what it saw when former police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd with his knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Thankfully, as a result, some more people have joined the frontlines of the fight for an end to police violence and the brutalization of black and brown bodies writ large. But think, Mr. Floyd has loved ones who witnessed his final terrible minutes of life, too. Breonna Taylor had a loving partner who watched her body become riddled with bullet holes from police officers who broke into her home as she slept. Philando Castile‘s partner and pre-school daughter watched him be shot to death by a police officer as he sat in the same car with him. Sandra Bland‘s family had to claim her deceased body from the coroner after watching dashcam footage of her brutalization days before she was to begin a new job. I could go on.
Families ripped apart. Communities terrorized. Blackness criminalized. That is, looking phenotypically of African descent–brown skin and coiled hair–just trying to live. Anti-poverty bias and gender so often at the intersection. Seeing brown people as an impediment to white freedom. Freedom to pillage the land–committing genocide upon its first inhabitants in the process–and steal people. Desecrating life that doesn’t service the desires of white people. This started long ago, yes. But it’s not over. When will it be over?