Collage: Wes Hazard

Rest In Peace to all who have fallen. I have faith in the future despite it all.

The Murder Of Trayvon Martin — February 26, 2012

So much changes in eight years. So much stays the same. This tragedy (and its ever-unfolding aftermath) probably did more to shape my consciousness as a Black man in American than any other outside event. It’s shameful and difficult to admit but before this I saw my Blackness as incidental rather than fundamental.

In my head I was supposed to be “different”. I was the the black kid (one of the small handful in my suburban Boston school system) who was in AP American History, and the honor society, and in Sci-Fi club. The one who liked Alice in Chains, the one who was the lone Black Friend™ of so many of my peers, the one who didn’t join the Black Student Forum in college because “I don’t define myself by race”. I was that guy. Sure I knew my Black History. I read Roots in 6th Grade and The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a sophomore. I could quote dates and bits of speeches and I felt the gut punch of learning about the 3/5ths compromise in that AP History class. But I was a nerd, who happened to be Black, and it was all academic to me, in the past, over there…somewhere. I talked like Carlton Banks, I was on the Quiz Bowl Team, I had a goddamned Led Zeppelin lyric in my senior yearbook quote. I was “black”, but not Black Black. It’s painful to admit that, but that’s who I was.

Even more painful and shameful is the memory I have of talking with my mom as the news of Trayvon’s murder came out. I literally sat there across from a woman who had come of age in the heart of BOSTON before the busing crisis and when black people could literally be killed for being in the wrong part of Dorchester and said that we didn’t have all the facts yet, and we shouldn’t rush to judgment, and maybe it was justified? Justified. I said that, I thought that. I can’t believe it but I did. Looking back I have never been more thankful for an instance of my mom full-stop checking me. The anger and sadness in her eyes as she told me that that was someone’s son, who was dead now because some asshole wannabe neighborhood watchman thought he was a cop and that he had the right to stop and question any Black person he saw. It wasn’t an instant conversion but I shut the fuck up and thought. A Lot. And much later, on the morning when that asshole was acquitted I was filled with a deep sorrow and a firm conviction that I know to be true to this day: if Trayvon was white he would still be alive. You can forget any other details, any mitigating circumstances, any “what ifs” or conjecture, but you must KNOW that simple fact. I know it in my bones, now — and it could have been me, because no one out there cares about my yearbook quote, at least not initially. Because the first thing they see is just that I’m Black Black. Because I am.

The Sandy Hook Massacre — December 14, 2012

I was in a barbershop getting a haircut for the upcoming holidays when I heard the news. First from social media and soon after from the coverage on the TVs in the shop. As a high school freshman during Columbine and having just graduated from college when the Virginia Tech tragedy occurred part of me numbly thought “another one” and part of me was ripped open in disbelief at the sheer senselessness and depravity. Whole classrooms of children and their teachers murdered in minutes by someone who anyone with any sense would say should never have had a gun, let alone be bought one by his mother. Two details I read in the ensuing news coverage somehow deepened the awfulness: someone in law enforcement commenting on the crime scene in a classroom, “There were 14 coats hanging there and 14 bodies. He killed them all.”, and a reporter in passing noting that as the news broke the emergency rooms of area hospitals were placed on high alert with extra staff to handle what was sure to be a surge of victims — only to stand down a few hours later when barely any survivors emerged. We were all rightfully shocked and horrified. We all asked why. We thought thoughts, we prayed prayers, we updated our statuses and we’ve done the same all over again with every awful new height of insanity.

The Murder of John Crawford III — August 5, 2014

A man, a young father, walks into a Walmart in Ohio talking on the phone to the mother of his two children as he wanders the store, seemingly without aim. He picks up an unpackaged pellet gun that is lying on a shelf in the sporting goods section and begins to casually walk around the store with it as he talks. It looks fairly realistic but it’s an item sold at the store, presumably handled by many prior customers without incident. And besides, this is Ohio, if it was real he’d be within his rights to have it there as he browsed video games or bought laundry detergent in bulk. Surveillance video shows him walking by numerous other customers who largely pay him no mind. But one man does, and he calls 911 and reports that Crawford is “like pointing it at people” and “waving it back and forth”. Crawford is doing no such thing, and later, when confronted with the security footage, the man will admit this and recant. But it will be too late because police arrive, and they shoot Crawford on sight. They will say that he did not respond to verbal commands to drop the weapon and this will be enough to prevent them from being charged or disciplined, but the surveillance video will show that no one could have ever complied in the instant that elapsed between the arrival of police and their shooting of Crawford. Especially someone who had his back turned, and was on the phone, and had no idea he was even being addressed because he wasn’t holding a weapon (not a real one), and he hadn’t done anything wrong, and he was strolling in the pet supplies aisle of a Walmart on a fucking Tuesday.

