To the girl on Facebook, who commented, “#All Lives Matter,” after deeming the protest she attended, a hateful event Martin Luther King would have been ashamed of.
Call it an overreaction. Call it a riot, a violent protest.
Call it everything, but justified, ask us to be polite, to stay calm, to voice grief, with respect while our brothers’ bodies are laid out on the street, sounding the alarm.
Our bodies are threats well before they are human, and you still want to know the resource of our rage.
You feel our rage will happen across a storefront window or happen across a corporate office.
You fear the glass shards glittering under police helicopters.
We fear your rage will drag our children into the streets and dance in the red pool beaming under street lamps.
I cannot decorate this pain for you. I cannot make a beautiful [omage 00:01:14]. I can’t invoke hope in prayer.
I don’t know how to make you understand the occupation your ignorance has blinded you to that black bodies are stopped and frisked so often.
We might as well call our cites, “War zones.” Every street corner a checkpoint, violence is not always a dead body.
Violence can be a pat down and broad daylight, because you share the same hue as suspect violence is indicting the man who filmed the killing of Eric Garner, but not the officer that illegally choked the life out of this body, while five others assisted in the arrest of violence, is convincing a jury that he caused his own death, that had he not been overweight, he would have survived.
Violence is needing six officers to arrest one, unarmed, non-violent man in the first place.
How can we accept a government that only applies the law to fill prisons with black bodies?
How can we accept a government that permits and perpetuates violence against its people?
The states traded white hoods for police uniforms. The cops kill more black people each year than the KKK Lynched.
You want our marches peaceful? You want us calm? You want us quiet?
Stop asking us to bite our tongues, and we cannot guarantee our siblings safe passage to the corner store.
Yet you still want to talk about looting. You want to police our protest tactics. You want me to know that you would have cared about the tombstones this nation is hoarding if we hadn’t blocked traffic. You think stopping trains is silly.
You want us to much peacefully to replicate your disfigured perception of Martin, but Dr. King said, “Riots are the voices of the unheard, and you will kill us now.”
It is not enough for you to hold our dead in your prayers, to wish us love and light. I get the sentiment, but it won’t keep my kin from becoming ghosts.
I’m not interested in resignations or remorse. I don’t want apologies. I don’t want your guilt. I don’t want your tears. I don’t want insistence on how not racist you are. I don’t want to know how many black friends you have, when you won’t even risk the discomfort of calling out your own classmates.
You just don’t get it, do you?
You’ve never lived out the aftermath. The empty seat at the dinner table. The now widowed mother with six mouths to feed.
My kin are being sent to Heaven well before God has requested their return.
You want to know why Malcolm called, “Whiteness the devil?” You can say all lives matter, but all lives are not killed every 28 hours.
All lives will matter when black lives matter.
How many more bodies will be enough evidence?
How many videos of our last words?
How many more must there be for you to finally call this a “Genocide?”