The Murder of Tamir Rice — November 22, 2014

The swiftness is what stays with me. Within 2 seconds of the police cruiser coming to a halt on the snowy grass of the public park in Cleveland Tamir Rice is lying on the ground in front of a gazebo, shot in the torso. Four minutes go by before he receives medical attention of any kind. His 14 year old sister will be tackled, handcuffed, and placed in a patrol car as she runs to him two minutes after the shooting. He’ll be dead the next day. Tamir Rice was 12 years old. The civilian who calls 9–1–1 to report Tamir Rice says two times to the dispatchers that the pellet gun he is holding is “probably fake”. The dispatcher asks the caller three times whether Tamir is white or black. The gun is fake, this is never communicated to the responding officers. They are told he’s black. Something that’s never told to Cleveland Police Department is that the officer who shoots Tamir, Timothy Loehmann, had been deemed unfit for duty in his previous role as a police officer in Independence, OH and had resigned rather than face certain termination. Per the Deputy Police Chief of Independence Loehmann was: “‘visibly “distracted and weepy’ during a gun range training course, and could not follow simple directions or communicate clearly.” No charges are filed in Tamir’s death. Again, Ohio is an open carry state. Tamir was 12 years old.

The Charleston Church Shooting — June 17, 2015

We love religion at least as much as we love guns in this country, and that says a lot indeed. But whereas guns are designed to put others, at bay, on guard, or in the ground, religion is supposed to invite others. It’s meant to unite us in something immeasurably greater than ourselves. However the God of this America must embody this America, its sins and its history, and so the old saying goes: 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American life. This country prays, but usually not together. Still, the congregants of The Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church welcomed the strange young white man with a bowl cut into in their weeknight bible study. He sat with them for almost an hour as they read scripture together in that church that had been burned down more than 150 years prior by white citizens fearful of a slave revolt. Then he stood up, drew a gun, spouted off some of the same old tired racist bullshit that bullshit racists have loved to spout for centuries in this land, and killed 9 people. He’d later tell authorities that he hoped to start a race war, and that he had doubts about carrying out the shooting during the hour he sat reading the bible with his victims because “they were so nice to him”. He overcame his doubts and later got fed Burger King.

The Pulse Nightclub Massacre — June 12, 2016

Collage: Wes Hazard / Quote: Margaret Cho

I woke up the day after and I didn’t have much to say about what happened in Orlando. I still don’t now. I felt a deep dull sadness and I made this instead of talking or typing and I’ll include it here.

The Murder of Philando Castile — July 6, 2016

You marvel at the calm of Diamond Reynolds. Hey boyfriend has just been shot, inches from her. He is bleeding and uttering his last words on this earth (“I wasn’t reaching for it”). Her terrified 4 year old daughter is in the backseat behind her. And the panicky off-the-rails cop who pulled Philando Castile over for the murkiest of reasons, before shooting him for no reason at all, is still screaming with his gun pointed at her. In that moment when a trained police officer has just had a meltdown and fired 7 shots into a car with a child in it, in that moment when the officer’s partner has skipped backward away from the vehicle to protect himself from the gunfire, in that moment when most of us would scream or cower Ms. Reynolds does not. Instead she has the composure to start a Facebook Live stream on her phone, tell her dying boyfriend to stay with her, calmy narrate the series of event leading up to the video, and confirm to the frenzied officer that she will indeed keep her hands where they are… “sir”. What familiarity with, what expectation of, unchecked & unjustified police violence must one have in order to remain so composed in a moment like this? To have the presence of mind to start recording amidst the noise, and the blood, and the smoke, and the screaming, and the danger because you’ve seen this story many times before and you know how quickly dash cam footage can get lost, and how stories can get straightened, how reaching for your license (as instructed) can turn into “I felt my life was in danger”.

I was going to write that “The only thing I marvel at more that Ms. Reynolds’ stoicism is that Mr. Castile’s murderer was acquitted.” But no, I don’t marvel at it. Very few black people do. The injustice of it??? Sure, maybe. But the fact of it? No. This is America, after all.

The Shooting of Charles Kinsey — July 18, 2016

Via the Miami Herald

You can’t call an incident of gun violence “funny” but this one definitely stretched toward the absurd. The scene: an autistic man who has wandered from his group home sits in the middle of the street, playing with a toy car. The black mental health worker who left the home to search for him Charles Kinsey, 47, lies next to him on his back. They are surrounded by police officers with their firearms drawn who are responding to reports of an armed man threatening to kill himself. These reports are erroneous. The man is not armed, he is holding a silver toy car, he has not threatened to kill himself (or anyone else) and he is not responding to the officer’s commands because he does not understand them. The mental health worker however did not reach the age of 47 as a Black man in Florida without realizing the gravity of the situation. He knows that his position as a mental health worker, the lack of understanding on the part of his patient, the absence of any firearm whatsoever, and the total lack of danger that the pair present to the police or the public is utterly irrelevant at that moment. He is black, his patient is Hispanic, and they are surrounded by shouting police with guns drawn who will absolutely shirt first and ask questions later. So he does the most sensible thing he can think of: he tosses his hands in the air, he lays flat on his back, he screams to police that neither of them is armed and that the young man is autistic, and that he is holding nothing more than a toy car. Then he gets shot anyway.

The official police line is that they believed the autistic man was armed and dangerous and that they were actually aiming for him. I’m sure this makes absolutely no one feel any better. Kinsey is handcuffed and left to bleed in the street for 20 minutes without medical attention but survives. The SWAT team officer is charged but eventually acquitted of all charges and still serves on the force to this day. As I said this entire incident is absurd, but also helpful in that the staunchest defender of the use of force by police would have to contort themselves into knots to justify this, and by extension a good share of other incidents. To all of the crypto-fascist uncles on Facebook who continually comment “if they just did what they were told…” “the officers felt legitimately threatened” “they shouldn’t have run…” under every single story of police violence I ask what advice would you have here? Kinsey obeyed all instructions, was prone with his hands clearly visible, calmly explained that no one was armed and that his patient could not understand and yet he still got shot. And when he asked the officers at the scene why they shot him (while handcuffed and bleeding) the response he received was “I don’t know.” Indeed.

The Murder of Jordan Edwards — April 29, 2017

Being a high school kid fleeing from a party that the cops bust up because of underage drinking is part of the lived experience of a lot of people in this country and a bit of a comedy movie trope from Superbad to Can’t Hardly Wait and beyond. It’s hectic and thrilling and you laugh about it at lunch on Monday. You’re not supposed to get shot in the head behind it but that’s what happened in Balch Springs, Texas to a 15 year old boy. Fifteen. There is no silver lining here but the incident is remarkable for being one of the very very very few instances of a police officer actually being punished for the murder of an unarmed black person. If this is to be the bar for some form of justice being served then it is a high bar indeed. The victim must be too young to drive, be a stellar student on the football team, and be in a car that is driving away from a high school house party as a hundred other attendees flee. And crucially that last part must be recorded on police body cam footage that is not lost or destroyed otherwise the officers will assuredly lie and say the vehicle was backing up “aggressively” toward them until they’re faced with video evidence and forced to change their story. If all of these conditions are met then there just may be a chance of having the murderer lose his badge and be convicted.

The Las Vegas Massacre — October 1, 2017

This tragedy showed me, in a very personal way, the degree to which the weight of racism can deaden and deform our humanity. This is true for those who embrace it and those who endure it.

I saw this story unfold and like any human who cares about other humans I was, of course, saddened. Unfortunately living in 21st century America I can’t quite say that I was “shocked”. However the dispassionate/mechanical actions of the shooter, along with the sheer enormity of the death toll certainly made it stand out among the endless eruptions of gun violence we see month after month. But among all of these endless individual tragedies that we’ve become accustomed to enduring this one induced a series of emotions that showed me just how much racism has worn on me. First came the “Oh no, not again” exasperation of another mass shooting. Then the jolt of the sheer scale of this particular one. Then the sorrow for those lost and their families. Then the anger that this keeps happening and is allowed to happen. And then…as more information came out…there was a profound and saddening…relief. Relief because the shooter was wasn’t black, but white.

That’s how ugly racism is. So ugly that I, a Black American (and a feeling human being), when confronted with the details of the deadliest mass shooting in my country’s history, could not help but to perform an immediate calculation of the devastating racial backlash that would occur if nearly 60 people, who were nearly all white, and who were attending a country music festival had been murdered by a black man. It’s hard to fathom the online comments, the political dog whistles, the retaliatory vigilante acts that would have followed because unlike a white attacker who has the privilege of being written off as a “crazy loner” a black man who harms white people is never anomalous but instead emblematic. I just want to be a normal person and be sad when a tragedy falls upon innocents instead of fearful of retaliation against people who look like me, especially if we’re going to continue to endure so many of these.